Hellgate: London Interview

GameSpy was able to corner Flagship Studios CEO Bill Roper for a lengthy five-page interview about the company’s newly revealed plans to offer “elite” subscriptions for Hellgate: London.

Q: I heard you mention “quarterly,” is that the content schedule? It’s not monthly?

A: I don’t know where monthly came from. I read that, but that wasn’t us, maybe it’s in a doc somewhere that I missed. But our push is always to do a big content update once a quarter (with smaller, incremental updates each month). Monthly would be really hard. The most difficult thing about a monthly push is QA. We talked with EA and they were all “no way we can do monthly, that’s going to kill everybody.” We talked about the best way of creating meaningful content, getting it through the testing process, and releasing. We also don’t want to slam out buggy content and hear players talk about quests that don’t even work.

It seems like quarterly was the best solution. Players just think every three months “oh, cool, there’s going to be a big content drop” and it’s enough time for us to make something substantive rather than say “oh look, we added a new monster. Here he is.” People are already brainstorming and making a big list of ideas. I think we’ll have things that will blow people away. For example, to me, offering a new character class is a really big deal, I don’t think I’ve seen that in any other game. It’s not something you associate with a normal monthly fee. You’re talking about implementing all-new skills and massive amounts of artwork, and that’s a big deal.

So does this mean they’re doing away with the promised two-week or one-month content updates completely?