Hellgate: London Interview, Part Two

PlayHG has tossed up the second half of the interview they did with the Flagship Studios folks at the recent Hellgate: London Asia Launching Party.

Q: Why is the Hellgate in London?

Bill: We always had the idea that there was a huge world event that was happening all over the world. And so we wanted to focus on the stories that were happening in different parts of the world, and the first place we chose was London. So for us, identifying it with the Hellgate, which is the opening between the world, the demons and ours, and then setting it in London was important too. There were a lot of reasons we chose London, that is why we put London after Hellgate.

Dave: We picked London because it is one of the most famous cities in the world, obviously one of the busiest, and it has a very unique look and feel, and had so much history to it and that was important. One of the reasons we picked a real world setting, as opposed to an entirely fantasy setting like the Diablo series. It provides a new challenge for us, and as developers, we like to be challenged and we wanted to see how we could take a real world setting and make it our own. Really just iron out the unique world, and the look and feel based on something that is already familiar.

And that right there was a big challenge. London has so many unique landmarks, the underground system and histories. From the Romans, to modern day, to the future, there is so much richness in the history. Yet it is unique looking so it is not a total mish mash of cultures. It has a very unique flavour, so we just look at that as an opportunity and it roots it. We put it the title because we wanted to kind of reinforced that this is a fantasy game but it is based in a real world setting. Hellgate by itself is a great title but it is kind of ambiguous. To tie it in and to really make it stick in your head, what it is we are trying to do, to define the look and to really capture the audience.