Hellgate: London - Roper's New Baby

Hellgate: London is a first-person action RPG for the PC from the mind of Bill Roper the talented folks at Flagship Studios. The game puts players in the midst of a demon-infested London cityscape where they must take up arms and do battle with the denizens of Hell. Among the many innovative aspects introduced by the game, Hellgate: London will feature a completely randomized world that offers a unique experience every time you play. Recently we had the opportunity to speak with Bill Roper regarding his newest creation.

Thank you for taking the time to speak with us regarding Hellgate: London. This is a title that has intrigued us since it was announced, and after going hands on with it at E3 I have to say I was left wanting more. How would you say the game is coming along? Any recent developments you'd like to talk about?

Hellgate: London is coming along great, and the past couple of months have seen a lot of things get into the game. We made a push right before Halloween for a party we were throwing where we let our friends play, so it was important that we have a host of new monsters, items and skills in. Between then and now we've added more of everything - monsters, skills, weapons, armor, monster AI, backgrounds - the works. We're also working on completing the storyline and breaking down the key parts into a quest structure. There are basically a ton of ideas and content flowing into the game right now, so there is literally something new every day.

I know you probably don't want to set expectations, only to have to disappoint fans, but has the team managed to nail down a delivery date for the game, or perhaps even a window when you expect it to ship?

We have an internal window we are working towards, and while it is looking good at this point, it is still too early to talk about when that is. You hit the nail on the head when you mentioned not wanting to disappoint fans. We know that there is a lot of excitement over the game and that expectations are high - and that goes for both our community and us here at Flagship Studios! We're definitely playing it on the safe side in regards to the release date because we want to do everything we can to meet and exceed the expectations we set. We're still far enough out where a release date, or even a window, would be educated guesswork. Trust me - as soon as we have a handle on a date we think we can honestly hit, we'll announce it.

For those not up to speed on what you and your team are doing with Hellgate: London, can you give us some background as far as where the idea came from and what the game will entail?

The official marketing spiel reads, "Hellgate: London combines the depth of role-playing games with the action of first-person titles while offering infinite playability with randomly created levels, items, and events."

Hellgate: London is an action-RPG with quite a few twists on the model made popular by the Diablo series. Set in a post demonic apocalyptic London, players take on the role of survivors empowered with items and weapons that blend arcane spells, divine power and super-science in order to try and re-establish a foothold for humanity. The game is in 3D and is played from either first-person or a tight third-person perspective, depending on what the user prefers. When we were coming up with the concept for the game, the merging of Half Life 2 and Diablo 2 was common shorthand.

Hellgate: London is playable as a stand-alone single-player game, but it's the multiplayer components that we believe will really make it shine. We're building our own online destination for the game that is comparable in features to any MMORPG. This means a client/server structure to provide safe and secure gaming, character databases, customer service, guild support and so on. We want to provide ongoing content for the game long after it has shipped, and we're building both the game and our infrastructure to lay the ground work for doing just this. Online gaming has a lot of higher expectations than it did five years ago, and we're looking forward to providing a much more compelling experience than we did in the Diablo days.

London, and England in general, is a place steeped in heroic, monster-vanquishing literature. Did you draw any inspiration from this extensive fantasy background for weapons, monsters, etc.?

We've all spent a lot of time researching English mythology, the background of the Templar and Masonic orders, fantasy tales and pretty much everything we could lay our hands on that seemed even remotely applicable. This also includes delving into the many different religions that are reflected in Europe since London is such an international city. We're trying to reflect some of this not only through the visualization and naming of demons, but also in the items and even the NPCs. I think that there will be a lot of little details that reflect the culture, history and mythos of England.

Clearly from what we experienced at E3, equipment, and the ability to upgrade and modify the tools available to players plays a key role in the game. Can you elaborate on how equipment is managed an upgraded in Hellgate: London? And what of inventory management?

We're huge fans of items and randomization, and we really are pulling out all the stops when it comes to creating equipment for the game. Since weapons and powers are so closely tied in the game - so much so that we design them to be "spell delivery systems" as opposed to just guns or swords - we want players to be able to individualize them as well. This is accomplished through Mods.

Mods are smaller items such as fuel cells, batteries, relics, ammo, runes, gems, and so forth that modify the abilities of the weapon. Everything from increased range to different damage types to affecting rate of fire and on and on and on can be achieved through adding mods to a weapon. Not every weapon has Mod slots, and not every kind of Mod fits on a weapon. It is a very simple, but very deep metagame that players can dissect for hours and hours, looking for the perfect combination of weapon and mod effect.

As far as inventory management, we're currently using two "sizes" of items - large and small. Large items are things like weapons and armor. Examples of small items include Mods and health packs. We're constantly playing with the inventory interface, changing how many of each size of item you can carry, how to more effectively access and manage your inventory and so forth. As the game grows, so does our understanding of what players want to get to in the inventory. User interface design is something that takes a long, long time to get right, so we put UI in very early in Hellgate: London and will probably be tweaking it well through our beta test.

Will there be one-of-a-kind items and weapons aside from the regular upgradeable ones? I notice on the Hellgate: London website thee are several generic "Katana" and "Templar Broadsword" blade types, but the "Negotiator" blade seems like a special, one-off creation...

Although we're creating over 100 general weapons types, we will have unique items drawn from them. The Negotiator is a base weapon type, although the name has received such a good reaction that we might give the class of weapon a different name and give the unique weapon that name. It's a lot of work (and a lot of fun) coming up with item names that sound great and make players excited to have them. No one wants to wield a Craptastic Butter Knife but everyone wants a Holy Negotiator.

Will we ever get to step outside the strictly urban areas of London and fight in some of the wider, more open-air locations? I know the hill on which the Royal Observatory sits on top of would make a fantastic spot to siege (Or defend from an attack, conversely...).

We have a lot of plans for location in which to set the action, and it is all going to be a matter of time as to what gets in. We do have long term plans to support the game well after launch, so if it doesn't make it into the game when we ship, it will most likely be in the queue for later. I mean, at some point we have to take a day trip out to Stonehenge…

We're already aware of the underground areas in Hellgate: London, but are there any ground-level indoor areas? Tromping through Westminster Abbey or scaling Big Ben could make for some great moments...

We do indeed have indoor adventuring planned, and the first of these went in at the end of last year with the inclusion of the British Museum. We took a slew of screenshots for our fansites at the end of 2005 and that one received some great comments.

We have some wild ideas for other places to let players run around, so keep an eye out for some places you might know in future screens!

What other classes besides the close-quarter Templars are available? Early promo art for the game showed some pretty tricked-out humanoids using some sort of magic- are these friends or foes?

We're looking forward to 2006 as being the year of revelations in the Hellgate universe, including character classes, items, and a host of associated projects. We can't quite reveal the details of anyone else but the Templar just yet, but every class is being designed to have very different game play, and since arcane powers play a big part in our world, you wouldn't be totally crazy to think that we won't have a character class that focuses on them.

Will players be able to go through the single-player game cooperatively, or will multiplayer activities be relegated to their own zones and modes? Will there be transfer from one to the other, i.e. can I use my buffed-up single-player character in multiplayer modes?

The stand alone version of the game is designed to be strictly single player. This means that you won't be able to transfer your tricked out character to our secured multiplayer setting because, well, we honestly don't know what you've done to make your character so good. The whole purpose behind a client/server structure is to do all we can to ensure that hacks and cheats are not impacting the experience of our players, and if someone can whip up whatever items they want offline, that would negatively impact the experience quite a bit. When a player had attained a high level or has epic equipment, those should be symbols of his status and reflect his passion and dedication and not just be the benefit of hacking.

Another benefit of the multiplayer system we're designing is the ability to add in content and game modes you won't get in the single player version. The ability to create areas and challenges that focus on larger groups, timed events, contests, seasonal events, player's ranking - the list goes on and on. And of course, we can keep coming up with ideas and fold them into the game as time goes by.

In a move practically unique to FPS titles, it's been noted that most weapons shown thus far have infinite ammo. Are there any weapons that will have limited ammo, perhaps of the "Big Daddy" variety for those otherwise inescapable emergencies?

We are making an RPG, so although we do have a lot of the game take place from the first person perspective, we didn't want to be forced to use the traditional FPS conventions such as ammunition. We do have gameplay mechanics that are commonly used by both spells and weapons, such as cool down, loading time, rate of fire and so forth to provide different balances and experiences for weapons, but we don't want you to ever be running around with a gun that doesn't work because you ran out of ammunition.

Given that Hellgate: London is a marriage of sorts between both action and role-playing games, are you in a position today to thoroughly describe where the game currently lies along the "twitch vs. character stats" spectrum. How often will players swing or shoot at enemies and not connect at all because of "to-hit" calculations?

When players miss their target, it is because of stat-based calculations and not because they didn't aim right. You know when you've targeted a demon, and once that has occurred, it is all down to RPG mechanics. We have heard from a lot of FPS players that want to be able to turn off the targeting system so they be successful based on their "twitch" abilities, and we're currently looking at perhaps making this a feature of one of the classes in the game.

Touching back on the game's multiplayer component, will games take place on a controlled server, or will the multiplayer be only a matchmaking service? In either case, what measures are you taking to prevent cheating?

Our goal is to provide the best online experience we can, and to us, that means offering a secure place to play. We are designing Hellgate: London to be played as a client/server game with robust databases and security measures. We spent a lot of time working with both the client and server aspects of Diablo II, so we have a solid foundation from which to build our network component.

Finally, and perhaps prematurely, are there any plans for continuing the Hellgate story in a sequel? The way the story has been presented, could we hope to see Hellgate: Rome or Hellgate: Los Angeles coming our way in the future?

We have a lot of hopes and dreams for the Hellgate universe, and while talking about sequels is definitely premature, we have been looking to bring our vision to other areas. As I said before, 2006 is going to be a year of revelations, so stay tuned!

Jan 10, 2006 - 11:52 am | 0 comments
Jason Dobson