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MMO Idea that could be worked out
Sandyboxy15
Member Posts: 2
So I was wondering,
If you happen to have a cool idea (like say a story, world, rpg elements, ideas about character creation) and want that to be worked out into a real MMO, is there any place, like a site, to go to and share ideas or find people who can actually program and stuff (don't want to sound harsh by calling it 'stuff')?
For example: I have a great idea for a MMO world and have thought of things like character creation, classes, a story, a world toset in but I simply can't program any of it or draw any of it because I am bad at such things. Is there anyone to turn to? I would love some advice please.
P.S: I'm 15 so don't expect me to have allot of money or anything, just some ideas
P.S.S: Not sure if this topic belongs here, sorry in advance 
Comments
Everyone and his neighbor's dog has ideas for games. Everyone who is capable of creating a game has ideas that he likes better than your ideas; that's why his ideas are his ideas and your ideas are not his ideas. If you're not able to play a major role in actually creating a game, then no one particularly cares about your ideas for a game.
What may have some value is ideas that would fit quite neatly into some particular game. Game developers tend not to look favorably on "toss a bunch of stuff out and redo it all this way" ideas, but proposals for minor tweaks to make things clearly better (especially but not exclusively bug fixes) may be welcome. Such ideas can be posted on the forums for a particular game.
The key distinction is between ideas that you build a game around, versus ideas that fit neatly into some game that already either exists or is in development.
Including you... and if we look at the screenshots in your profile, that didn't work too well.
Big words, small deeds...
Give the guy some slack, he's 15. At least he's trying. You're much older, and I have yet to see a successful game you participated in, only not even "alpha" worthy graphic demos in your profile.
This is quite true. I posted recently that the worst idea a professional developer could have is to listen too much to the players. Anyone can start to make a game nowadays using tools like "Unity". The biggest problem is not the design, it's to find the talented artists for graphics and audio, something you just can't improvise. Ideas are no longer good enough nowadays, in the 80s, someone could make an amazing game alone in his garage and sell it (Richard Garriott sold his first games on floppy discs wrapped in transparent plastic bags), this is no longer possible today.
My computer is better than yours.
You may want to dip your toes in and try to play around with some ideas in programs like RPG Maker, etc. I think there is a demo and there are some free alternatives.
I would also recommend a shot at making your own pen and paper rpg just to flesh out some world making and character concepts. The community for such things is also widespread and vocal. It does have some overlap to the mmo community as well.
Have fun
Aye. Or get yourself a copy of Neverwinter Nights 2, it's very cheap now and the possibilities even for someone not an artist or a developer are huge.
My computer is better than yours.
Thanks for your thoughts about this guys, really appreciate it!
By the way, the idea of using RPG maker could be a cool idea indeed, and the mentioning of a 'pen and paper' RPG gave me the idea of maybe just writing about it (The story/lore).
Also, I'm pretty handy with the WC3-editor, so maybe I could make something simple with that. (Like DOTA started, but obviously not so big)
I've heard of a site that has programmers you could hire for freelance work.
You get what you want programmed and they get to add it to their resume, its a win win.
Unfortunately, from what I've heard a lot of those programmers are amateurs and the work shows. A lot of the code is hardly worth using and the programmers on the site that are actually any good are usually busy.
I dont remember the name of the site, sorry.
Your other option is to hire a programmer. Which is insanely expensive.
Your last option is to learn programming. Which I myself am doing at the moment, honestly, its a lot easier than you would think. Everyone makes it out to be this HUGE COMPLICATED THING when its not, sorta. Sure it can be, but it can also not be.
What I would suggest that you write you ideas out. I am kind of in the same boat. I've had an idea of a MMORPG for years that I've been molding and shaping for a long time. Study the genre and question and grill developers when you get the chance
.
But if you're young I would also suggest learning to code your own games even if it's just some mobile games. Go to school for it if you can and maybe you'll meet others with the same goals or at least talents to help. Try to get into the industry and branch off on your own. Of course that's easier said that done.
There is kickstarter these days as well.
Quizzical might sound harsh here, but he's completely right. It doesn't matter what the OP's age is. Ideas are a dime a dozen in the gaming industry and everyone likes their own better than yours.
I'd even go as far to say that giving ideas away might be impractical anymore. Non-gaming businesses are filled with managers and bosses that are so paranoid of new ideas that someone has to first present them with a new idea in such a way that they will think it was their own idea. You lead the horse to the water, and hope it doesn't try to impregnate all the fillies in the adjacent pasture. If the horse is still thirsty, you try a different analogy.. I know I've ran into any number of them. There's no reason that that mentality doesn't exist within the gaming industry as well.
Logic, my dear, merely enables one to be wrong with great authority.
You've got the right attitude! What Quizzical said was harsh, but very true. Don't let that discourage you though. You're young and have many years ahead of you. Start planning for a career in game development now, find a college that has a good program and plan on going there when you graduate high school.
You said you don't have any programming or art skills. Most artists and programmers have zero skills until they start practicing and learning (I say most because there are very few people who are "naturals" at such things). I really think anyone can be a programmer if they put their mind to it. But you have to work for it.
Don't focus on the end result, focus on the process (and the steps) that are needed to reach the goal. Good luck!
Man it's hard to even remember when I started coding lol. I think it was right around your age actually I got my first computer at 15 but was doing goto statements and saving programs on tape using an old commodore 64. While some of the suggestions like Unity, RPG maker and Neverwinter Nights 2 are great and modding and scripting can get your feet wet I recommend jumping into the hard stuff because I can script in Skyrim Creation Kit or any other toolkit with ease after learning Microsoft Visual C++ so that is where I would start.
Also there are so many great youtube channels that you can look up for tutorials on C++. Using Schoolfreeware as a jumping off point. W3Schools is a great resource for HTML and JAVA. You could also get C++ for Dummies or check out cplusplus.com for books and other resources. Also Robocode is this awesome programming game that would help you learn Java. In fact you could do a google search for games that help teach programming.
One of the best things I ever did was program a MUD as well so if you want to download something that is purely text based to start off with and get used to dealing with an entire playable game CircleMUD.org is great. It helps to have a complete program that you can compile, debug and see the structure of the code. It's very important to have good coding practices. CircleMUD is coded in C++.
If you want to do 3D modeling or animation I would suggest 3D Studio Max which you could get a demo for.
I went to college for two years to get my Diploma and Microsoft Certified but one of my friends did eight years to get his masters in computer science. You need a lot of math and physics. My classmates, teacher and other prgrammers were also invaluable resources.
Best of luck and I hope some of that helps!
"classification of games into MMOs is not by rational reasoning" - nariusseldon
Love Minecraft. And check out my Youtube channel OhCanadaGamer
Try a MUD today at http://www.mudconnect.com/Right. Because the best measure of a final game's quality is screenshots that used a very early version of a game engine to demonstrate some technical point about how 3D graphics works, especially without the accompanying text explaining the technical point that the screenshots where there to demonstrate.
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Perhaps "no one cares" was a little too harsh; there may be people on a forum like this who also aren't involved in creating games who care about your ideas, at least about as much as you care about theirs. But people who make games for a living have far more ideas of their own than they can ever make, without having to resort to checking on someone else's ideas.
As others have noted, the "unless you can contribute to making a game, no one cares about your ideas" doesn't automatically mean that you should give up. Acquiring some skills involved in making a game is another alternative. But you certainly shouldn't waste time pushing your ideas on various game developers without having anything to offer besides ideas.
I'm not saying you are wrong Quiz, I also feel that no one involved in making games 'cares' about the ideas of non-developers.
I do not however think this is smart. I don't think that just because you know how to render an artistic chair in 3D that it means you understand how to write a good story. Just because you can build a graphics engine, it doesn't mean you can conceptualize a world as deep as say, Star Wars.
I also see a psychological barrier which could exist. For example, when conceptualizing 'new' games, developers seem to rely too heavily on their existing skill set. They don't seem to push the envelope on what is technically possible but rather fit their 'new' design into their old bag of tricks.
I believe listening to outside ideas could generate a lot of advances, because devs are challenged to make something work they never thought possible.
You might be able to split hairs on my argument - but I will stand by this:
No one will ever convince me that the best way to do business is by closing yourself off to diverse ideas.
Last analogy:
How many games have developed based upon the Star Wars I.P.? George Lucas obviously didn't know the first thing about game development. Yet, look how rich his 'ideas' are for gaming. Sometimes it might be a good idea to listen to those outside the bubble.
Certainly, a good artist isn't necessarily a good writer or a good programmer, and vice versa. Which is why it's a good thing that, unless a game is made on a shoestring budget, those roles can be filled by different people.
Computer games are primarily about the game mechanics. While writing, artwork, and audio are essential parts of most games, they only play a supporting role. The game mechanics are the main thing--and everything else needs to be fit around the game mechanics when necessary.
If you want something to be primarily about the storyline, the artwork, or the background music, then making a computer game is the wrong way to go. Write a novel and it can be all about the writing. Compose a song and it can be all about the music. Indeed, if those are your main talents and interests, that lets you dispense with any pesky need for programmers and various other things that you can't do yourself.
You say that there have been a lot of Star Wars games, and there have. But many different Star Wars games have basically nothing to do with each other as far as game mechanics go. Licensing the Star Wars IP may well direct the artwork and writing to a substantial degree, but when it comes to designing the core game mechanics, that it is a Star Wars game barely matters.
Above, I said, unless you have something to contribute to creating a game, developers won't care about your ideas. That doesn't mean you have to be able to do everything yourself. It doesn't even mean that you have to be a programmer. If you're an excellent artist, then you have something to contribute, and may well be able to have considerable influence on the artwork in a game. If you're an excellent composer, then you have something to contribute, and may well have considerable influence on the background music in a game.
But if you want to design game mechanics, then you'd better be able to program some yourself. Otherwise, you won't be able to distinguish between things that are easy to code and things that are completely intractable. If two potential features are equally interesting but you can only implement one, and one of them is a hundred times as much work as the other, that is, in itself, a pretty compelling reason to do the easier one.
I'd actually go a little further and say that letting anyone without a decent background in probability touch fundamental game mechanics isn't likely to end well. Good intuition helps a lot, but your intuition will be better if you can do the formal computations when needed. Fortunately, that's introductory enough that a lot of CS majors have an adequate background. The probability-as-a-branch-of-mathematics stuff like sigma algebras isn't necessary or even relevant.
Ordinarily, you wouldn't ask an artist to write code, nor a programmer to create artwork, unless it's someone with a pretty diverse skill set. But that really points to the compelling reason why game developers don't care about outside ideas: if you have the skills to make a game, you ought to make your own game. If you don't, then for people who don't know what they're doing to tell people who do understand what they're doing what the latter have to do isn't going to work out.
First off, Quizzical is not completely right. He is simply parroting THIS ARTICLE. This type of philosophy is not helpful or constructive to society, even if it were a nearly absolute truth- which it is not. If I had a dime for every time I saw someone who knew nothing about "game ideas" parrot this article, I would have enough to fund my entire project like a AAA studio. While there may be some good opinions in the article, it is not the absolute truth on the matter. In fact, there are ideas which are solid gold, ideas which would make great games, and bad ideas.
There is also an entire career field devoted to people who create games who do not program and are not artists. This is the role of "Game Designer" or in the case of AAA studies, entire design teams. Yes, that's right. People paid for their ideas.
Obviously, there is more to Game Design than ideas. However, it is not necessary to do any software engineering or art management. Those are left up to programmers and software leads. Game Designers may or may not also double as other tasks in a project, depending on the size of the company and scope of the project.
Game Design has a lot of interesting skills and talents required to be good, and it all starts with ideas. One can be a successful designer while never knowing how to program or draw. However, one must hone design skills. It is similar to architectural engineers, software engineers, or mathematicians who do nothing but work on complex algorithms for a project. Yet instead of designing code structure, equations, or architecture- they design video games.
This is a real field, and a real task best devoted to a single person. It is more than the "idea guy" just the same as an architectural engineer is about more than making a good looking building. Just like the former, the latter must be detailed in certain areas or else the entire building may collapse during an earthquake due to poorly designed architecture. Just like how a game design can collapse if a designer failed to predict what the players would do when they create their own "storm".
This is directed at anyone who supports that idiotic article about "Why Your Game Idea Sucks" and its bad philosophy.
Finally, he is only 15 years old. This means that if he starts now, he could actually become so talented, skilled, and experienced in every aspect of game design or even game development, that he could succeed. If I started my project when I was 15, it would be the world's most complex video game by my current age. If only most game designers, artists, or programmers were so lucky. Youth for most in western culture is an amazing time to learn. In fact, for all you know you are shooting down the next Notch, the next WoW, or the next Terraria. Who cares if it is not likely? By attacking and belittling the young as fools, you are dangerously harming their dreams. Innovation is not born from practicality. It's born by dreamers. Dreamers who are often told by fools that they are crazy to think they can accomplish their dream.
Will it be easy? No. Does a 15 year have a capacity to learn far more than any adult? If they don't have to work full time at such a young age, they absolutely do. Is the chance low that the young man you're talking to will make your perfect game? Why does it matter? The fact there is a chance, and the fact your attitude harms others, means you should drop the attitude and encourage them.
It doesn't take a liar to tell a young man that he can accomplish his dreams if he is devoted to his idea. In fact, most indie studios finish their game DESPITE being in the exact place this young man is in.
You know the REAL harm in telling young men they are unpractical dreamers and their ideas suck?
They may one day grow up, create an amazing game, and make you look like the complete asshat you are. What a tool, to try to dash the dreams of the young, just because you were never able to fulfill your dreams.
I challenge anyone who believes "ideas are a dime of dozen" to watch this movie: Flash of Genius (2008).
It is about an inventor, who has this simple idea. An idea which was stolen from him, with the thief making millions of dollars thanks to his "dime a dozen idea".
Inventions may be a dime a dozen, but some of those dimes are diamonds in the rough, and with some polish... will shine brightly to the point of making the owner wealthy.
C++ is a horrible language for beginners. While it may be good if the person masters it despite the archaic difficulty of the language, it would be much better (and more likely for the newbie to succeed) if they were to use a higher level language such as C#.
Even better, would be to start with a scripting engine, such as Unity, Game Maker, or Torque2D. Being able to dabble in scripting opens up experience to future high level programming, which then opens up easier understanding of lower level languages like C++.
However, working with a game engine introduces a newbie to not only light programming (scripting) but game programming, game design, the reality and complexity of making games, artwork, and if they are interested- areas such as shaders, animating, and coloring.
I'd suggest those interested in game development, to dabble in a little bit of everything. That way, they can find out what they like to do the most. Leave the low level headaches for the professionals.
I'm not saying you're wrong to suggest C++. But from my experience and the opinions of others such as Game From Scratch, C++ is not recommended for beginners. Check out the linked article for another reason as to why.
Great idea about designing a MUD though. Anyone who is interested in making a RPG or MMORPG, a MUD is a great place to start. Heck, it is a MMO.
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~~edit~~
Here is the expert that I am referencing:
… the C++ question.
Let me get the 800lb gorilla out of the way first of all. C++. This is one of the most controversial and repetitious questions of all. New developers hear from other developers that C++ “is what the pros use” and therefore want to use that. To make matters even worse, people answering the questions are often new developers as well and will recommend what they know thus pushing people to use a language they probably shouldn’t. Frankly, if you have only ever used a single language, you really shouldn’t be answering these kinds of questions!
Alright, back to the whole C++ question. Should you start learning with C++? NO. See, no maybe, no wishy washy answer or caveats, it’s simple, C++ is an epically stupid language to start with. It’s about the same as starting to learn math by starting with advanced calculus. Again, dumb. If you are going to listen to a single piece of advice I give, it’s DO NOT START WITH C++. I know, of course, that you are going to completely disregard this advice and start with C++, but in 3 or 4 years when you’ve got the scars and trauma from ignoring my advice, I’m going to smugly *tisk tisk* and give you my best “I told you so!”. I will offer another piece of advice while I am at it… anyone that recommends you start with C++, in the future ignore their advice!
Don’t get me wrong, I totally understand why you want to go with C++, I’m just as guilty. Recently I purchased a set of golf clubs and I’m a horrifically meh golfer, but I got a set of “blades” cause that’s what the pro’s use. The gotcha? I’m no pro golfer, and my god did these golf clubs totally ruined my golf game. Sometimes using what the pros use isn’t the right thing to do. Alright, off that tangent.
Again, these are just my opinions ( and those of the vast majority of people that went down this road themselves! ) and I know you are going to start with C++ anyways, but don’t say I didn’t warn you, because you are making a really stupid mistake.
Now, if you did in fact make the decision to go ahead with C++, for the love of all that is holy, DO NOT USE DevC++. It’s old, unsupported and a vastly inferior choice on every measurable level. Don’t worry, I’ll cover the options off later.
Might I suggest taking a step back from actually making a video game and working out your game on paper? Many MMORPG's, in fact most of the genre actually, take their roots from plain on pen and paper concepts that have been ported over and programmed into video games.
If you have a good idea then, make the game. It would be a lot less expensive to do it this way and would give you a great working prototype to then present to a developer. And who knows, you might even make something that causes people to get together in the same room again, and that would make you Richard Garfield rich, which is not poor.
This is quite true. I posted recently that the worst idea a professional developer could have is to listen too much to the players. Anyone can start to make a game nowadays using tools like "Unity". The biggest problem is not the design, it's to find the talented artists for graphics and audio, something you just can't improvise. Ideas are no longer good enough nowadays, in the 80s, someone could make an amazing game alone in his garage and sell it (Richard Garriott sold his first games on floppy discs wrapped in transparent plastic bags), this is no longer possible today.
I was about to say same thing. Give him some slack a kid of 15 years old have some ideas encourage him instead bluntly saying get lost kid becouse thats what he is saying.
Some rusty old guy thinks he knows it all becouse lack of social skills.
Hope to build full AMD system RYZEN/VEGA/AM4!!!
MB:Asus V De Luxe z77
CPU:Intell Icore7 3770k
GPU: AMD Fury X(waiting for BIG VEGA 10 or 11 HBM2?(bit unclear now))
MEMORY:Corsair PLAT.DDR3 1866MHZ 16GB
PSU:Corsair AX1200i
OS:Windows 10 64bit
Wow this got harsh. But in reading everything so far, and while I agree with Quizzical and even read a bit of the link Kwaynos99 linked (sorry, it was a little too specific and since I'm not the one who needs the rundown on coding...) my piece of advise is this:
The most important thing is…
Do something. Really, the most important thing you can do is start writing code, start learning, jump in. All the planning, dreaming and forming of teams is all fun and such, but the most important thing you can do is, um… do. Jump in, learn, make mistakes, the experience will be invaluable.
Your first game won’t be good. Your second game won’t be much better. But if you finish a single game, you’ve done better than 95% of people that came before you. Don’t plan an MMO, it’s way beyond you, even with a team of a few hundred people. Hell, aiming much higher than Pong is setting yourself up for failure. Pick something small and execute. Again, there is a 99.99% chance your game isn’t going to be published, so approach it as the learning experience it is.
- Taken from Kwaynos99's link
This doesn't just apply to coding or anything. Just DO SOMETHING. Ideas are just a beginning; like they said, write down your ideas, make it cohesive. As of now,
<a data-cke-saved-href="http://www.mmorpg.com/profile.cfm/username/Sandyboxy15"; href="http://www.mmorpg.com/profile.cfm/username/Sandyboxy15"; title="View information about Sandyboxy15" suhlink"="">There are some programs that are good for beginners without diving too quickly into coding. It's hand-holding, of a sort, but it should give you an idea of what to expect or prepare for when creating a game. Try RPGmaker or Renpy.
I am sorry Neo_Viper, for having to rip into you like this. However, people need to know the truth, and you couldn't BE any more wrong. The indie scene is EXPLODING, and the graphics are certainly NOT revolutionary.
Please, anyone reading this: do not believe a word Neo_Viper says. The exact OPPOSITE is true. If you don't believe me, start following game developers yourself on a site like http://www.gamasutra.com or http://indiegames.com/index.html
The #1 thing right now is game design. With tools like Unity and a HUGE revival of retro graphics, game ideas are gold right now.
Also, let me give you a bit of how programming worked in the 80's. People spend long hours just to do the most basic of tasks. It was an expensive process just like it is today. Do not be deceived into thinking that games were cheap to develop or "easy" with only individual garage programmers. To even suggest that "someone could make an amazing game alone in his garage" is quite silly. Someone, as in anyone? I'm sorry, but do you know how many people know programming now, compared to the 80's? There were very, very, VERY few programmers in the 80's compared to today. Programming is MUCH simpler and infinitely more accessible than in the 80's. Of those who knew how to program, to program video games "in their basement alone" would require them to have a sustainable income or enough wealth accrued to not get payed while they created games. I am positive it is a correct assumption to assume that most programmers were priviledged white males or workers who did not have the free time due to programming for a real business as a full time job. They would wet their pants if they saw Unity.
For programming in the 80's compared to now in relation to difficulty, see this thread: http://gmc.yoyogames.com/index.php?showtopic=440319
For what it was like to grow up as a programmer in the 80's:
http://www.andygibson.net/blog/article/growing-up-a-programmer-in-the-80s/
Games were significantly more expensive only decades ago. a SUPER NINTENDO cartridge would cost $50, which is equivalent to $91 today. Your new PS4 game will be 2/3rds the cost of a nintendo game in the 90's.
Large budget NINTENDO cartridge games would sometimes have budgets of $500,000. From 1985 to 2013, that is the equivalent of $1,090,223.17. Yes, cost of AAA games has risen incredibly, and the cost of the games themselves has dropped quite a bit. However, can "someone in a basement" come up with half a million dollars? A million dollars? Heck, even a small game dev budget in the 1985 of $10,000 would equate to someone having a $22,000 "basement".
With the invention of tools like Unity, people are able to cut costs even more and ship out "amazing games" that sell really well. Hell, Shadowrun Returns was made using Unity.
With the popularity of sites like Kickstarter, indie developers have seen an insane rise in popularity and success, and niche games are being made that otherwise would never have succeeded due to lack of funding to start the projects.
With mobile development, from smartphones to Nintendo's reinvention of the GameBoy, graphics have taken a back seat to accessibility.
Neo_Viper has the exact OPPOSITE of what is reality in 2013 and in the 80's. Flip what he says around. Barely anyone could program a game, let alone an "amazing one" in their basement. There were very few people capable of this, simply because of how new and complex the technology was. These days, as of the 21st century, "someone can make an amazing game alone in his garage and sell it."
Hell, Richard Garriott couldn't just sell his games like Neo_Viper is acting like. Digital Distribution didn't exist like it does today. Games were through floppy discs. Not even CD's.
These days, ANYONE can make a game in their basement, alone, with horrid graphics, and sell it. Thanks to digital distrbution, crowd funding (preorders, prepurchases, alpha funding, kickstarter) things have never been better for solo or small indie teams and crappily done artwork games.
If you don't believe me, let me refer to you to a game created by one person, with horrid graphics, that BECAUSE of digital distribution, popularity of social media, and alpha funding by digital currency, we now have this:
and this
or Cave Story+ (2011)
or this
and this:
Need I go on?
You're the one that brought up that article, not me.
I didn't say that the original poster's ideas were bad; they may or may not be. That no game developers care about his ideas are a simple statement of fact, and really just observing that everyone likes his own ideas the best. That's nearly tautological: if I discovered that I liked your game ideas better than mine, I'd modify my own ideas to incorporate whatever I really liked about yours, and then I'd once again like my own ideas better than yours.
Professional game designers do not get paid to sit around and say, someone ought to make this game, and then next week, someone ought to make this other game. Ideas are important, but the hard part is not in saying, let's build a game around this. The hard part is in filling in all of the details of exactly how everything ought to work. The bare outline that you might have before you start coding is only a tiny fraction of the ideas that have to go into a game, and much of it will have to be overhauled later, anyway.
Furthermore, there isn't much demand by computer gaming companies for people who write down game ideas but can't do anything else. If you want a role in designing game mechanics, you've got to learn to program for yourself. That doesn't mean that you need to be a great programmer; you don't necessarily need to be an expert at squashing bugs or at optimizing code for performance. But you need to have a good idea of what computers are good at and what they aren't, of what would be easy to code and what would be impractical, of what would be easy to code and be done with it and of what is going to cause all sorts of problems down the road if you try it. Ideas that would be amazing if implemented, but are impossible to implement, are not good ideas.
Any ideas that you're not going to code yourself, you need to be able to explain to the people who will; one perennial frustration among programmers is when they deliver a program that does exactly what was requested to the letter, only to learn that what the non-programmer who requested it really meant was something totally different. Sometimes the easiest way to explain exactly what you mean is with code; this is why pseudocode exists, even though no computer can compile and run it.
If you're going to make a game, the critical thing is to make sure that the tools that you use can do what you need them to do. For anything that isn't really, really simple, you want a compiled programming language as opposed to an interpreted scripting language. If you want the game to be 3D, you need access to either DirectX or OpenGL, so that you can put the video card to good use. If you want it to be an online game, you need access to built-in networking capabilities. If you want the game to have sound, you need built-in audio capabilities.
Don't be overeager to grab a game engine and run with it; game engines want to do things in particular ways, and if that's not what you want to do, it's trouble. That's not to say that licensing a game engine is necessarily a bad thing; if a lot of things that you want to do are already done well by a game engine, and it leaves you with the capability to code for yourself whatever the game engine doesn't have built-in, it can make sense to use one. Just make sure that you have the capability to do some serious coding for yourself, and aren't limited to the capabilities that the game engine has already. If an off-the-shelf game engine can do everything you need without you having to do any serious programming yourself, then your project is so thoroughly unoriginal that it should be canceled immediately.
Really, though, it's not so much the tools you use as it is what you do with them. When amateur programmers abandon one game engine in favor of another, the old engine probably wasn't the problem to begin with.
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But the first thing you code shouldn't be a game unless it's a very, very simple game. My personal recommendation would be to start with a relatively lower level language--but only use it for some simple programs at first, and certainly nothing graphical. Once you can write some simple programs and understand exactly what they're doing, you haven't just learned some syntax for that particular language. You've learned a good bit about what computers can do and how to make them do it. And you've made it much easier to pick up whatever language you decide you want to learn in the future: being good at one programming language is a lot closer to being good at ten languages than it is to not being able to code at all.
If you start with very high level tools that try to cover up most of what is going on, you don't get the same intuition about what is going on, and of what you can and can't do. You'll pick up some very bad habits that lead you to write awful code that runs incredibly slowly and is a nightmare to debug. High level tools make sense for some purposes that don't have to do anything complicated or performance-sensitive, but that doesn't describe MMORPGs in the slightest.