Cultivating Your MMO Ideas - Wizards and Warriors: Massively Multiplayer Online Game Creation - page 68

As you can imagine, it can get quite complicated as you begin to build the
number of quests. It is also possible that you might decide to make changes to
your characters, locations, and story as you begin to build up your quests. Quests
are a key component to any MMO, so don ' t think that once you have written

them you won t need to change them. You should expect to improve your quests

as testing of your game reveals issues.

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It is best to start off with detailing the quests for each of your key NPCs within
the starter level, and then slowly build them up and create linked quests and
quests that take a player to a new area. Start off small and build upon a solid base
of quests. Doing so will improve your game considerably and will ensure that
any issues that might arise are spotted early on.

Considering Areas versus Difficulty
When you begin to create your maps, you will need to consider the different
levels of enemies in that particular area. It is common for the player to be able to
defeat a single enemy within the same or next level, while multiple enemies of a
higher level become more of a problem. These groups of enemies (called mobs)
can pose a danger to new players, and so you should try to spread the enemies
out in the early levels.

If you are making a starter area, you should put enemies of the same area close
to the player, and then slowly build up the levels. Once players are at a
reasonable level and you have introduced them to a particular set of game
rules, you can then send them on their way to complete harder quests.

You can see an example of how to arrange your first few levels in Figure 3.10.

As you begin to build your other areas you will need to create a mix of enemy
levels. Most MMOs have a range of levels within an area, and some will be too
difficult for the player to initially defeat. The main reason for this is that the
player could level up as she goes through an area, but then there will be no
further reasons for the player to return to a particular area. So if you have level 1,
2, 4, and 12 within an area, but it is likely that the player will only reach level 5,
that means the player will have to move out to another area before coming back
and completing the required quests.