Hellgate: London - Bill Speaks... Feature

With a European release scheduled for November 2nd, the wait for Flagship Studios' Hellgate: London is finally drawing to a close. TVG recently had the chance to chat with Flagship's CEO Bill Roper on a number of matters

Expectedly, the man had a lot to say so we've had to split this feature into two parts; the first of which looks at issues stemming from the current beta test, whilst the second part focuses upon the subscription model employed by the game.

TVG: We've been fortunate enough to play the beta for the last week and really enjoyed what we've experienced; however, recently there's been a number of issues relating to player's unable to log-in, update the client, and teleport problems. Could you firstly provide a comment on the situation and with the release only a few weeks away, whether you're confident of nailing out these bugs and glitches?

Sure, well that's why it's called a beta and not release, bugs happen. We're still a month out, we know what those bugs are, they're all being fixed. We probably expect another beta push sometime later this week or this weekend. There's nothing of any real concern to us, and so there's really not anything we're freaking out about. I think a lot of time players get one they go 'Oh my God there's a problem, how could they possibly release this'. They just assume that what they're playing is the most recent code when it can be weeks behind what we actually have.

Our concern is getting everything on the disc that has to be correct, because we don't have anymore time to work on that before it's sent for manufacturing and be published. Whereas we can continue to work on the multiplayer part, as we get to patch it the first day that you log-on. You can't play online until you go through our servers, so if there's some tweak or some fix, it's really nice we can keep getting the balance, making those little changes right up to the last minute.

Multiplayer issues that people are experiencing are because again we're still testing, we haven't pushed all the fixes we've done, and the fact that we know we do get the chance to patch them on the very first day.

So no worries for people, no stress.

TVG: Following on from that, what are your thoughts and Flagship's about the beta so far?

Yep, it's really been going fantastic, the feedback's been excellent, we've had a lot of changes that have happened with the balance of the game and the flow of the game specifically based on the fact we've had really good test data that has come in. It has been a really excellent group of people that we've had playing, a lot of awesome feedback, and we're very excited about what we've been able to get in, the changes we've been able to make and what we're still able to do over the next month.

TVG: There's some concerns that the skill-trees of the different classes possibly won't offer enough diversity; what are your thoughts on this?

Well we talk about that a lot in the office and look at that, and we disagree. The reason we disagree, is because in comparison Diablo 2 is such a mature game, a lot of players say 'well Diablo 2 just has so much more to do', whereas there is no more skill to Diablo 2, to be honest a lot of the skills in Diablo 2 were pretty crappy in comparison to what we're doing now. I just look back at it and think 'skills didn't grow with your character,' so you could easily outstrip skills, which made them pretty useless and we had skills that just weren't that great, that really weren't that useful at all, but the difference is that players have had 7 years of Diablo 2 to fine tune. We made a big change recently to the skill system, which I believe has been pushed to beta but maybe not quite yet, is the increase from 6 to 10 points per skill cap, we re-arranged some of the skill-tree flow, we've also made it so you can put points into spells earlier, it does broaden the base.

But the really big thing is that player's haven't necessarily started to find good builds for different character ideas. Tyler Thompson, whose one of our technical directors and really big on the skill system came by the other day, we were talking about this a few days ago and he came in and I'm playing a Guardian through the game right now and he was looking at my character and thinking 'that's interesting you chose that'. My concept for the Guardian is hack 'n' slash concept, so I race into the middle of combat, use my Shield Charge to get right into the centre, stun the main guy that I'm attacking, then I'll hit my prayer that dazes everyone, then I hit my Shield Turn so I do damage for the round as well. The point is I have this pattern which sets me out as pack fighter, but it's all very shield based because I like the fact that the Guardian has a shield, so I try to base it around getting my character into combat extremely fast and then as quickly as possible dazing and stunning as many opponents as I can, and Tyler went "that's really cool" because he plays very different .

The builds are out there but they are found as you play. We think it might be a good idea to put some testers in and say 'here's some builds we play with internally, here's the Guardian build that Tyler played, here's a Guardian build that Bill plays', because I think it really is a misnomer when people look at it say, 'well the skill system isn't as deep as you think, because it's deeper but it also so early'. We did the same thing when Starcraft came out, we got initial reviews and people from the beta were saying 'this is a pretty good RTS,' and 'it's alright,' and then we would see these six month updates after people had a lot of time playing it and people said 'oh my god the game is so deep', because those things take a while, especially when it's in beta.

We understand that especially when it's in beta testing, the latest code isn't there, because we put the code out we get feedback we can incorporate that feedback. Right now that we're pushing towards our gold master so we don't have this luxury of an immediate turnaround, so we're not only playing with bug-fixes but balance changes internally first to make sure they work before we push them out to the public. The next beta push we do addresses balance and those types of things, so people will be happier. It's a constant back-and-forth, but unfortunately testers are... well fortunately testers are voracious, and unfortunately if they're not...

TVG: They're a hard bunch to please...

... A lot of the times it's hard to remember that this isn't the most recent code, this isn't the way the game is shipping. You'll see these changes and we take these things seriously, and we think people will be pleased with not only the diversity of each class, but the things you can do differently in each class.

TVG: Linked to Diablo can you talk a little about the complexity of generating the random 3D levels featured in Hellgate: London, it must be an all-together much more difficult task than before?

Yeah it definitely is. That was really the biggest thing, that randomisation and those dynamically generated levels were the biggest motivators to creating our own 3D engine. Initially when we started the company that was one of the things we looked at was the engines to see if we could get a jump start, but there really wasn't anything out that could handle that, and there really still isn't. There's a lot of complexity in there.

One of the main reasons that 3D engines can look so beautiful is that they pre-build the level, in terms of lights, pre-calculations, etc. With us we have no idea what the level is going to be, there are certain things we can do, but the vast majority of things are done on the fly, we don't know the colour of the lights, we don't know what's going to be in front of it, etc. So that was a big hurdle especially with the fact we've never done a 3D game before with this team, because Diablo 2 was the last thing a lot of the team did, they were working on other projects but nothing that got out, so we had to work from the ground up . That was a huge challenge for us on all levels, certainly on a technology side not only the complexities of building a randomly generated world but also then we had to build all the technology for it.

TVG would like to thank Bill Roper for sharing his thoughts along with Chris Clarke and Jodie Van Hibb for organising the opportunity.

Keep an eye out for the second part of our Hellgate: London feature next week, where Bill Roper shares his thoughts on the reaction towards the subscription model and the possibility of Hellgate: Grimsby.