Hellgate: London Interview, Part Two

The second installment to RPG Vault’s Hellgate: London interview is now available, though this time around they chat with Flagship Studios’ Erich Schaefer.

Q: What variety of enemies will we have to defeat? What are your main considerations in designing them, and are you willing to discuss some interesting examples?

A: We don’t have a final opponent count, but there will be somewhere over 50 different types of demons to fight. And, like we usually do, we’ll take those base types and expand them into many varieties with different stats, abilities, textures and effects.

Our main consideration in designing monsters is making them unique, and ideally, forcing the players to change their gameplay to adapt to their uniqueness. So, we like to contrast Ravagers that jump attack with Imps that fire missiles and Dark Seraphs that spawn right next to you in an explosive column of fire. We try to create a good mix of flyers, runners, melee types and shooters, peppered with mini-bosses that buff or command the lesser monsters.

Some of Hellgate: London’s more unusual monsters are Orbiles that suck the energy from newly created corpses and then go into an aggressive lightning mode. The goal for the player is to kill them before killing any other monsters; they are pretty easy to deal with until they can suck a corpse – can I say that?!? I’m also partial to our new Fellhorde race of demons – a whole hierarchy of creatures that burrows out of the ground in packs.