Hellgate: London Interview

IncGamers is offering up an interview they did with Flagship’s Ivan Sulic and Matt Householder back in August about the Hellgate: London alpha test.

Q: There were early quest concepts in HGL with faction quests. You’re a Templar, the Cabalists don’t like you and you have to do quests for them to get faction points and improve your standing with them. None of those exist in the alpha?

A: Faction is not going to be present for launch. A lot of our faction stuff got scrapped because every time I wrote a faction dialogue, I had to do it 3 times. So there’s got to be 3 different dialogues, and 3 different localization processes, and we also didn’t have the tech worked out to give rewards like we wanted to. It was all just perks from a vendor. So, instead we focused on station faction. As players earn faction points they get access to a better vendor. Even that might go the way of the dodo, since it’s just not interesting.

Ideally, it would have been awesome to have 3 dialogues and 3 incompletes and 3 reward dialogues for every single character based on which faction players chose. But then we took into account the long term integration of more factions and increasing that number of base dialogues. That seemed implausible. So, it’s just something that got put on the back burner.