Hey there everyone! I'm new here but got inspired by a group of friends to make a game. I finished programming college so I got basics for that, here I would like to ask anyone who will read, an opinion on getting started!

There is a game called “Mabinogi”, pretty old but the amount of features there is what makes me think it would be interesting training and a challenge for me. For those who don't know, it's an mmorpg, 3rd person view, you got basically lots of skills that unlocks via special means (hidden skills), it gives a lot of possibilities for players that want to either fight monsters, craft stuff, do other activities like playing music, tame and train pets or becoming merchant who puts goods on cart and needs to travel to other towns to sell to NPCs for better price, and some of those activities unlock skills that gives cool effects.

With that in mind, IF I were to make such a game, what engine, programming language would be best? What other ideas or suggestions could you give me, since to be honest, I wasn't programming for quite some time so I'm very rusty.

Quick summary:

• Game would need to be able to become mmorpg
• I would like to be able to implement good (so they wont be poor) quality graphics (some of my friends can make those)
• Possibility for many different mechanics to implement (playing music, emote interactions, fighting, swimming, flying, spellcasting, trading, mounts)
• This whole thing will just be a project for myself but at some point if it works well I would like my friends to be able to play it, so at some point I would like it to actually work online.

I could be considered rookie in these topics so I probably overlook some other informations needed to give proper advice!
Thank you in advance! ^^

• Don't aim for an MMO. these need dozens of staff, permanently on servers, special server and client architecture to prevent syncing problems, etc.
  
• “good graphics” is subjective, and it depends a lot more on art style and custom assets than the engine, but for a quick and non exhaustible list, try to narrow your options to this:
  • for 2d focused or 2d only games: Unity, Godot, Construct3 (subscription based), GameMakerStudio (subscription based), GDevelop
  • for 3d games: Unreal 4 (heavier, harder to use, has more stock assets for realistic environments), Unity (more suited to lightweight or cartoony games, like mabinogi. it CAN make most of what Unreal does, but doesn't have as many readily availiable solutions for ultrarrealism)
  • If you're a hardcore coder and wants to everything on your IDE: Raylib (any language), Phaser, (javascript) PlayCanvas (javascript), monogame (C#), LibGDX (Java).
    
• every engine suggested above has ways to add networking. Might need some googling and a lot of code to get it to work, but it's possible.

That's an extremely ambitious project. Remove the MMO component and you're still looking at something that could take work-decades rather than just work-years. Keep the MMO requirement and you're looking at work-centuries.

Volfitur said:
what engine, programming language would be best?

Whatever you're comfortable in.

Volfitur said:
What other ideas or suggestions could you give me, since to be honest, I wasn't programming for quite some time so I'm very rusty.

Plan much, much smaller. If you're rusty enough you need to mention it go for things like Pong, Breakout, Connect 4, and similar.

Volfitur said:
Game would need to be able to become mmorpg

That's a 9-digit proposition. Unless you have a few hundred million dollars burning a hole in your pocket, put that idea away.

Volfitur said:
I would like to be able to implement good (so they wont be poor) quality graphics (some of my friends can make those)

All the modern game engines handle that automatically. Artists can swap out models, materials, and shaders without impacting other systems.

Volfitur said:
Possibility for many different mechanics to implement

That's normal game development. For experienced developers working in tools they're comfortable with each of the things you described can range from 2 weeks to multiple development months. For the short list it's easily more than one FTE work year. (That's about 40 hours a week for a whole year.) The generic “fighting” might mean 2-3 weeks per type of attack, so a lunge may take animations, code, and data for a few weeks, a slap might take another 3 weeks, a straight forward punch another two weeks, an uppercut another 4. It gets extra complex if you need multiple reactions, like an uppercut response animation for a small body, a medium body, a large body, plus additional responses custom to each boss. The generic “spellcasting” is similar, if you have only a single animation that's straightforward as a single item, but if you want 30 different spell animations and 50 different abilities, you're easily looking at years of work.

Volfitur said:
I would like it to actually work online.

Multiply all work estimates by a factor of roughly 3x. More if you're a novice to online development.

Even though the odds of actually completing the project you described are tiny, vanishingly small in fact, actually trying to do the things can be valuable learning experiences. If you're doing it to learn rather than doing it to create a viable commercial project, you can learn a lot by starting down that road.

Thank you for advices, they will be really helpfull! I indeed plan to work on that project and as it goes, I plan to learn a lot, that's partially why I choose it to be bigger. I know that probably I won't be able to make it work as intended, but I just want to challenge myself and give it a try ^^

I will try first to make it work as single player project to some degree. I'll try to make it in Unreal 4 since I wanted to make it 3d.

Thanks again ^^

What i would also recommend is break the project down into multiple steps.

Like:

1. Make a game that show cases the fighting
2. Make the game that show cases the crafting
3. etc. etc.

This will help you get a grasp of your strength and weaknesses and let you have more bite size projects.

Locking thread. @devtraining , please don't necro.