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How They Made World of Warcraft
SiliconJesus writes "Rob Pardo, VP of Design at Blizzard, gave an interesting keynote at the Austin Game Conference outlining the Blizzard philosophy on designing game content, core and casual players, and why story should always drive the game." From Raph's writeup: "If you extend the leveling curve too far, it becomes a barrier. You hit a leveling wall. Our walls are shorter and there are less of them. The short leveling curve also encourages people to reroll and start over. We had some hardcore testers who would level to 60 in a week. There was much concern within the company. But I would tell them that we cannot design to that guy. You have to let him go. He probably won't unsubscribe, he's going to hit your endgame content or he'll have multiple level 60s. In games with tough leveling curves, it discourages you from starting over." More is available from the conference, with Gamasutra having a rundown on Mark Terrano's writer's keynote, and Gamespot's piece on the MMOG Rant session. Paneled by the likes of Matt Firor, Lum, Rich Vogel, and Jessica Mulligan, that must have been entertaining to see live. One more thing - WoW has 7 Million subscribers now.
Long answer: Hell no.
Idea is unworkable for so many ideas. The first is simply the amount of time and varied resources that would need to go in to the project. An MMORPG world requires a ton of art, sound and level design assets to be compelling. This isn't something the traditional geek is good at. However, even supposing you got all that part out of the way P2P just isn't possible. The load it would place on each client system, and line, would be crushing for any area where there's a few hundred players gathered. Also P2P has a problem of cheating. Who do I trust for what a given monster is supposed to be doing?
To work effectively as a real MMORPG, you've got to have some beefy servers. As a somewhat analogous situation, take the difference between IM and IRC. IM is something you could do totally P2P. Really the main function of the servers is just to let you find your contacts. You can send messages directly. However IRC relies on the presence of a server. After all, if you tried to have each and every client responsible for sending out hundreds (or thousands) of copies of each thing a person says, it'd crush a normal person's line, even broadband. So to work you need a server on a good line that aggregates everything and sends each person only one copy and only what they need.
Likewise with games. P2P works fine for something like C&C Generals. Each computer only has to communicate with a few others, maybe 5-6 at most. Also each game has nothing to do with any other, so if someone cheats, the other clients can just disconnect that one, doesn't affect anything overall. However it doesn't for something like WoW. If I move in a zone where there's 400 other players, they all need to know about it. It'd be just about impossible for my client to send that update to all of them at the same time, and for all of them to do the same thing. The chatter would be crushing. You need a central aggregation point.
The closest you can maybe get is a sort of half MMORPG like people do with Neverwinter nights. People run area servers, which link together. So a bunch of individuals run servers on their computer, each which supports like 64 people and represents an area. However that means only so many people can be in an area at once, and if that server dies, that area dies (and maybe delinks other areas). True P2P just isn't feasible.