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Hellgate: London: Bill Roper Opens Up
SBFord
Former Associate EditorMember LegendaryPosts: 33,129
In a new interview over at Gamasutra, former Flagship Studios CEO Bill Roper talks about Hellgate: London and the demise of the game studio. Roper indicates in the interview that the team tried to do too much too fast and that things spiraled out of control very quickly.
"The biggest failure with Hellgate is we just tried to do too much," Roper explained. "We were a single-player game, or you could go online and play for free. And there was also this hybrid subscription model that you could get into, and the game was coming out on the new Windows platform, and we were part of the Games for Windows program."
He continued, "We shipped in 17 languages, we had a very high-end graphics engine that we had built but at the same time we did low-poly versions of the game. I mean, the list just went on and on and on."
Read the full review here.
Comments
Game had potential. I remember all the armor you could get and dress up your toon . Great looking game too.
I remember the Flaming Guy Faux item that was "rare" but dropped off every other monster forever until i quit playing. I remember all the good items not working. I remember having some gigantic item stuck in my pack and not being able to get rid of it. I remember making fun of my roommate for buying a lifetime sub.
If GM had kept up with technology like the computer industry has, we would all be driving $25 cars that got 1000 MPG - Bill Gates
I cant wait for the new Hellgate to make it over here, to see how the Koreans improved on it. Haven't tried the Korean Version nor will I. I enjoyed the game originally although we all knew it had a lot of flaws, but with some reworking, the game has great potential.
Hopefully we will see a North American Type Release by 2012.
I notice that Bill really didn't have much to say about Runic. Maybe it's because the Schaeffers managed people's expectations and didn't oversell Torchlight, choosing instead to work incrementally instead of trying to release everything at once. Hellgate: London, at it's core, is a good game. The trouble is that the single-player was literally gutted to reserve content for the multiplayer.
The fact that Roper chose to walk away and let the Koreans have it is inexcusable. It's like he lost his rockstar status so he didn't care anymore. Roper tried to make Flagship into Blizzard overnight and wanted to have all the perks that they got as Blizzard employees. All in all, the interview sounds like a "poor little old me" whine. As far as I'm concerned, Roper doesn't have anything to say anymore beyond, "I'm sorry".
"Soloists and those who prefer small groups should never have to feel like they''re the ones getting the proverbial table scraps, as it were." - Scott Hartsman, Senior Producer, Everquest II
"People love groups. Its a fallacy that people want to play solo all the time." - Scott Hartsman, Executive Producer, Rift
Sure, the Flagship did not make the best decisions but I think the ultimate is that EA knew the game was not ready but did not care. They wanted their money. Just imagine if they decided to extend developement just a little more time, the game would still be online and doing pretty good today. Some companies are just simply stupid.
The game had a half dozen publishers, with 2 in the USA... and you think EA had the clout to force it to release early?
Take off your blinders. Read the article. He does a fairly good job of explaining why it crashed and burned.
@LordDraekon: You know, reading his interview Bill Roper sounds more "Oh gawd, how could I have messed that up" or "How did I not see that?" then "oh poor me." Yeah, he's probably a bit bitter that Runic took the concept behind Mythos and made a fairly spiffy budget dungeon crawler because he knows that if he didn't screw up so badly, that WOULD have been Mythos right there. But at the same time, he doesn't really blame Runic so much as he blames the real person behind the catastrophe... himself, for taking on too much too soon and overshooting what his resources were capable of.
Hellgate: London was a good idea, a decent RPG with FPS elements, and a fairly solid singleplayer game (though admittedly I never encountered most of the bugs you guys are talking about,) I would have loved to see Hellgate: New York or Hellgate: Cairo. Unfortunately, the game's reach exceedth its grasp. That's all there was to it.
I liked the game both single and multi. I still miss it and maybe I should reinstall just to do the single player again. First time I had ever bought a Lifetime membership so was bummed about that.
Call me what you want. I still play hellgate london almost every night. I play it single player with a fan patch. It is my single most played game with 485 hours played. I'd wager more than half of those were post the 2009 closing of the servers.
I played Hellgate in Open Beta and loved it despite the flaws. I paid for a founders sub and while I regretted it ultimately at the time it was a vote of "Yes more like this!".
Only game with a similar formula is Borderlands (a great game in it's own right).
That said I was so upset and disappointed when the game closed. Did I blame Roper personally - yeah a little. He sold it. He put his face on everything talking about how it was going to be so big - and it kind of fell apart with him at the helm. Time heals all wounds and things are forgiven. I still play it .. and still enjoy it.
It is a great loot heavy grind with a fps interface. Why I liked it in the first place.
This is the Hellgate London forum where the fanpatch can be found:
http://www.hellgateaus.net/forum/
Also a lot of good info there about HGL (now called: Hellgate: Ressurection) in Korea. Supposed to be coming back to NA/Europe this year. Originally the lawsuit prevented development for NA/Europe and Japan but it's in open beta in Japan right now.
I loved this game and I hope Hanbitsoft can follow through on their stated goal of bringing it back to the rest of the world! Of course if you look at the speed with which they are working on Mythos then it could be a while LOL!
Freakin sweet video of a boss fight in the Japanese beta:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7s6nVw1NVB4
"They" saw you coming".
if you want more concepts, ez to implement concepts for games check my blog. It's pretty ez to figure out, just keep readin'.
And um yeah, no subscriptions.
Godspeed my fellow gamer
The completely randomized gear/dungeons did it in for me. When a system just vomits random content at you, it just seems pointless. Which is what HG:L felt like. It was like an open statement: "your surroundings are pointless".
HG:L was the biggest disappointment in my gaming lifetime. A futuristic post-apocalyptic 3D Diablo 2 built by former Diablo 2 devs.... How do you NOT get excited for that? I even read the first novel, which is to this day the only game-based novel I've ever read.
Sad face.
Funny. Not only did he ruin hellgate, but he ruined champions online too. Make sure you pay attention to any future mmos. If the name Roper is attached, avoid it like the plague.
The problem was that Bill was not ready to run a company. These start-up companies no matter how talented can hit rock bottom with bad management. He tried to be vague as possible with his answers here.
The P2P system was horribly implemented.. I even wrote lengthy posts about how they are preping the game for failure with the system they were proposing. Then I got ambushed by 20 fanbois talking about how the lifetime subscription option is awesome.
They seperated the community and the loot grinds. If you stop paying for the premium membership you lose your extra bank slots.. you lose the ability to use all your items you collected.. You lose any motivation to dedicate any time to this game.
They pushed out a product that was hardly even ready for Open beta let alone release. May be EA's fault, but what can you do? Management decided the publisher.. they even probably decided the ETA to tell the publisher how long till the investment returns.
Simply put.. bad management with Bill basically at the helm killed Hellgate.
- ya I'm here
Wow, it was a bit painful to read that article.
It is clear that he is not a very coherent person. If he ran Flagship like he constructs sentences, then I am not surprised the company went bust.
Whoever made that comment about him lying to his wife about his p***s size before marriage, obviously hit home hard.