Hellgate: London Interview

1Up has conducted an interview with Flagship Studios’ Dave Brevik, in which the company’s co-founder talks about Hellgate: London, the influence Diablo has had on the game, and his RPG interests in general. The interview is actually in video format, but a transcript is provided. A taste:

Q: The art is really something that we’ve always enjoyed, especially dressing our characters, all that unique gear, the sets . . . that’s probably one of the most enjoyable parts, for me, out of Diablo. What’s it like now? You know, Diablo was a sprite-based game, so you were able to really hand-tool that art. How’s the jump to now working the 3D environment with all that?

A: A lot different. [Laughs] You know, there are advantages and disadvantages to it, just like anything else. And we’re, you know, it’s a learning experience for us in a lot of ways, because we’re writing our own engine. We’ve had some problems and figured out solutions and stuff, but we’ve done a lot of research. There’s tons of information out there on how to do things, which is really a nice aspect about being in the developer community, that a lot of people share a lot of information. And so I think that it’s much more complicated than what we did in Diablo I, for sure. Diablo II was a little more complex because we had more parts. The more parts you had, then we had to do all sorts of layering on the sprites and things like that. So now it’s easier — you don’t have to do all this layering because it’s just a 3D model and you draw it, but then you have to select which textures go where and stuff. But then we want — OK, now that we can do that part easier, now let’s add 27 things that you can change. Then it becomes a kind of a pain to keep track of what the actual look is like. So there are some technical hurdles there. But that, by far and away, is not the largest technical hurdle in the game. It was something that we solved, and it went well.