MMOs are happily two orders of magnitude easier to write today. Before game engines you can license or get for free really existed, it was just you, the compiler, and a text editor, which rapidly turned into many people, the compiler, your editors, and pain.
I worked at Turbine off and on from 2001-2012, and was the MMO game engine tech lead in the time period up to when Lord of the Rings Online and Dungeons & Dragons Online shipped (2003-2005). Both were based on the same game engine core, which was a more or less complete rewrite of everything in the game engine (client and server) from the original Asheron's Call. Many of the concepts carried over, but the implementation was completely different. To this day, I still think this "G2" engine got many things right in its internals that many other game engines (MMO or otherwise) didn't really get, probably because everyone who worked on it was crazy but actually pretty nice and reasonable to work with. Some friends who ended up working at Unity or Epic from Turbine that I've talked with think the same. It certainly made many questionable assumptions as well.
I got quite burned out from the rewrite (well over 1 million lines of C++ redone between 5-6ish people) and went part time/remote in 2006, left in 2007, came back in 2009 part time/remote again to help port the stuff to PS3 and Xbox 360 for projects that eventually got cancelled. My last six months (I stopped giving a shit at this point) was doing nothing but porting much of the client code to Mac OS X, which consisted of fixing endless compiler errors and patching up library/API differences in hundreds of thousands of lines of client code. This was actually kind of therapeutic because much of it was mindless.
I do smile a bit when realizing that code I wrote on ~16 years ago is still plugging along in some datacenter somewhere and on people's PCs, long after the company and the people who worked on it have scattered to the winds. Many of the core team that worked on it back in that time period went on to found some companies (game or otherwise), are working at places like Google and Facebook, or remained in the industry at Epic Games and Unity and various game studios.
Thanks for this. You may have heard that some time after AC was shut down, an AC server build somehow leaked and the community has now got a basically true/pure emulated server setup now. I can now go back to my first MMO safely whenever :)
The AC1/2 code was a pile of poo to be honest, but it still managed to do many things light-years ahead of other piles of game code poo at the time. Great concepts, but questionable execution (many people, many of whom were brilliant but this was really their first software job of any sort, came and left over the 90s, leaving their code behind. The AC1 software-only (i.e., pre-DirectX/OpenGL/GPUs) renderer and physics code were in large part incomprehensible, but they worked.)
Dungeons and Dragons Online is one of my favorite MMOs. (Granted I haven't really played since before the Forgotten Realms expansion.) It's so different from anything else out there, and the dungeon experience is truly unique. I really like how it makes you depend on different, diverse roles and uses them for all sorts of noncombat things.
I played through the F2P beta for LOTRO too. That was a bit rough at times, but fun.
I worked at Turbine off and on from 2001-2012, and was the MMO game engine tech lead in the time period up to when Lord of the Rings Online and Dungeons & Dragons Online shipped (2003-2005). Both were based on the same game engine core, which was a more or less complete rewrite of everything in the game engine (client and server) from the original Asheron's Call. Many of the concepts carried over, but the implementation was completely different. To this day, I still think this "G2" engine got many things right in its internals that many other game engines (MMO or otherwise) didn't really get, probably because everyone who worked on it was crazy but actually pretty nice and reasonable to work with. Some friends who ended up working at Unity or Epic from Turbine that I've talked with think the same. It certainly made many questionable assumptions as well.
I got quite burned out from the rewrite (well over 1 million lines of C++ redone between 5-6ish people) and went part time/remote in 2006, left in 2007, came back in 2009 part time/remote again to help port the stuff to PS3 and Xbox 360 for projects that eventually got cancelled. My last six months (I stopped giving a shit at this point) was doing nothing but porting much of the client code to Mac OS X, which consisted of fixing endless compiler errors and patching up library/API differences in hundreds of thousands of lines of client code. This was actually kind of therapeutic because much of it was mindless.
I do smile a bit when realizing that code I wrote on ~16 years ago is still plugging along in some datacenter somewhere and on people's PCs, long after the company and the people who worked on it have scattered to the winds. Many of the core team that worked on it back in that time period went on to found some companies (game or otherwise), are working at places like Google and Facebook, or remained in the industry at Epic Games and Unity and various game studios.