Hellgate: London Interview

Total Video Games returns with the second part of their interview with Flagship’s Bill Roper.

TVG: You’ve announced the Elite subscription as a means to accessing content updates, can you elaborate on this with regards to regularity, length, themed tie-ins?

Sure, the big thing for us is that we always want to remind people is that you’re getting more than you actually got with Diablo 2, you get the [online] game for free. There seems to be a big hang up which people have where they feel somehow we must be doing something to screw them, which I don’t understand at all. Players make this big deal about the fact that when you get the game in the box you get 40-50 hours of standalone play, and that’s obviously the first time you go through it, but with the character classes and randomisation you’re going to get really different gameplay as you go through several times. Then you can go online and have that same experience with your friends in a secure server environment for free, we also give you stuff for free that we were never able to do in Diablo like being able to be members of guilds, auction houses, in-game e-mail and all kinds of things like that. So you get that Diablo 2 experience plus and we’ve worked very hard to ensure that we can do that for free. Then for the gamers that want to keep going with that experience, and that was definitely something that we had a lot of requests for back in the Diablo 2 days, players wanted to get more, they wanted more stuff, more items, more spells, more monsters, more areas, on and on and on. But we were able to do one expansion set then another year and half went by and there was another content patch, but that was really it. We did not have a dedicated staff on the project, we had no ability from a supportive model or from an engine/technology standpoint to really be able to do that continuing content. So with Hellgate that was really, really important to us, and of course maintaining a team to create this kind of content, not just do things like fix bugs, but make substantial new content which we can release on regular schedules, we have to pay for that somehow.

(…)

I’ve seen where people say ‘they’re going to be making lots of money when the game ships, so they should be giving this stuff to us for free,’ but well the only problem is, like many developers we work out a publishing/development deal where you pay to create the game based on advances against royalties from the publisher. We have to pay all of that money back, so all this quotable money we have to pay back and then after that maybe you see some profits. Moving forwards it’s not like we suddenly have all of this money to be working on content, and you do have to maintain that team going forwards. It’s a different model, maybe the confusion comes from ‘well Diablo 2 was free, but now I have to pay for part of it,’ and they make an assumption that ‘well they must have held stuff back,’ or ‘I’m not getting the full experience’. No, you’re getting the full experience, plus moving forwards we’re going to make more stuff and if you want it, as opposed to waiting a year and buying the expansion pack, you’re going to be getting big content dumps all the time.