An MMO, or MMORPG, is an online role-playing video game in which several players play together in a persistent world at the same time. The world of an MMO is always online, with events and dungeons always running even when the player isn’t logged in. MMOs focus on providing role-playing experiences, allowing the player to create a custom character they’re able to build and advance, while engaging in quests and connecting with other players.
Designing and building an MMO isn’t easy. Although several MMOs launch each year, only a handful of them manage to survive several years after launch. Part of what determines whether an MMO succeeds or fails is how it’s designed from the start. Learn more about effective MMO game design by understanding the principles of MMO game design, designing dungeons, designing daily quests, understanding common mechanics used in MMO game design, knowing where to find MMO game design templates, and creating an MMO game design document by looking at an example.
What are the principles of MMO game design?
The principles of MMO game design focus on creating a massive world for thousands of players to explore simultaneously, complete with varied, updating quests, tough in-game bosses, and optional PvP combat arenas. Sticking to the main principles of MMO game design offers a studio the chance to make an MMO that players love. That all begins with creating a massive world.
Making a massive world for players to explore offers more chances for player-driven stories to occur. The world needs to be interesting enough to encourage players to leave social hubs either alone or with a group to explore. Designers accomplish creating an interesting world by making immersive and diverse environments. In those regions, elements such as dynamic events, dungeons, overworld bosses, and environmental puzzles keep players moving around, engaging with the content and each other to create their own narrative.
Designing an MMO to support hundreds of thousands of players simultaneously comes with unique performance challenges. To reduce problems that cause players frustration, such as lag and latency, designers must use a modular backend architecture that supports the population of the MMO’s servers as they increase and decrease over time. With modular design, the MMO is able to support a massive crowd of players in the same social zone or region.
MMO designers must provide hundreds of varied quests to keep players interested and moving about the world. Quests give life and meaning to the world while sparking roleplaying opportunities for players. Designers use quests to encourage replayability by providing different outcomes based on a player’s class or race. However, creating quests isn’t a one-and-done job. As the MMO expands into new regions and new story arcs, the design team needs to continue creating quests. Story quests, faction quests, daily quests, and NPC quests are just a few of the options.
Continuously adding new regions, quests, and other content updates supports two more key principles of MMO game design: long-term retention and player progress. MMO game designers must release content continuously to keep players around for the long term. Bug fixes are helpful and needed, but it’s content that keeps players interested and returning to the MMO. Aside from new regions and story arcs, designers advance player progression by increasing level caps, providing new abilities, or releasing new classes or specializations.
Supporting the different ways people play MMOs, such as soloplay, cooperative multiplayer, or PVP, is another critical part of MMO game design. Optimizing for soloplay means focusing on making new spells, abilities, or talents that allow solo players to tackle challenges on their own. Offering auto-attack systems takes some of the grind out of fighting dozens of enemies, and providing pets and gear makes them look and feel cool. Cooperative multiplayer entails having synergy between classes and making sure everyone feels they’re making a difference. Easy-to-use chat systems and grouping systems help players find friends or make new ones, and quest synchronization allows everyone to advance together. PVP is supported through open-world combat or designated battlegrounds and arenas where players test their builds against other players. Including guild versus guild combat helps encourage large-scale battles.
How to design dungeons for MMO games?
Design dungeons for MMO games by focusing on quest and enemy design, player progression, and player rewards for solo content, while modifying the dungeon for group content. Dungeons are separate and instanced areas within an MMO that encourages players to group up with each other. One of the ways that a dungeon encourages cooperative multiplayer is by having challenges that are harder than overworld content. The enemies have more health or hit harder, which supports multi-classed groups to overcome them, for example. Despite the harder challenge, dungeons encourage players to engage with them by providing rare loot, gear, or currency.
Focus on constructing appealing and challenging dungeons full of meaningful challenges that encourage players to give them a try. While some players are incentivized through rewards alone, others prefer a story reason to have their character take part in the dungeon. Part of quest design is deciding what enemies spawn and how tough they are. A dungeon with a quest to defeat bandits in an abandoned temple must have bandits as the core enemy class, but it doesn’t hurt to sprinkle in a few other surprises, particularly when the dungeon has a branching layout that leads to a cave bear’s home or a spider’s nest.
Utilize player skills to design MMO dungeons that emphasize the importance of each class, giving players more to do than just heal or damage enemies. Dungeons provide an opportunity to test players in ways that overworld content doesn’t. A class that has the ability to spot, disarm, or set traps allows a player to check for dangerous obstacles as the party progresses through the dungeon. A class that identifies and reads languages is able to find clues and hints to solve a puzzle. Unique challenges that inspire players to use their skills or utility abilities make any dungeon far more memorable.
Design dungeon rewards that support player progression through currency, rare crafting resources, XP, gear, and story progression. Rewards are what incentivize many players to take part in the dungeon in the first place. Players gain currency to buy consumables, find rare crafting resources to craft new weapons, gain XP to level a bit faster, earn powerful gear that gives them an edge, or progress the story in some way. Designers need to balance these rewards with player progression to keep the game fair and reduce the chances of players becoming overpowered early. One method is to make the rewards for repeatable dungeons only give currency or crafting resources and save big gear drops for one-off dungeons.
Implement dungeon difficulty modifiers to support cooperative multiplayer in MMO games. Dungeons must be available for solo players, but the difficulty must change when a group engages with the content. Designers are able to modify enemy health and damage outputs, increase the number of enemies that spawn in a dungeon, buff the boss at the end, make the traps more deadly, and design puzzles that require multiple people to solve. With greater challenges, designers must ensure that the rewards suit the amount of risk. More currency and XP, a high-quality version of the gear drop, and even rarer crafting sources are all viable options for improving the rewards the group receives.
How to design daily quests for MMO games?
Design daily quests for MMO games by creating quests that fit the narrative of the location, support activities players already enjoy, offer incentivizing rewards, and include appropriate cooldowns for both solo and multiplayer gameplay. Daily quests are repeatable tasks that are replaced on a 24-hour timer. The rewards from daily quests encourage players to log in regularly, if not every day.
Create daily quests that fit the narrative of the location and make sense for the area. Regions in an MMO have specific resources and story elements attached to them already, so daily quests must fit into the area’s narrative context or else they risk breaking immersion. The design team then doesn’t have to create lore from scratch, reducing their workload as an added benefit.
Determine the types of activities that players already enjoy doing to design daily quests for MMO games. Daily quests encourage players to return each day, but the quest itself still has to be interesting and rewarding enough for players to complete it. Players love collecting resources, saving animals, and working together to defeat major overworld bosses. Turning these activities into recurring quests increases the chance of long-term retention.
Offer incentivizing rewards when designing daily quests for MMO games. Fun activities are only half of the reason why players complete daily quests. Rewards must be valuable enough to encourage players to engage with repeatable content, but not so lucrative that it creates a balancing issue. Two common types of rewards that daily quests provide are currency and XP. Currency allows players to stock up to fund purchases or production cycles, while XP helps them level a little faster. Some MMOs that support a battle pass also include a type of currency or XP related to battle pass progression with their daily quests.
Implement cooldowns to design daily quests that ensure players are unable to grind rewards indefinitely and break the game’s balance. Daily quest, dungeon, and raid cooldowns ensure that players are only able to progress so much each day. Without cooldowns, players risk becoming overpowered and running out of reasons to stay engaged with the game. Daily quests have a 24-hour cooldown, whereas a dungeon or raid has cooldowns appropriate for soloplay versus cooperative multiplayer. Raids have longer cooldowns to give participants time to recover and prepare before the next raid.
Daily quests that focus on group activity, such as fighting an overworld boss, must have larger rewards than daily quests performed alone. Players aren’t incentivized to join daily multiplayer events when the reward isn’t worth it. Cooldowns for daily overworld events must be different from standard daily quest cooldowns, too. Players log into the game throughout the day, and everyone must have the chance to complete the daily overworld event before the task is reset to something else. Shorter cooldowns are common for daily overworld quests and events that require multiple players to complete.
What mechanics are used in MMO game design?
Mechanics used in MMO game design include role-based class systems, combat, progression systems, social systems, and exploration. Video game mechanics are the rules and systems that determine how a player interacts with the world, and in MMOs, how the player interacts with other players. Since MMOs focus on social gameplay and role-playing, the genre retains many mechanics commonly used in single-player role-playing games, so players familiar with RPGs already vaguely understand how the gameplay in MMOs works.
Role-based class systems are used in MMO game design to define specific archetypes that support group dynamics. The holy trinity of specific archetypes is the tank, the healer, and the damage-per-second or DPS. A tank has high health and deals heavy damage. A healer has low to medium health and keeps the party alive and buffed. The DPS focuses on critical strikes and implementing negative statuses or conditions on the enemy. Using these archetypes, designers are able to create specializations and sub-classes for MMOs that spark interest in players while also having an easily identifiable group role.
Combat is a system of mechanics used in MMO game design that covers all the different ways players fight enemies and each other. MMO combat mechanics range from melee-based attacks to magic-based attacks to abilities that heal other players or activate buffs or debuffs. Besides stats, combat mechanics govern how weapons, abilities, and talents influence characters’ damage output and available actions in battle.
There are several different types of MMO progression systems, such as character progression, gear progression, and world progression. Character progression refers to how the player character grows stronger as they complete quests and level up. Gear progression tracks the ways weapons, armor, and other gear become stronger or more useful as they’re upgraded. World progression is how the world changes, especially as certain story milestones are met. MMOs typically use either a horizontal or vertical progression system. Horizontal progression systems allow the player to select new abilities as they level, while vertical progression systems focus on a particular skill or weapon that becomes stronger as the player advances it.
Social systems are used in MMO game design to give players the opportunity to connect with and speak to other players in the game. Social systems encompass the mechanics that support player interaction, which set MMORPGs apart from traditional ARPGs, CRPGs, and JRPGs. Designing social mechanics is vital to an MMO because it helps players make connections with each other, which in turn encourages them to keep coming back to the game. Players form communities through mechanics such as text and voice chat, guilds, friends, and alliances. Through the community, players form tight emotional bonds and attachments that support long-term retention.
Exploration mechanics give MMO players the means to traverse the immersive world. Walking is all well and good, but MMOs provide several different means of exploration such as mounts, fast travel, and specific mechanics such as auto-run. Different means of traveling allow players to quickly explore regions, unlock new maps, and find hidden areas or lore drops. Altogether, exploration mechanics immerse players in the world and make it easier to roleplay their characters.
Where to find an MMO game design template?
Find an MMO game design template by searching an online template repository, a game design community forum, GitHub, a professional game design website, or a game development resource library. An MMO game design template is an organized, structured outline that helps ensure the team has thought out every aspect of the game’s design.
An online template repository collects game design templates, allowing users to browse, download, and share their own templates with the community. Milanote provides game design templates, MMOs among them, along with moodboards and other design-focused projects to aid in game design.
A game design community forum is a website for a specific community where users post and discuss topics, including game design templates for MMOs. A forum devoted to game design means that the community is made up of professional and indie game designers, which offers the chance for beginners to receive helpful advice from the community. Community members share game design templates, too. GameDev.net is a popular game design and development community forum where users find several game design templates, including templates for MMOs.
GitHub is an open-source online repository where users upload code, documents, and a number of other digital goods, such as game design templates, that are free to download and use. Since GitHub is open-source, anyone is able to download the content listed on the site and use it for their own purposes. GitHub has a few MMO game design templates that users download and modify for free.
A professional game design website regularly has free resources available for users to download, such as an MMO game design template. Game Design Skills offers advice curated from actual professionals in the game industry who have worked with studios big and small. The added benefit of using a game design template from a professional game design website is that it’s put together by professional game designers who actually understand what a game design document is and the information included on it.
A game development resource library is another type of online repository that curates a specific collection, such as game design templates. GameDocs is a game development resource library that collects actual game design documents that studios have released to the public. Although it’s not exactly an MMO game design template, design teams are able to look over these real GDDs for existing games and create their own MMO design doc based on them.
What is an example of an MMO game design document?
There’s no published example of an MMO game design document, but it’s possible to use a generic game design document, such as one from Game Design Skills, and tailor it to an MMO. Designers must include the game summary, target audience, main features, gameplay overview, player progression system, narrative details, art direction, monetization, and production timeline or milestones. Definitions and examples of each field are below.
- Game Summary: A short summary of the game to help investors and other members of the studio understand what the game is about and why it’s being made.
- Target Audience: A defined demographic of the type of players the MMO is being made for, such as PC players in their 20s-40s.
- Main Features: The main features of the game that make it different from other MMOs out there. Some consider this the game’s unique selling points.
- Gameplay Overview: The overview covers all the different ways that the player is able to engage with the MMO, such as dungeons and PvP arenas.
- Player Progression System: This section includes the different ways that the player character advances in the MMO, such as an ability tree or how they unlock new spells.
- Narrative Details: A brief overview of the story of the MMO and its major players or factions.
- Art Direction: This section refers to the art style of the MMO, extending to environmental art, character art, and the overall style, such as stylistic or grim realism.
- Monetization: An overview of the different methods the MMO intends to use to fund the game, such as battle passes, subscriptions, or cosmetic stores.
- Production Timeline: A list, table, or timeline with design and development milestones. The timeline is subject to change.
