Double Dipping
There is a large break in the design process between PvE and PvP. There is little, if any crossover. Designing a game for one of these things doesn’t really work. Just ask Auran. People expect both from their MMO and when they get only one they feel cheated.
The problem, of course, from a purely developmental standpoint is that this requires (close to) twice the amount of work to be done. First you design one area of your game, and then the other and you have features for each. This wastes a lot of time and usually means the game is still heavily focused to one over the other (most likely PvE over PvP.) Essentially it becomes a matter of progressing through PvE content to advance (gain levels) and then, in the end, using those abilities to PvP.
But why? Why design a feature set for each and then have them be (for the most part) mutually exclusive? Why not mix them together a bit? Make PvP, entirely, a worthwhile (or hell, even doable) form of advancement. Design one set of features, reuse them between your PvE and PvP.
Don’t create battlegrounds for PvP and dungeons for PvE content. That is a waste of perfectly good development time. Make an instance which can do both. Mix them together. Allow them to be separate also, of course, you should still be able to choose one or the other just don’t design two different areas for what amounts to the same basic thing.
That’s not to say such an approach is not an investment of time, it certainly is, in designing the ability and tools to do this correctly in the first place, but, after having been implemented it allows much greater freedom to design really great areas. If your designers spend time on less areas they can make those areas really great. They can nail down the look, the sights, the sounds, the feel, they can get it all where it needs to be at.
And, speaking of double-dipping, why do we separate our genre’s so harshly in games? There is another waste if I’ve ever seen one. I think that will have to wait for another time though.
mmo, mmog, mmorpg, mmo gaming, game design, pve, pvp
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