Hellgate: London Interview

Eurogamer conducted an interview with Flagship’s Bill Roper about his upcoming Action RPG Hellgate: London, reminding us the game will be released in two months now.

Eurogamer: What are the key innovations Hellgate brings to the genre?

Bill Roper: One is just the amount of immersion. We can go all the way into first-person with our characters and do things with scope and scale we’ve never been able to do before. You really become a part of the world.

Another thing is the sheer depth and breadth there is to it. Everything we did in the Diablo games we’ve just blown out of the water. In Diablo we had the socket system, in Hellgate we have this whole mod system for our weapons. You actually see the mods when you put them on your weapon, and so does everyone in the game, so it becomes part of your character’s story.

The level of customisation is a really big thing. One of the things that’s always a challenge when you’re playing an RPG, and for some reason especially an MMO, is that your characters all tend to look the same after a while.

So if you’re a level-45 warrior with the best warrior outfit, all the other level-45 warriors will look the same. Or worse yet, they’ve been building their outfit piecemeal, so they have a bronze breastplate and blue shoes and an orange helmet and they look like a clown threw up all over them.

In Hellgate, every piece of armour you pick up has a colour-scheme associated with it. You can use a menu to apply the colour of that item across all your armour, so you have a uniform look. We started running numbers on it and by level 10 and 11, it’s almost impossible for any two characters to look exactly the same.

To me that’s a really big deal, because you want to feel like your character is special and has an important place in the storyline. To create a hero that feels and plays unique is a big difference.