Flagship's Bill Roper Comments by Ellie Gibson

Really looking forward to it, but then I am right in the middle of their target audience.

/cue lots of comments of FPS whores who say it looks shit without understanding one bit what it's all about :p

More like, Cue me! Yeah, this looks good, but I don't know if I will be able to persuade many of my friends to play with me. Question is, will it be anywhere near as fun single player? I've also just got back into Guild Wars, so will have to manage both of them whilst also doing another degree. Woo!

And then, there's the question of what class to play. Faction, whatever. All 3 look really different in terms of art and style of combat.

Looks a bit shit. What is it all about anyway?

Alright, which one of you EG staffers is from Lewisham then?

I live in Lewisham (well the borough anyway) and my missus works in Catford for Lewisham council. It's not quite hell-on-earth, though a Lewisham mission pack would certainly be welcome to boost the area's profile.

They should include the Catford Cat, and the rather good sushi place round the back of the council offices.

Offline Boredom vs. Online Rip-Off Fees.

Wake me up when they made it free to play. Why should anyone quit anything for that?

I hate poor people.

Don't forget you CAN play it online with mates without paying a fee. The fee is just for clan membership, extra items bla bla bla and stuff that won't bother the average gamer really, I would have thought.

"Eurogamer: Will you consider doing an expansion pack set in Lewisham?

Bill Roper: Sure, we may add that in continuing content. It would be great to go down there"

so it's definitely a bunch of people who went - 'We want a game with some cool gothic architecture and an old looking setting. Where's cool?
London!
Anyone been there or know anything about the place??
Nope.
Never mind we'll pick some cliché's and go from there, research is overrated anyway.'

Go Hellgate: SE London Expansion Pack!

You could have the Catford Cat come alive (via the power of the undead) and then be faced to fight him in the carpark of the McDonalds in the centre of the god awful One Way Sytem!

Don't forget you CAN play it online with mates without paying a fee. The fee is just for clan membership, extra items bla bla bla and stuff that won't bother the average gamer really, I would have thought.

Exactly. Easier to whine though than to inform oneself.

Darkedge...you what?

interview made me laugh :)

Mac version?

Isn't this on consoles as well?

No

I'm waiting to see just how london everything is - quests in Cockney rhyming slang?

Awright me mucka, you won't adam and eve the size of the rats in the basement. head up them apples & pears to see tha guv'nor who'll give you a monkey to sort it

:)

Real people don't talk like that, only Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins does

Ok, ive never played diablo, most of the games i play on pc are fps although ive not bought one since quake 4. I have been playing console rpg's for years (zelda on nes was my first). Should i be interested in this?
All comments welcome.

Will there be old man's gorblimey trousers of dustmaning? That's what I want to know.

Reduced online features = do not bother me with these features.

None of the features reserved for paid online play is really upsetting the amount of bandwidth I cause. It is 100% rip-off. The online experience is intentionally crippled to sucker you into paying. 10€ is not the problem, I laugh at these costs, but it is the lack of respect for the customer that grinds my gears here. Do they think I am stupid? Sorry, there are enough hack and slays to go by. Especially for non hardcore gamers who do not buy everything on release date and grind it to death. Some of them actually have respect for their customers and do not serve them incomplete featuresets because they got greedy.

None of the features reserved for paid online play is really upsetting the amount of bandwidth I cause.

New content doesnt have anything to do with bandwidth.

Really can't stand the "it all needs to be free" mentality. And if people have the choice to get something free, they complain they're not getting everything.. It's like a kindergarden, really.

People have to realise that copying games will lead to developers chosing to change their business models to adapt to a new market situation.

@ 4thVariety, im sorry but i dont get your point.
If you only want to play deathmatch, capture the flag ect, then its free, that hardly sounds a rip-off as far as im concerned.
If you want the mmorpg stuff then you pay a sub like any other mmorpg, whats the problem?

Since this is the Lewisham / Catford thread, I'll tentatively raise my hand and admit I live in view of that one way system in Catford. :)

Where does the EG obsession with Lewisham come from? I'm curious...

As for Hellgate, I alternate between not being very interested and then thinking I'll buy it if I'm bored when it comes out. Will probably wait for an EG review to help me decide.

Wendelius

Looks good and sounds interesting... I'll be watching for your previews and reviews.

No LAN-play at all, only 3 characters and no hardcore mode for non-subscribers is a bit sh*t, really. Even Diablo II does better than that.

Still, while the in-game movies don't really convince me, these are still the Diablo-guys we're talking about. Once you get into it, you might never get out of it...

Just because everybody does something is no reason to do it yourself. Besides MMO is not a genre, it's a feature. Hellgate is a Hack & Slash game, period. I played it during GC. Diablo2 is the core of this game. The market is filled with many good hack & slay games, there is no reason to pick Hellgate over any competitor when it comes to gameplay. Leftclick an opponent weaker than you, click some skills, spamclick potions when necessary. Repeat. That is what I am paying for, no matter how many textures they throw at me.

The MMO part only means that I can see other people doing what I am doing and have some type of social organization to them. That is not the sort of value one would pay 10€ a month for really. Sure, they promise content such as areas and classes attached to the fee, but couldn't they just make an expansion?

@Ryuken,
"Once you get into it, you might never get out of it..."
Why? real question.

Cheers.

@ 4thVariety,
Really?
What little i know about this game sounds nothing like what you are describing, you do realise its first person, randomly generated?
The single player is just that, a single player campaign.
The multiplayer is just that, multiplayer online.
And it apparently does some other things differently as well.
MMORPG for a fee being one of them.
You choose to pay for it or not, your choice.

"Once you get into it, you might never get out of it..."
Why? real question.

Because Diablo (and that type of game in general - I'd class WoW of not being a whole world away, too) can be incredibly addictive - soemthing you don't see in a few gameplay videos or screenshots.


FWIW, only time will tell if the subscription fee will be worth it, and if they deliver on their promises, and how crippled or not the free mp mode will be. I just think it's way too early, and the knee-jerk "RIP-OFF" to everything these days just annoys me. Mainly coming from a generation that is used to download everything from the net, I feel.

/grabs pipe and slippers

@polymorph: " "Once you get into it, you might never get out of it..."
Why? real question. "

Well, if it's Diablo then I am talking about the brilliant atmosphere (that soundtrack alone, women moaning included!, should get a seperate Adult-rating) and just those "f*ck!"-moments like meeting the Butcher or hearing Bill Roper's altered voice taunting you when you enter King Leoric's grave, simply chilling stuff, even now imo.

If it's Diablo II then I am talking about that craving I have every half year to see all those cinematics again and to replay the game with yet another character build. It's the most replayable game ever with all those skill trees and items. I know, other games offer different character options as well but for some reason Diablo II still calls me back more than anything else. It's not as dark as Diablo I but it's still in the "cool" gang...

I can't forget those games, even if some folks might call the hack'n slash gameplay shallow. I'll happily ruin another mouse on them. So yeah, expectations are pretty high for Hellgate: London I'd say. :)

That Elite-stuff is bothering me a bit like I said, but times change apparently. Hopefully the game compensates in other areas.

@UncleLou,
Its single player though yeah?
Im not dissing, just something i have never played before.

Yeah your right about people expecting everything for nothing these days.

@Ryuken,
Cheers pal. I can still buy them both yeah?
Unlike that system shock 2 ive been trying to by since the beginning of time.

Great interview!

10/10 for Lewisham and Catford related cheekyness.

@ Ryuken,
Sorry to keep you up lad!
As i said further up the page im born & bread on console rpg's.
I played oblivion a while on 360, is it like that?
I mean like you are always upgrading?

@polymorph: No, Diablo games are isometric and 2D. It's the usual "kill monsters for experience, level up to spend 5 points on your main stats and 1 skill point on a skill".

Here's a demo: http://www.blizzard.com/diablo2/demo.shtml

@polymorph

It is not first person, I played it at the games convention and for non-gun wielding characters it was 3rd person just like Diablo and Titan's Quest. Same was true for the "gun-characters", you were able to play 1st person, but it had no fps controls.

The whole thing with the customization also seemed more of a way to avoid giving the player perfection. The player is supposed to chase after the perfect weapon he will never reach, these final nagging 2% always in front of his display. That distracts from the fact that the choice of weapon is pretty much the same. At any rate you will outdamage the opponents' healing capacities while outhealing their damage output. If you can't do the latter, then go back, grind a level, revisit. Basic stuff.

The levels did look good, but the hardware requirements will most likely be staggering. Much of the power seems to go into post effect spamming until it looks good. Disabling all these effects will result in sub-par graphics with high requirements as fiddling with the settings revealed. During my stay at the Microsoft and EA booth, I could see people watching other people play Crysis while leaving Hellgate displays abandoned.

For owners of high end systems this game m ight be an eye candy to buy, but in terms of gamplay Hellgate will feel really old really fast. All "modern features" will be restricted to additional payments so there is no redeeming factor for the core game. It will be a short hype on release and go down from there. There are just no game mechanics keeping you interested for more than a month. The whole sales pitch will center on "grind a more perfect weapon", "you haven't seen this", "you haven't played that class". But that is just flashy graphics to a very boring mechanic, once people realize that, they will be gone.

Do you mean it's clearly worse than Diablo, and that's why it won't interest people for long, or it's just like Diablo, and the problem is the subscription fee?

Not quite sure I follow your general thesis - World of Warcraft works in exactly the same way, doesn't it? Always dangling the next best thing in front of your nose, with rather simple core mechanics.

I am not a WoW player, because I do not like that "flashing of +1% perfection". I like experiencing a game, not obsessing over statistical details. That is why I see Hellgate as a "one shot" game. Something I complete and abandon for good. Like Diablo. I can see where Roper thought: "Imagine we had fees on D2 back then". But that is just the greed talking, because putting in fees alters the game at the core. You can't get away with shallowness then. Wow overcomes the obstacles in its own way and nobody can quite copy them.

(1) WoW has the power of the franchise and the peer pressure, which Flagship is yet trying to build. Especially the simplistic gameplay hitting at the height of the Fantasy boom, (tons of Fantasy even in the mainstream) combined with low requirements, helped build that peer pressure you see amongst 14-20 year olds. Hellgate might be simple enough, but the world it plays in is not "trendy" with the mainstream and the requirements are high, so the game is unable to build peer pressure where it is required. The Wii does that at the moment.
(2) WoW does not send mixed signals, it is expensive, but people do not get divided. Once they are in the feel as equals. Mayn people will buy Hellgate without the knowledge that there is a fee, because the retailer will not advertise it. Bringing them into the pay2play part of the game is an additional sale for Flagship and a very tough one as most players will not feel they get more, but that something is kept from them at a cost.
(3) Wow is devouring. It seems to be build around the idea that it makes you abandon all other games. You can't play Wow AND one of its competitors. It is changing your social structure, shattering your online social life, even your real life if it hits you hard.
(4) Selling off an expansion subscription style will penalize early adopters. If I join later I will get more "for free". Going "free to play" on the online features and release some type of episodic content is more compelling, to me at least. PLUS it has the advantage that Flagship does not give out all this content for free to people joining the game after 6 months. The argument "fee for content" also means that the stream of content has to be constant.
(5) Hellgate has no working copy protection. An online account and no offline play is the best protection there is. Hellgate does not have that and therefore risks loosing "one-timers" to pirates.
(6) Hellgate gameplay does very good what it does, but it isn't necessarily the type of gameplay that motivates forever.
(7) That "casuality" is a problem, because the monthly fees are anything but casual. They require you to evaluate each month, in advance mind you, to estimate whether Hellgate is worth it this month.

For once take WoW out of the equation. What cash cow pay to play titles are really out there? That is what Flagship will be getting, not 8 Million subscribers.

Cheers for the thorough reply (honestly, not sarcastic). :)

It does sound a bit like you are more worried for Flagship Studio's and the game's success though - my core point still stands, they're offering a single-player game, a free multiplayer mode, and a sub-based mode. Arguing that WoW doesn't divide the player base sounds like you'd prefer it if Hellgate did the same. That's my key problem I think with the people complaining about the subs - what do they actually want? And sorry, while we all have to wait how it will turn out, I find the approach that it's somehow unfair that players who pay a sub will have better equipment a little bit silly - if you're thy type of gamer who juts couldn't live with that, you either have to pay the sub or play something else.

In the end, the market will decide - is the free mp mode good enough to stand on its own, like Diablo 2 does? If not, will gamers feel the sub-based version will be worth their money? If yes, good. If not, there'll be a lesson to learn.

In the end, I see it like this: they try a new business model, good luck to them, let's wait and see how it turns out. But calling it a rip-off already is extremely premature.