Hellgate: London Q&A

GameSpot is offering up a lengthy Hellgate: London Q&A with Bill Roper, quizzing the Flagship Studios CEO about the game’s less-than-perfect launch, the upcoming Stonehenge update, whether or not the game is still viewed as an MMO, and more.

GS: Hellgate launched with more than a few serious bugs. Was this a matter of staying true to the ominous Halloween date, or were outside forces to blame?

BR: Honestly, we tried to do too much with the game. We created our own engine, tools, and online destination from scratch in just a few years. We are really proud of the work we did, however we were perhaps a bit too ambitious.

If we could have waited another three months to ship, we would have, but the challenges of an independent game studio are much, much different than what we had during our days at Blizzard or the guys at Arena.net face (since we often see comparisons with them and Guild Wars) as they were owned by NCsoft before they had to ship. We don’t shy away from the fact that Hellgate: London was far from perfect when we launched, but we’ve also stayed dedicated to the game and our players and have been exerting every effort to make amends and get the game to what we envisioned. We’re thankful to our fans that have stuck with us, and encourage people who maybe tried the game when it launched or never checked it out because of early concerns to give us another look with The Stonehenge Chronicles.

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GS: What kind of response have you all gotten from the optional pay-to-play business model? Is the paying option proving to be popular or meeting expectations?

BR: In hindsight, perhaps we should have only talked about how Hellgate: London had free online play and not talked about the subscription service until we were announcing the Stonehenge Chronicles. A lot of the misconceptions and uncertainty over what players got for subscribing would have been avoided, and the whole model might have made more sense to people. By trying to offer a delineation of services on day one, a lot of people just got confused or upset because they saw the players in the other side of the fence as having some sort of advantage. We don’t see this between MMO players that do and don’t buy an expansion set, for example, so somehow we had bad messaging or timing on what we were offering. We really hope that players who experience The Stonehenge Chronicles will understand what we’ve been trying to do with this since the beginning.