Hellgate: London Interview

The Hellgate: London interviews just keep on coming, and this time it’s Total Video Games who were able to get a hold of Bill Roper.

TVG: There’s some concerns that the skill-trees of the different classes possibly won’t offer enough diversity; what are your thoughts on this?

Well we talk about that a lot in the office and look at that, and we disagree. The reason we disagree, is because in comparison Diablo 2 is such a mature game, a lot of players say ‘well Diablo 2 just has so much more to do’, whereas there is no more skill to Diablo 2, to be honest a lot of the skills in Diablo 2 were pretty crappy in comparison to what we’re doing now. I just look back at it and think ‘skills didn’t grow with your character,’ so you could easily outstrip skills, which made them pretty useless and we had skills that just weren’t that great, that really weren’t that useful at all, but the difference is that players have had 7 years of Diablo 2 to fine tune. We made a big change recently to the skill system, which I believe has been pushed to beta but maybe not quite yet, is the increase from 6 to 10 points per skill cap, we re-arranged some of the skill-tree flow, we’ve also made it so you can put points into spells earlier, it does broaden the base.

But the really big thing is that player’s haven’t necessarily started to find good builds for different character ideas. Tyler Thompson, whose one of our technical directors and really big on the skill system came by the other day, we were talking about this a few days ago and he came in and I’m playing a Guardian through the game right now and he was looking at my character and thinking ‘that’s interesting you chose that’. My concept for the Guardian is hack ‘n’ slash concept, so I race into the middle of combat, use my Shield Charge to get right into the centre, stun the main guy that I’m attacking, then I’ll hit my prayer that dazes everyone, then I hit my Shield Turn so I do damage for the round as well. The point is I have this pattern which sets me out as pack fighter, but it’s all very shield based because I like the fact that the Guardian has a shield, so I try to base it around getting my character into combat extremely fast and then as quickly as possible dazing and stunning as many opponents as I can, and Tyler went “that’s really cool” because he plays very different .

The builds are out there but they are found as you play. We think it might be a good idea to put some testers in and say ‘here’s some builds we play with internally, here’s the Guardian build that Tyler played, here’s a Guardian build that Bill plays’, because I think it really is a misnomer when people look at it say, ‘well the skill system isn’t as deep as you think, because it’s deeper but it also so early’. We did the same thing when Starcraft came out, we got initial reviews and people from the beta were saying ‘this is a pretty good RTS,’ and ‘it’s alright,’ and then we would see these six month updates after people had a lot of time playing it and people said ‘oh my god the game is so deep’, because those things take a while, especially when it’s in beta.

We understand that especially when it’s in beta testing, the latest code isn’t there, because we put the code out we get feedback we can incorporate that feedback. Right now that we’re pushing towards our gold master so we don’t have this luxury of an immediate turnaround, so we’re not only playing with bug-fixes but balance changes internally first to make sure they work before we push them out to the public. The next beta push we do addresses balance and those types of things, so people will be happier. It’s a constant back-and-forth, but unfortunately testers are… well fortunately testers are voracious, and unfortunately if they’re not…

Spotted on Blue’s News.