Flagship’s Bill Roper on Hellgate: London
By Shawn on Tuesday, September 11th, 2007 at 9:31 PM PST In Computer, Game Companies, Games
Flagship a studio formed by former Blizzard employees who worked on Diablo together, is gearing up for the release of its action-RPG Hellgate: London. Although it’s understood that the game will inevitably be compared to Diablo, CEO Bill Roper believes Flagship has produced a game Diablo fans will embrace as well as one that evolves the genre.
It’s (Hellgate) a new perspective on action RPGs. It sounds cheesy, but I guess that’s really it… In Hellgate there are all the elements like randomisation which made Diablo such a strong title, but we wanted to do it in a 3D setting in order to play with things like first-person. We’ve done a lot of fun gameplay things we were never able to do with Diablo.
Hellgate brings some key innovations to the genre. Taking characters completely into first person and using scale and scope brings a previously unrealized level of immersion to the game. Everything has more depth. In Hellgate, characters will be able to mod their weapons as they could with the socket set in Diablo. The modding is not only seen by the character but everyone in the game so that it becomes part of your story.
The level of customization Hellgate achieves is astounding. One of the challenges in an RPG or MMORPG is that all of the characters tend eventually to look alike. Hellgate implements a system to let characters project their own unique style.
So if you’re a level-45 warrior with the best warrior outfit, all the other level-45 warriors will look the same. Or worse yet, they’ve been building their outfit piecemeal, so they have a bronze breastplate and blue shoes and an orange helmet and they look like a clown threw up all over them.
In Hellgate, every piece of armour you pick up has a colour-scheme associated with it. You can use a menu to apply the colour of that item across all your armour, so you have a uniform look. We started running numbers on it and by level 10 and 11, it’s almost impossible for any two characters to look exactly the same.
Roper is certain that Hellgate: London will appeal to Diablo fans as well as classic MMO and Oblivion players because of the randomization and collectability in the game. Even FPS fans should enjoy this game as a Marksman or an Engineer. Watch for Hellgate: London to launch in November.
via Eurogamer
