For those who have experience with Defold in 2026, would you recommend it for a large 3D multiplayer game? I’m a big fan of Lua, which is why I want to work with this engine.
I’m looking at a long-term project with a 3D world, multiplayer, and potentially a fairly large map. I know the MMO part is more of a design and infrastructure challenge than an engine problem, but I’m wondering how well Defold handles this kind of project today.
What are the biggest limitations you’ve run into? And if you wouldn’t recommend Defold for this, at what point would you switch to another engine?
Defold absolutely has the potential to do this.
It would depend on project scope and business plan.
Funding wise, at the bottom end, to make an Indie scale game might need an initial budget (my guess) of ~$24M over about 5 years.
If you allocate a chunk of that cash to funding the Defold development team they will be able to implement missing functionality.
Marketing and rolling costs will be much much higher, so no point in skimping on what you pay the Defold team.
After writing this I asked Google AI your question, and it looks like I am not so far off.
I’m not super experienced, but I think if you want to make game that is:
lightweight,
works smooth even on older devices/mobile/browser,
will have rather simple 3D graphic.
Then Defold is in my opinion the best choice. The server backend is not made in game engine anyway, so the complexity of systems or infrastructure doesnt make a difference. Same with huge map - in every game engine you will have divide it into chunks anyway.
However if you need advanced 3D graphics, you will achieve it significantly easier with UE or Unity.
I can easily imagine making Muck on Steam , Runescape Classic or Shakes & Fidget using Defold. Maybe you can tell us examples of games with similar graphics and scope to yours to make judgement easier?