The second community Q&A has been published on the Black Prophecy website. Lead Programmer Marco Nowara and QA Manager Stephan Bast take on the questions. Keep reading!

Chris: What kind of technical challenges and difficulties do you encounter in the development of an MMO? Can you say offhand that the development of a single-player game is "easier" to accomplish?

Marco: Yes, single-player games are much easier to develop. There is no need for net code, a task distribution between client and server and the forced necessity to prevent cheating. Even in a pure multiplayer game like Counterstrike you have fewer problems due to the lower player count. A further optimisation is not necessary as it is possible to simply send all data to all players. In an MMO you need to carefully gauge what kind of data the server is sending to the clients. In addition to this, a normal multiplayer game is hosted on just one single server unlike an MMO where the game world is segmented across several servers which perform their specific tasks - these things alone make an MMO much more difficult to develop than a simple single-player game.

Stephan: I can only judge this subjectively as I have not worked on a major single player title yet. In comparison with a single-player game you will encounter many more limitations due to the permanent synchronisation between client and server. Another big obstacle is to develop a stable and high-performance server architecture, Black Prophecy Gold which is not necessary in a single-player game.

Furthermore, in a single-player game you can focus more on telling a story and thus have much more freedom than if you have to design a game with several hundred players playing simultaneously.