engine for mmorpg? Thread

I really wanted to use hero engine which makes making an mmorpg a lot easier or supposedly at least because of all the features that HE has.
But this engine is super extreme complicated to use and I am giving up on it after spending probably 2 weeks trying to figure out how to use it.
Unity and game maker is really simple to use but the downside to for example game maker is that there's no .net library for you to use code from.
You have to code everything yourself.. no premade buttons to make for your game.. you have to make a picture/drawing that looks like a button and program mouseover and clicks and everything and no textfields either etc.
Unity is c# tho so it has access to the .net lib but unity isn't recommended if you want an mmo or anything that will have more than 30 players online.
Plus you have to code all the networking yourself and for an mmorpg it could take a year doing that but with hero engine it's all done for you already.

I know about the bigworld engine too and it should have about the same features as hero engine but it's a lot less documented and probably even more complicated to use than hero engine is my guess and it's more expensive too.

I know making an mmorpg with any engine isn't recommended unless you have a lot of money but I don't care about the mmorpg becoming successful.
Just a basic mmorpg foundation with basic features like moving around, chatting, some basic combat etc in an open and seamless persistant world.
top-down camera too. 3d.
And then I would continue making the game more interesting after that by adding features "out of the top of my head".. one at a time.

It feels though like I'm not going to be able to make any mmorpg since I don't understand hero engine and probably never will be able to understand it.
Making an mmorpg in an engine that isn't made to make this type of mmorpg's in will take forever and might not even work out in the end.
Like for example there's a professional indy team working on an mmorpg called greed monger who made so much of the game in unity but realised unity isn't any good for mmorpg's so they are remaking the entire mmorpg in hero engine now.

I have tried to think of singleplayer games but I just don't have the disipline for working on something "lesser". All features I imagine for a singleplayer game would be 100 times cooler in an mmorpg. Also making a singleplayer rpg would need about the same amount of assets as an mmorpg so it would take about the same amount of work i can imagine just that it's a lot easier on the coding side. Same goes for multiplayer games.. a multiplayer game feels a bit like a small feature picked out of an mmorpg.
Like imagine world of warcraft battlegrounds.. they could probably of just made a normal multiplayer game where they had battlegrounds and sever browser etc.. but instead they made battlegrounds just a part of an entire mmorpg.

I'm not in this for the money, just as a fun hobby.

Edited by: Killsomething

If you're here as a hobbyist, you need to be thinking of something other than an MMO. Those are huge, unending commitments, and you should only think of doing one if you're willing to commit the massive amounts of time and money it's going to take to make and then run it. Even if you make all the art, all the code, all the music, all the writing by yourself, you're still going to be paying for (probably multiple) servers, which are expensive, especially when they're running games as complex as MMOs.

The money required isn't to make your MMO successful. It's so that your MMO lives AT ALL. If you can't run the servers, which, as mentioned earlier, are damned expensive, you don't have a game. It's as simple as that. The cheapest servers I could find on a google search are several hundred dollars. Each. That is a minimum. You will be spending hundreds or thousands of dollars a year, possibly that much a month, just so players can access the game.

Any MMO, even a 'simple' one, is going to be thousands of dollars and and at least a year, minimum, more likely 3+, of work.

Frankly, kid, this reeks of complete inexperience and ooh-shiny syndrome. I hate to be negative, but you should think of doing something else.

EDIT: typos

Edited by: TerranAmbassador