Development Diary: Why we hate being called an MMORPG

Path of Exile is not an MMORPG, it’s an online action RPG. Yes, it’s played online on persistent servers with thousands of other players, but we don’t want to call it an MMORPG because the term has become so closely associated with World of Warcraft clones - games that allow hundreds of players to play together in each area.

Path of Exile limits the number of players in any one world area (a few dozen in towns, much less in actual wilderness areas) by instancing them. It also features visceral action combat that would not be easily to simulate on servers designed to handle many hundreds of players in one area. Although this is stated many times on our website and in interviews, many people still believe we’re making a traditional MMORPG.

Where possible, we try to make design decisions that mitigate these costs and risks while making the most action-packed game possible. This article contains some generalizations about how we see the world, the challenges of making Path of Exile and our responses.

Massively Multiplayer, but you can’t play with everyone?

One of the main selling points of an MMORPG (and something that seemed impossibly cool back in 1999) was that many hundreds of players could gather in the same area and all see each other’s actions in real time. Despite how technically difficult this is to implement, most online games want the “Massively Multiplayer” title so much that they invest in the necessary infrastructure to make it happen.

MMORPGs are very sensitive to population levels. If the game has too few players, it begins to feel like a ghost town. The MMO experience relies on the player being able to encounter other players as they explore the world (both to quest with, and for PVP shenanigans). If player levels stay low for a while, server merges are required - confusing the players and damaging the game economy.

If population levels are too high, the world has to be sharded into many concurrent versions of the same world, housed on different servers. Some MMORPGs have many such shards, which means that two arbitrary players who first meet outside the game are unlikely to both play on the same server. This is a major problem for many players - they can run around with hundreds of other people, but only the people who happened to pick their server. They have limited options to play with people from other servers, such as World of Warcraft battlegroups.

Because Path of Exile uses instancing for all areas (including towns, at a higher population cap than the wilderness), there is no technical restriction on the number of players that can be playing concurrently on a server cluster. If it starts to get overloaded, more servers can be easily added in parallel. We’re planning to only shard our servers for major geographical locations (America and Europe for example). This means that regardless of the number of players in America, they can play together if they choose to.

Another advantage of using instancing is that if the server population is relatively low (on Christmas day, for example), there are still the regular number of players per instance - just fewer instances running concurrently. Players don’t feel the ghost town effect so strongly when their instances are still full.

It’s quite telling that recent MMORPGs put a significant amount of their end-game content in instances. They’re trying to reap the benefits of this system but are still forced to shard so many copies of their world because of the large non-instanced portions of their games.

Action Combat

Unfortunately, when designing traditional MMORPG servers to handle this many players moving in the same area, many compromises have to be made. There’s no time for the server to do anything other than receive the movement input, check that it’s not inside a wall, and send it out to all of the hundreds of players watching.

Due to the low player limit, the world areas can be fun and challenging for both small party or solo play. There’s no need to wait for dead monsters to repopulate or queue for bosses.

Handmade vs Random

Traditional MMORPGs consist of giant handmade worlds, painstakingly crafted by talented teams of artists and designers at great expense. Once players are grinding end-game content, developers are pressured into adding new areas every few months so that their player-base doesn't get bored of repeating the same static areas.

Instancing world areas also gives us one more opportunity - we can randomly generate their layouts. This goes a long way towards facilitating replayability, because players are very sensitive to repeating the same area over and over. It also means that we can hide interesting events and subareas in the world.

Like some other Action RPGs, Path of Exile has multiple difficulty levels. Once the player has finished the game with their character they can then continue to play the game again in a mode where the monsters have become far more dangerous. Our random level generation allows us to also scale up the environments in these areas - mazes can be longer and caves can be deeper.

Random Loot

Most traditional MMORPGs have quite a large degree of item determinism. Monsters have loot tables and a small random chance to drop specific items. Whenever a new end-game area is added, multiple tiers of weapons and armour must also be designed and created, often at significant expense.

On the other hand, Action RPGs generally approach item drops in a completely different manner. All monsters have a small chance to drop all items of their level or less. The items have some number of magic properties that are randomly picked out of a pool appropriate for that item. This system is basically a slot machine. There are frequent chances to win based on either the item type or on the synergy and power of its properties. It eases the end-game content requirements substantially because playing normal areas can yield valuable item rewards also.

This non-deterministic item system is cheaper to develop. Rather than having to design hundreds of new items for each content patch, only a few new base types and new random properties effectively create millions of new combinations for players to find.

Business Risks

MMORPGs are not cheap to develop. There are plenty of examples of MMORPGs that have cost upwards of $30m USD, even before marketing costs.

Another significant issue with these projects is the risk. Game projects generally have quite high variance (only a small portion are profitable), but it’s worse with an MMORPG. Because most of the revenue comes from subscriptions (or microtransactions) after release, there are many opportunities for the game to become unpopular and fail. There are also substantial post-release development expenses that are difficult to fund if the game was already over-budget and performing poorly. Once a company doesn't have the funds to release promised content updates on schedule, users leave, and funds dry up further. This death spiral is the reason many MMORPGs ultimately fail.

The revenue models of modern MMORPGs are all over the place. Many of them require a boxed copy purchase, a monthly subscription and also have premium microtransaction content available for purchase. These schemes can be quite confusing (and expensive) for the customer.

ArenaNet’s Guild Wars had great success with just a boxed copy purchase and no monthly fees. Nexon’s MapleStory made a small fortune by supplying the game for free and just selling microtransaction perks. It’s worth noting that neither of these games are traditional Everquest-clone MMORPGs (Guild Wars uses instancing and MapleStory is a 2d side-scrolling online game).

Many players are unable to justify multiple $15/month subscriptions at once, and already have a World of Warcraft subscription that they are not giving up.

In a similar vein, we’re giving Path of Exile away for free. We want as many people to try it as possible so that we can grow a large community of players who enjoy the game - it’s less risky that way. This is also why we’re offering only ethical microtransactions. We fear the risk of player backlash and it’s just not worth selling experience potions to try to make a quick buck. Sure, we’ll make less money per paying customer than our competitors, but we know the community will appreciate it". We intend to maintain Path of Exile for at least ten years, so it’s important that we have a good relationship with our players.

It’s common for developers to outsource portions of their development to various developing countries to take advantage of cheap labour. Communication problems over distances are common with this type of arrangement and can lead to wasted resources or assets of questionable quality. We’re developing Path of Exile in New Zealand, which means that, other than a couple of overseas contractors, most of our developers are English-speaking Westerners who are immersed in Western RPGs. It’s also good that New Zealand wages are among the lowest in first-world countries. Path of Exile’s low budget means that we don’t need to recover $30m via microtransactions like some competing free games do.

Huge Launch

After making such a gigantic investment, investors in a traditional MMORPG want a huge launch with expensive advertising campaigns. We don't blame them - it must be pretty scary trying to recoup $30m via the long tail (the period after launch where sales are tailing off).

Online games have long lifespans and generally receive frequent content expansions (both free and paid). Because of this, their content is worst at release. Although a newly released online RPG might appeal to its most hardcore fans, it generally lacks the polish and breadth of content that keeps mainstream players around for more than the trial month. There's a group of 200,000 MMO players who drift around from new release to new release, playing out their free month on the initial content before getting bored and moving on.

One luxury that indie developers of non-massive online RPGs have is that they don't have to try to recoup their development costs in the first month of release. The reason that popular indie online RPGs seem to come out of nowhere is that they were initially released to a limited niche audience and gradually gathered more mainstream appeal as they received updates in the first year or so.

We lack the advertising budget to have a giant mainstream launch for Path of Exile, so we are initially focusing on the core niche of online action RPG players. Once we've added some expansions and grown our company we'll hopefully be able to advertise more and attract mainstream players.

It also helps that any additional content we add can take advantage of the random level/item generation systems that we have. Doubling the amount of raw content more than doubles the amount of time players can be entertained by the game.

In summary, by choosing not to make Path of Exile a traditional MMORPG, we’ve attempted to reduce both the technical and business risks for a small team and focus on delivering a great action RPG. So far these decisions have paid off well. We are developing a product that we’re very pleased with and for a budget that we can afford. If you’re keen to try Path of Exile when it enters beta next year, please sign up for a forum account now.

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