”And what did you do at work today, honey?”

“Oh, I just created a new world, designed a new planet and some critters to roam the hills and valleys, and outlined the designs for the players that are gonna run around and shoot ’em all.”

“That’s nice, dear—what are you going to do on the seventh day?”

Building the next generation of massively multiplayer online worlds actually requires years of dedication to concept, design, and execution. Big franchises and bigger teams are crafting the spaces online gamers will inhabit for the next decade. That requires a talent and commitment level of a flavor that is unique to the games industry, and we’re taking you inside the process to reveal just what it takes to bring virtual universes to life.

What's clear about the next wave of MMOs is that graphics are no longer an afterthought—developers are finally tapping into the full power of the GPU to bring cutting-edge visuals to the genre.

Final Fantasy XIV

Welcome to Hydaelyn. Population: You and your friends

Few gaming franchises combine the longevity, critical approval, and fan adoration that defines the Final Fantasy series. This 14th iteration (not counting all the various off-shoots, side projects, and even animated films) moves the franchise online for the second time (the first was 2002's Final Fantasy XI). But a brand new world—Hydaelyn—and a new setting on that world called Eorzea require a vast amount of new art concepts, design, and creation—all occurring under the watchful eye of art director Akihiko Yoshida. NVISION tapped Yoshida-san for exclusive insights into the process his team goes through to remain within the traditions of the franchise while developing fresh new locations for online gamers to explore.

“The variety of playing styles available will be considerably greater than that of Final Fantasy XI,” Yoshida-san says of the scope of content being created. Hydaelyn blends sci-fi and fantasy elements, as seen in the early images released, leading to a large variety of disparate styles needing to be blended into a cohesive world vision. “To deliver the graphics necessary to bring that variety of gameplay to life, we are striving to produce sharp images that are contextually appropriate to the time, place, and situation. An example of this would be visually stimulating or evocative landscapes,” says Yoshida-san, adding, “To help fulfill the expectations that players have come to have of a Final Fantasy world, one of the first things we take into account is a certain sense of reality. For example, we have paid a great deal of attention to the effects that the passage of time or changes in the weather have on how light is displayed.”

Still, veterans of Final Fantasy XI will see some similarities in the character styles and professions, even though the specific races and classes will be new to the series. “The character creation in Final Fantasy XIV will be much more in-depth than that of previous titles in the series,” says Yoshida-san, “Players will be able to generate avatars similar to those in Final Fantasy XI if they choose to do so, but there will also be some new [player character] types.” Want more specifics on the new characters? The devs are keeping that information tightly under wraps, though five distinctive races have been revealed so far.

Incredibly, Square Enix released the single-player Final Fantasy XIII while working on this MMO off-shoot. The games share certain technology details such as the core engine and the tools used to build the worlds, but the processes, challenges, and ultimate requirements are significantly different. More surprising yet is the fact that the world of Hydaelyn revealed in the first release of FFXIV may actually be smaller than the locations crammed on to the Blu-ray disc shipping for FFXIII on PS3. “Since we are still in development a thorough comparison isn’t possible, but at release FFXIV will be about the same scale, if not slightly smaller, than FFXIII,” says Yoshida-san.

But that’s not to suggest the game world will actually be small. Shortly after its release in Japan, it was revealed that enough content for an entire additional game ended up on the FFXIII cutting-room floor. These game worlds are always massive…and complicated. While Square Enix is keeping many gameplay details under wraps, five races have been revealed (the Hyur, Lalafell, Miqo’te, Roegadyn, and Elezen) with character classes organized in four discipline types (Disciples of War, Magic, the Land, and the Hand). The races, classes, and disciplines require an intriguing blend of art assets that capture the vast scope of this world. “The world of FFXIV will have certain sci-fi elements such as out-of-place artifacts, perhaps best exemplified by airships,” says Yoshida-san. “These elements will play a key role in distinguishing the cultures and civilizations of different nations, regions, and races, but they will not be extremely numerous,” adds Yamamoto-san. “We are seeking to create a fantasy world with its core in classic sword-and-sorcery that players will never grow tired of visiting, no matter how much they play.”

Veterans of FFXI may, come actual release, recognize certain elements of the class structure, but the developers are happy to point out that lessons learned from that development will be incorporated into a tighter, more focused online Final Fantasy experience. “It would be more accurate to say that we are attempting to achieve a development process that takes full advantage of the know-how obtained from Final Fantasy XI while also improving on its shortcomings,” says Yoshida-san. “Given the differences in the game worlds, there will be no direct transplants from Final Fantasy XIII,” he adds, “however, players can expect to see some of the classic monsters from the Final Fantasy series making an appearance, a number of which will be undergoing a makeover from FFXI.”

Some of those enhancements will come courtesy of a close working relationship between NVIDIA and the Square Enix engineers and art department to optimize the vast environments and detailed characters for NVIDIA GPUs. And you heard it here first: Square Enix is also investigating options to incorporate 3D Vision support.

Like so many in-game details, further specifics on these relationships and what they may deliver to gamers in the year ahead are not being disclosed. Of course, given the evolving development process that MMOs undertake post-launch, many other high-end elements could find their way into the code and your game experience. “We are putting in place a system that will allow us to continually implement fresh, new designs while simultaneously taking precautions to ensure that there is no ‘design inflation’ early on,” says Yoshida-san. “Allowances are also being made for future expansion of the game.”

That, for fans of the Final Fantasy universe, is very, very good news. As if the single-player Final Fantasy XIII wasn’t enough content, this super-stylized sci-fi epic with swords and sorcery elements will provide even cross-server gaming between locations to keep you entertained for years. And in that time, you’ll get to wander some incredible locations, gaze in awe at mind-boggling structures, and craft details on your own character that place it undeniably in the Final Fantasy universe.

DC Universe Online

Create your superhero and battle for good—or evil

As if creating virtual worlds wasn’t complicated enough to begin with, working with licensed—and iconic—images like Superman, Batman, Metropolis, and Gotham City present unique challenges for the DC Universe Online design and art team.

With oversight from Jim Lee and his team of artists at Wildstorm, Sony Online Entertainment’s Austin studio has been building this world for more than three years. Despite the reams of source material, a cohesive 3D virtual world requires fleshing out many places never seen in a comic book panel. “We fill in the gaps,” explains DCUO art director Mark Anderson, “what would a back room look like? What would a holding cell look like?” Wildstorm has provided plenty of leeway to allow the game developers to fill in these holes in the world design, while ensuring that the iconic parts of the lore are recreated in perfect detail.

“There are definitely key elements we can’t stray from, the kind of things where fans know what the Pantone number is,” says Anderson. Details like the Superman statue in Metropolis facing a specific direction are set in lore and require incredible precision. “We did a lot of work on details of Superman’s jaw line and his facial expressions,” says Anderson, “even the way his cape falls across his shoulders…all the details are important.”

While extensive blueprints exist in the comic books for many of the characters, the environments present a very different challenge. “We had to ask at every stage how you know you’re in Metropolis or Gotham… Metropolis is about truth and happiness where Gotham is dark and foreboding.” But even those directions don’t help fill in the blanks of scenes that can possibly be viewed from a wide range of angles and perspectives. “The biggest difference from the comic world is scale,” says Anderson, “where our Metropolis is the size of Long Island, and that needs to hold up for people who fly through the air and see it from a bird’s-eye view, and those who stand on the doorstep of a building…but it takes all of us to fill in little details and give these locations a unique feel.”

The visual goal then has to be blended with the realities of MMO world architecture where bandwidth is key. Metropolis itself consists of six districts, each with 10,000 light sources, totaling 60,000 light sources in the city. That in itself is quite a chunk of data to pipe to gamers. Working in Maya, the team has built the architecture in a fairly traditional format, but focused detail on the prominent locations such as the Daily Planet building. “We do a full elevation drawing, and then the environment group will model it at high resolution, then transfer down the texture and material work,” says Anderson.

The overall goal for the visual style of DCUO was to use a vibrant color palette, but not just stick to a literal translation of the images in a comic book panel. “We have to give the flavor of the DC universe, and then celebrate the individual players within that space,” says Anderson, “but also make it feel like you can build a character yourself that could be on par with any of the greatest characters in the universe.” To provide flexibility in character customization the team spent a lot of time drawing plain bodysuit characters, making sure—with feedback from Jim Lee at Wildstorm—to get the proportions right to fit the particular style of the universe. “We’ve got six guys building characters in z-brush, and building the high-resolution models digitally, but like using clay,” explains Anderson, “we then sculpt them and send them to Jim [Lee] for approval, correct anything that he feels is needed, then apply color with polygon painting, and then transfer that to the low-res in-game mesh.”

The end result is a system that should provide a vast array of options to create a unique identity in the game world (“we can’t have 12 Batman’s running around,” says Anderson, but you’ve got to expect that a huge amount more than that number of players will try). Some of the more flamboyant superhero accoutrements will be streamlined to allow the characters to move effectively and look good from all angles, so don’t expect massive flowing capes or broad, feathered wings. Unless, of course, it’s one of the game’s “iconics” that were produced starting with a grayscale outline, then in full color with all the costumes and accessories, and will be specially crafted into the mission structure and environment to look as “natural” as possible.

“From a gameplay standpoint, we want to mix what you traditionally see in a console action game with an MMO, and if we mix that audience and keep the attention of the console gamer, then we could have something special,” concludes Anderson. Certainly the look and feel of the world, and the recognizable characters inhabiting it, will be hugely appealing to comic book fans, and if the combat mechanics and mission structure capture the imagination, DCUO could well be the next big thing in MMOs.

Star Wars: The Old Republic

Bioware sinks its teeth into the license of all licenses

As the late, great Hitchhiker’s author Douglas Adams succinctly described it: Space is big. Really big. Imagine having to build it, and keep it faithful to the greatest space opera in cinematic history. This daunting task already has Jeff Dobson (above), Bioware’s art director on Star Wars: The Old Republic, losing track of the figures behind the asset creation. “I lost count of the total number of assets long ago,” he says, “Suffice to say the number of artists it takes to produce an MMO of this epic scale is an order of magnitude larger than anything I have worked on in the past.”

Bioware has experience in the Star Wars universe, having created one of the most critically acclaimed single-player RPGs of all-time in Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. This new MMO picks up 300 years after the events in KOTOR, and as such is able to incorporate locations from that game (and its Obsidian-developed sequel), as well as familiar names from the movies. Of course, the period of galactic history in which this game is set means that while a place might sound familiar, it may not look like it does in any movie scene. It’s in these areas that the developers are still able to add their own creative flair to a setting that is detailed in so many forms of media to a truly scary level of precision.

Like most MMO development, it’s a huge challenge to build vast worlds as visually intricate as those you see in single-player games. Aside from bandwidth restrictions, a game with as broad appeal as a Star Wars MMO has to scale to work on lower-end systems, but also have the longevity to look compelling five or more years from release, and also appeal to the eye-candy crowd wanting to showcase their high-end PC rigs. “From the start, we set out to establish a visual style that would run well across a broad spectrum of machines,” explains Dobson, “…and this drives the technical parameters much more than bandwidth considerations.”

While Dobson has positive things to say about the working relationship with LucasArts and LucasFilm on ensuring the visual styles fit the canon, he concedes that the tweaks, redos, and do-overs for a typical character model before it’s approved for in-game use are “more than we would like!” He adds, “As we progress through a project of this scale, we learn a lot of things as we go. We find ourselves swinging back to the earliest assets to bring them up to the level of the most current assets. Developing character assets for a game with so much customization, though, allows us to call many things ‘done.’ You will never get everyone to love every asset, so some disagreements are solved by simply saying, ‘Pick another character!’ ”

While the game design sticks with the existing galaxy of Star Wars locations, expect to be able to explore some of these worlds in more detail than ever before. For high-end users, Dobson is bullish about the possibilities of exploiting the latest technology: “NVIDIA continues to push the bleeding edge of graphics forward,” he says, “For artists, this means the more perfect realization of the pictures in our heads onto the screens of gamers.” As is clear from these screenshots, the scale of the locations around the galaxy is as vast as the artists deem them to be. So we had to ask, is providing the visual canvas for new worlds in the Star Wars universe the ultimate sci-fan/artist dream job? “Um…YEAH,” says Dobson.

Guild Wars 2

The MMO with no monthly fees gears up for round two

The original Guild Wars became a huge PC hit for developer ArenaNet when it launched in April 2005. Clearly the team principals, several of whom left Blizzard to form this new studio, knew a thing or two about crafting a unique MMO experience. It does a serious disservice to the inventive gameplay mechanics that Guild Wars was largely known as the “free” MMO, as no monthly fees were required to keep playing after you bought the game at retail. While the team continued to add content in expansion packs, work started on a true sequel that aims to push the technology to create one of the most visually arresting MMOs ever made.

ArenaNet employs eight or nine concept artists on staff, and with production artists also contributing ideas, it means some two dozen talented folks have crafted the framework for the environments and assets in Guild Wars 2. “It’s an ongoing process,” says art director Daniel Dociu, as art goes from the concept teams on to the creatures and character teams to bring to virtual life. These concepts are created free of technical limitations, according to Dociu, “they are high-level ideas, very ambitious pieces, with complete disregard for obstacles and restrictions.” That’s not done just to create a high-end target, but as a source of inspiration for both engineers and artists. “Once everyone is on board with a new idea, we then identify where problems arise on the art, engineering, and design side…it’s very important to have everyone excited because then everyone gives their best shot to pull it off,” adds Dociu.

While the art production doesn’t follow a strict process, Dociu says that after the high-level ideas are scaled to a more manageable scope, they go through three to five iterations. “In theory, all the maps and environments go through three passes: a rough draft (maps are laid out quite crudely, with placeholder props and art to get the functionality pinned down and allow play-testing); then a second pass replacing the placeholder with real, but not final assets; then the polish pass when the map is fine-tuned for lighting, mood, and all the good stuff happens,” he explains.

Because of the ambition level of Guild Wars 2, Dociu revealed that the size of the team is probably twice that of the original game. That goes for the actual world geometry, too. According to graphics engine programming lead Jim Scott, “We’re typically rendering two to five times as much geometry as we did in Guild Wars 1, which, when combined with the more advanced occlusion culling, means a ton more objects and details in the game world. Likewise, our textures are not only larger but also deeper, with additional channels to feed into our improved shading and lighting systems.” The new game engine, combined with the raw processing power of current GPUs, “has allowed us to tackle ideas of a much grander scale,” Dociu adds. “Many ideas were put off first time around, but this time we knew we could be more aggressive and literally envision more ample spaces, more richly populated with props, the props themselves with more geometry.”

To power this, while aiming to keep the technical specs scaleable for the widest possible audience of PC gamers, the engineering team and graphics team has worked closely with NVIDIA to understand the workings of the target graphics cards’ capabilities. “We’re pulling every trick in the book—from clever precomputation to hardware instancing and occlusion to specific driver and API hacks—to bring tomorrow’s visuals to even yesterday’s GPUs,” says Scott.

It’s a truly staggering world already, with a strong visual style being one of the tent poles on which Guild Wars 2 aims to build an even more fervent audience than that which devoured the RPG content of the original game. “We want it to stand out and be visually superb,” says Dociu. And the team looks to be succeeding admirably with that goal already—well ahead of the game’s (currently unannounced) release date.

LEGO Universe

"If you build it, they will come!"

You might think that building a game devised around lots of square bricks would be a relatively straightforward technical process. You’d be wrong—very wrong. According to Scott Brown, president at LEGO Universe developer NetDevil, each individual brick can actually require thousands of polygons. That’s thousands. To get those rounded connectors perfect—to draw the tubes that connect the bricks—is actually a surprisingly intricate process. Now, still some months from release, consider there are some 80,000 bricks and shapes in the world, and you can start to understand why NetDevil has spent two solid years learning how to optimize performance to allow for that level of detail in a large, open, massively multiplayer world.

“We have more polys in our bricks than there are avatars in most MMOs,” says Brown. So when players start to build objects in the game world and populate their property with new models, there’s the potential to have hundreds of models on-screen at once. Whether the models are found in pirate- or space-themed locations, to mention just a couple of the likely fan favorites, the developers have had to find ways to compress the data so that it can be swiftly shifted across the network. “Bricks are submitted to the server farm to be compressed down,” explains Brown of the technical process at work here, “and since they have so many vertices we do an opacity map (as opposed to a texture map), and that gives us a lot of detail in the brick. We’re now looking at a radiosity map on that, optimized and compressed to the in-game model, and then sent back out by the servers.”

While Brown describes the process of solving these issues as “exciting for us” the end result will see the knobs on bricks that are covered up during construction removed from the model, but with the aim of “making bricks look amazing—to be the best looking bricks you’ve ever seen, that are also fun to play with in the game world.”

And it should come as no surprise that the gameplay will often have you destroy various LEGO constructions (as seen in the series of Star Wars and Indiana Jones–themed games). But players with higher-end hardware will get a more satisfying payoff as bricks (and more of them) fly in all directions from a broken model. Brown explains that players using NVIDIA graphics cards with onboard physics processing (PhysX) will be able to turn on advanced visual details such as how many bricks fly off a smashed object.

Though it’s a licensed property, and LEGO has an employee in NetDevil’s office as the caretaker of canon—a “visual grand authority,” says Brown—the team has had the creative freedom to craft their own locations and story. “It’s not just about LEGO City or Pirates or Indiana Jones or another IP, so we built our own virtual play set, and we have bricks that you collect that are not made by LEGO any more,” says Brown in a nod to the hardcore fan base that can name sets by individual bricks and the dates those sets were available.

That flexibility is particularly apparent in areas like special effects, where a LEGO brick that was painted to look like fire or smoke wouldn’t have the same impact of animated flames. So the team has the ability to make the effect as dynamic as they wish—to animate it to be as fun as possible, or to just add more color or scale to a scene. Citing the work developer Traveller’s Tales has done bringing life, dynamism, and fun to LEGO video games (in the likes of the Star Wars games, LEGO Rock Band, and the upcoming LEGO Harry Potter), Brown says that the humor element from those games is a significant part of what NetDevil will emulate in LEGO Universe.

It’s already been a long road— the project was often delayed while technical challenges were successfully solved. However, LEGO Universe has tremendous potential to bring families of gamers together to build virtual worlds (with a lot less clean-up needed when you’re done)