Hellgate: London Peek #3

RPG Vault is offering up a third installment to their ongoing “peek” features for Flagship Studios’ Hellgate: London. For this latest feature, Flagship’s Bill Roper talks about the gameplay and how much time the team has put into the game’s randomization of locations, chance encounters, and items.

A great benefit of Hellgate: London is that the instanced, randomization scheme makes the game incredibly self-balancing. If players want to push themselves, they can always move into more difficult areas without spoiling any of the story elements. If they try to move ahead and find the next area too difficult, they can not only build up more experience and items in a place that feels comfortable for their individual skill sets, but it doesn’t feel like “grinding” since not only the layout, monsters and items are randomized – also exactly what tileset is used, and whether or not they happen to get an area that has some element of rarity to it, like themed backgrounds, monster behavior and items or chance events.