who else started in their game dev journey with an big MMO idea, but had no experience developing anything in the past.

what was your idea? how big was it?

i did. i had a really huge game i wanted to make, all by my self. haha. well its about a year later and i have real work done on much more realistic goals.

just wondering if anyones got some stories

It was not an MMO but an epic!!!1111 FPS me and a friend wanted to make, since we were not really into the MMO genre. It was basically the idea of Battlefield 1942: "Oh yeah let's have vehicles and you can use them all, airplanes, open maps, a death ticket counter, blah blah, yadda yadda..." We were shocked when some months later or so Battlefield was announced. We asked ourselves how it could be that they did the exact game we came up with and were joking that they must have somehow sneaked into our homes and stole the idea. ;-)

Of course now I know that ideas are a dime a dozen and what really counts is the execution. We would have never been able to pull that trick. But it was a great time and today we are still sometimes joking about how Dice stole our idea and made battlefield. hehe

Fortunatly for me MMOs didn't exist when i started making games so i actually "completed" my first proper game attempt. it was a 2D non-scrolling shooter with 3 levels (i did want to make more my my goto mess didn't let me), i even printed proper labels for the floppies and distributed the game to a few friends via the allmighty sneakernet so i count it as a success.

My second game, a snake game with some twists also went really well, it was only a bit later on that i started biting off more than i can chew, i got a half-finished MUD lying around somewhere (it was based on ROM so it was perfectly playable, just far too small to be worth putting online),a FPS tech demo, a GUI system and stuff like that, still no MMO though (I've played with the idea of making one but the timing of my MMO ideas have always been awful, (i had a great idea for a 2D:ish elite/space rangers inspired space MMO(i was planning on having each solar system on its own virtual server and have a "hyperspace" zone to travel between them to keep the backend complexity down), i didn't even have time to actually plan out the gameplay details before EvE was announced though so atleast i didn't waste any time on it, My online soccer manager idea was scrapped for a similar reason (Sports Interactive is not worth competing with in that field)

I'd still like to make a MMO but it is getting quite hard to find a niche that hasn't allready been filled. (I might pick up my space MMO idea again in the future and bring it to mobiles where it could be more competetive though (But i have a bunch of less financially risky games that i want to make first)

haha interesting! i had the same experience but with planet side 2... i basically had that game on paper and then they started beta testing... i was a bit depressed, thinking i couldnt make my new awesome MMO because they had done it. lol

Was a Pokemon MMORPG later we got Cease & Desist from Nintendo, then I started another MMO project, but as going from scratch I got stuck with over designing, which lead to all the recruited members become inactive and losing their interest. Well there still is actually colored web comic running based on the world of the game idea. Publishing about one page per month.

Later I actually did some calculations if the idea would even be possible, but the world would be too huge for current hardware. Though I have not done any games lately, but been thinking how to bootstrap large company able to actually create at least little bit of the MMORPG Ihave in my head, but that requires ton of work if it ever is going to happen.

I never started wanting to make one, but I thought of making one. I'm sure at some point everyone has. I've always wanted to make more of a Mega Man FPS MMO.

I've never even played an MMO.

I've never even played an MMO.

im so sorry for your loss ;(

MMOs barely existed when I got interested in game development, but my first inspirations were the final fantasy series and the myst series, which are almost as impossibly ambitious. Heck, I'd love to design an MMO now, it's just a genre with so much potential and social relevance - don't we all feel the desire to make something like the best games we play?

i would love to design my MMO also. just the sheer time effort and people needed are all thats stopping me