Hellgate: London Interviews

Flagship Studios’ Bill Roper and Ivan Sulic have each fielded a handful of questions about Hellgate: London in new interviews at Newsweek and GameSpot. The Newsweek interview with Bill is broken into two installments (here and here) and focuses on a variety of topics:

Q: Obviously that random level generating approach that’s well suited to a Diablo-style RPG, but as you’re showing here, it was intended from the beginning to be done in a first-person engine. Having as you get closer to the end of the process, having been through all this and all this stuff you’ve learned, do you feel that there are some things you guys have learned on this that might be applicable to games that aren’t RPGs like Hellgate?

A: Oh yeah. Definitely. I think that randomization is actually really underused. There’s definitely a reason for that. It’s hard. And the challenge is to do it, but make it look easy, to have it where people don’t look at it and go, “Oh, you can kind of tell they tried to do randomization and it looks the same.” It’s a lot of work. You have to have it in mind when you start. But I think that you see it in bits and pieces in a lot of games. Even like you know, World of Warcraft has randomized, things that drop, and you’re like “Oh, I found it,” but they tend to be in smaller portions. With Hellgate London, we’ve tried to apply the randomization process in every single element of the game. To when levels are generated. To what monsters are spawned. To what items drop.

Along with that randomization goes rarity which is important. So you’re not just finding–“Oh, I found this type of sword instead of that type of gun.” It’s like, “I found this sword and it’s magical,” or it has mod slots, so you can modify the weapon. It’s a unique one, so maybe there’s only twenty of them in the whole game. It’s part of a set, so you want to build the different pieces of the set together. And all that randomization and rarity is in the same thing, it’s in the background levels. When you go into a background level, it’s a rare version of that level. Everything has a fire aspect. It has fire in the sky, fire damage, and every item that drops has some fire components to it. And maybe you only get that one in a thousand times. And that maybe has only certain types of unique items that will drop associated with that set.

We do the same thing with quests, where you’ll be out running around in an area, and we have these things called chance events, where you’ll get contacted on your PDA and there’s a Templar who’s wounded, and he’s sent out an emergency beacon. And you don’t get that every time you play. Maybe one in a hundred times does that happen. It really keeps you guessing. That’s what I love about it. We play the game literally every day at this point, a little bit at least. I played last Friday. We have a play day every Friday now. There’s tons of stuff that I’ve never seen before. One, because content is still jumping in, but even in areas where I’ve been playing for two years, like “Whoa, I’ve never seen that here before. What’s that thing?” And it’s really fun. That really translates so well to when when people are playing the game.

While the GameSpot interview with Ivan focuses entirely on the game’s quests and overall quest design:

Q: In your opinion, what’s the secret of good quest design? Are there any general rules of thumb when designing a quest for Hellgate?

A: Secrets? There are none. Just use some common sense.

If you’re making a Japanese RPG, for instance, perhaps you shouldn’t have a story about some boy with amnesia that wakes up with his father’s sword and suddenly goes on a grand adventure with a flamboyant tagalong. And if you’re making a Western RPG, maybe you should cut down on the orc slaying some. Not every town needs a wizard to kill that jerk of a dragon that’s been eating all those cows, you know. That’s all narrative, though. In terms of mechanics, I think a good design is one that plays off the strengths of your base systems but does not rely on them.

We have a solid action RPG foundation in Hellgate that features customizable characters, deep skill use, and highly randomized environments, weapons, items, and monsters. That alone makes wandering around any given level and killing things worthwhile. What do we then do to make the entire experience more enjoyable? To make unique quests interesting? We simply create those unique experiences I mentioned above. None of them are too radical and none of them negate the base gameplay. But, all of them allow players to do something extraordinary while they’re enjoying the game’s core features.