Hellgate: London

First off, it is really a misnomer to call the free version "limited", as it is the ability to play the entire game online in a secure environment for free! This is very much in line with what we did with Diablo II and is something that all of our fans wanted us to figure out how to make happen. We're excited to be able to bring gamers an amazing online experience which is included with their single player game.

For gamers that want more, we're committed to creating ongoing content and provide meaningful updates. This requires us to maintain not only a robust online environment, but also a full team of developers to both tune and tweak the game, but to create that new content.

Players that want to subscribe to the game can get this additional service and ongoing content for USD 9.95. We've only set the pricing in the U.S. as of now, but we're working with our publishing partners around the world to find an equally friendly price for access to the ongoing content.

Hellgate: London is probably going to incite a massive debate as to whether it is "really" an MMO since it doesn't perfectly match what other MMORPGs do in terms of game play, content, and so on.

We'll have all of the community elements you would want from an online RPG, such as guilds, highly manageable friends lists, an auction house, advanced grouping options, and so on. As for game play, we're working on everything from raid content to PvP; from special group and guild events to real-world calendar timed events - on top of different game play modes.

The greatest advantage to being able to provide continual content is that we can interact directly with our players and work to enrich and enhance the game in ways that will be interesting and exciting to them. This back and forth with our players, and then putting those things into the game, is one of the things that make an MMO special.

Definitely, but there is also a real outcry for something new and different. With Hellgate, we're focused on creating a different style of MMORPG that has the great elements of various styles of games.

We're much more action-oriented and focused on getting players into the fun quickly. We use dynamically generated content and the power of randomisation to craft a game that is constantly new each time you play. Our goal is to take the best parts of classic MMOs and enhance them in new ways, ending up with something that is really unlike any experience players have seen before.

Not at all. We have been able to use the single-player game as the foundation and springboard for the online experience. We know that a compelling single-player game is something that a great many gamers still want, so to be able to provide that and also create a compelling online game was our goal from day one.

Unfortunately we can't let players use their offline characters in our secured online environment because we can't know what players have done to those non-secured characters. Fun and security go hand in hand in our online plans, so ensuring that our online characters are "legit" is of high importance.

You can play through the single-player storyline with your friends online for nothing more than the cost of buying the boxed game. This was essential to our plans and is something that we've gone to great lengths to ensure can happen.

We need to be able to make the same commitment to our game as our players have shown they do. This means we're in it for the long haul and will be making continuing improvements and changes to the game through not only patches and tweaks and fixes, but more importantly with substantial new content. This is why working on continuing content is so important to us.

We're very focused on completing the game and then on providing continued support and continuing content. That being said, we relish the idea of being able to potentially explore the mythology and heroes, history and mysteries of other cultures and places.

Flagship is a PC-focused development studio, so our chief concern is getting the game done for that platform.

We are working as hard as we can to get the game out to players this summer. We're excited at the progress and expect to go into closed alpha testing soon. As with any project of this size and complexity, it is impossible to tell now exactly when we'll be able to sort through all the vital bugs, nail down those last bits of balance, and release the game in the polished state we know that our fans expect.

We are on track to get the game done in our timeframe, but as we've all seen with the success of the games we previously worked on, releasing absolutely our best effort is the most important thing.