Hellgate: London Interview

PC Zone interviews Bill Roper to find out what all went wrong during the launch of Hellgate: London.

“I think that people had incredibly high expectations that we simply didn’t meet,” admits Roper. “The game came out with some major bugs and that threw fuel on the fire. We’ve been killing ourselves addressing all of those issues, and the game is so much better now than it was when it came out. We just hope people will come back and give it a try again, if they played in those first few weeks of its release and were disappointed.”

“As for development issues,” continues Roper, “we simply tried to do too much with the game. Vista, DirectX 10, being both a single-player boxed product and a multiplayer online game, a simultaneous launch in seven languages across Europe, the US, and South East Asia, and creating our own fully-featured online destination on top of all that.

“We’ll take the blame for not getting enough testing done while working to meet our committed ship date. There were so many issues that came up just before launch that just compounded the things we were working on, right up until the game launched, that we didn’t get fixed. Or that we thought had been fixed, but came up again when we had tens of thousands of players online concurrently.”