I was recently asked about
performing due diligence on an established console game developer working on an
MMO. I came up with a quick starting
list of questions to get an initial read on the team. I think they might be helpful. A genericized and condensed list is below:
- What is your design expertise wrt multiplayer
mechanics? How do mechanics scale from SP, to 2P, to MMP? Where do game-per
se mechanics meet metagame mechanics and what is the importance of
each in a persistent world game?
- What is different about “level design” in an
MMO vs. a SP game?
- What is your philosophy of balancing a game
(e.g. do you like RPS type mechanics or do you like homeostatic systems,e.g. Catan, or something else)?
- When is it good / bad to shard and why?
- What is different about art production in an
MMO vs. and SP game?
- What are your philosophies of polishing
pre/post ship for an SP game vs. an online PSW game?
- How do you plan to add post-ship content?
- What is your method for testing for balance and
rebalancing, prelaunch?
- How does/should balancing/rebalancing interact
with live operations in shipped game? How does this interact with
economic or quasi-economic systems in the game?
- What are your guiding principles in designing
the internal economic model of the game (if you plan to have one)?
- How does the revenue model work with the game
mechanic?
- What kind of design choices invite farming, bot
usage, and other pathological play behaviors - what if anything should be
done to counter or design for these things?
- What do you think makes for a good subscription
model game vs. a good free to play / item sales game? Are there other revenue models you’d
like to try? Why?
- How would you fit UGC into an MMO? What are the
major issues in including UGC?
- What is the team's expertise wrt large scale,
high transaction-level database-driven applications?
- What kind of overall architecture is good for
an MMO vs. an SP or networked, but non-PSW game?
- What is the team's security background, and
what is the security model for the game?
- What is the team's networking background?
- What is the team’s plan, and capability to
manage, liveops?
This is obviously far from an exhaustive list, but it's a place to start. The main point of these questions is to get at whether the design will be executable and if the game has a chance of being fun. "Right" answers to these questions won't guarantee either, but wrong answers will pretty much ensure that the game won't ship on time / budget and/or that it won't be fun and will fail.