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An archived Hellgate: London feature. See the Hellgate Archives for more.

Feature: Edge Magazine UK HGL Preview
Date: June 1, 2005
Source: Edge Magazine

Edge Magazine Online

The now-independent originators of Diablo are raising hell again from a new perspective and in a new world: ours.

Touched in the retro-chic red curls of the foyer at Namco Hometek's Santa Clara headquarters, Bill Roper is challenging all comers on a widescreen-projected Tekken 5. It could be a strange sight to PC gamers more familiar with his history as a producer for Blizzard: we imagine the same gamers making a collective, cosmic double-take when he later references Animal Crossing during the presentation of his post-Blizzard studio Flagship's debut project.

We've come to California to see Flagship's take on London, a title so anticipated that it was drawing attention even before it existed - nearly from the day in June 2003 when Roper, and the founders of Diablo developer Blizzard North, left the studio they had built. Such was the speed of their departure that it was all Roper could do to slip his mobile phone number into an interview with GameSpot, ensuring that during Flagship's formative week "the phone was ringing constantly, alternately publishers and fanboys," Roper laughs. "In a good way, it rang constantly."

Namco's American division has big plans for the PC gaming market, and Flagship's game is its flagship game, referred to in almost reverential tones before we return to San Francisco to see it properly. Hellgate: London draws on the themes that saw Diablo achieve such success - but where once Hell clawed its way out into a medieval hamlet, Hellgate finds it claiming near-future London. The survivors of the initial invasion, and the following doomed defences, have taken refuge in the Freemason-constructed Underground lines, building a resistance as directed by the Knights Templar while the occupied city warps around them.

"I don't really know how any of my ideas come to me - I came up with Diablo when I was in high school, so some themes just brew for a long time," says designer and programmer Dave Brevik. "At the time, Diablo was a technological leap as well as a fun game, and that's the same kind of philosophy that I wanted for this new studio - that we can not only push the technology, but we can make something fun to play. And this idea melded those goals together."

"Dave's actual initial pitch was: 'Randomised RPG, first-person perspective'," remembers Roper. "And we spent half an hour trying to figure out how that would suck. [Laughs.] That's the acid test. Then, I think Max [Schafer, fellow co-founder] - because Max has an architectural background - said: 'Oh, we should do it in London'. Pretty soon we realised there was this whole underground aspect, these modern dungeons, and it went from there."

"'A cross between a firstperson shooter and Diablo'," offers Brevik with the satisfaction of a man who has the golden pull-quote. "Yeah. And that's really been since day one," nods Roper. "I think about two weeks went by and we had the wireframe engine up."

Today, Flagship's in-house engine - the intricacies of the game system and randomly generated levels required a bespoke effort - is well beyond wireframes, ably portraying an ashen, haunted London beneath the pall of a hellspawned nuclear winter. If the post-apocalyptic gloom isn't an immediately remarkable look (even for Flagship, as there's an indelibly Diablo murkiness to it all), then the location certainly is. Hellgate's London streets may be built from algorithms rather than plans successively military, occult, and utilitarian, but they're still hardwired into generations of turmoil: great fires and plagues, the Blitz, the riots, the boarded-up storefronts of urban decay. By playing off select imagery - occasionally token imagery, as British Telecom may never have installed as many red telephone boxes as are scattered in Hellgate's rubble - rather than direct recreation, it's both otherworldly and disarmingly familiar, suggesting Flagship's photographic research may have captured the city's soul.

As ghouls lurch from bombed-out facades and bestial demons bay in Covent Garden's abandoned bus lanes, there's a moment where the game could be an Anglophile Doom sequel, a moment lasting until your first kill's death throes kick up an item - a Templar-issue spectral pistol, perhaps, or a saint's finger-joint, ready to be jury-rigged as a sacred power source. At a keypress, a reassuringly dense inventory overlay flicks in from the screen's edges with a perfectly judged clunk; while only a working prototype of the bruising Templar character class is on show, currently undisclosed classes are waiting in the cloisters to round out multiplayer parties. Each glimpse of a placeholder system hints at the depths of number crunching that will accompany the bloodletting, and also what a colossal undertaking it is for a small studio - then again, their previous title was hardly light on detail.

"Diablo 2 was a gigantic..." Brevik trails off, lost in remembered crunch time. "God. It still gives me a little chill. When I was the president of Blizzard North, running that project almost killed me, literally. And I vowed I'd never do something like that again, and now I think we're going to do something like that again." He and Roper laugh. "So I must be a glutton for punishment, but we really like what we do, even though it takes a long time to recover from the experience. You give it so much effort - I was working 15-hour days for about eight months on Diablo 2, and the last few months I took Sundays off, sometimes."

"We had to mandate Sundays off," Roper picks up. "Which was difficult, because there wasn't any parent company telling us to work like that, it was personal drive. And I think we've gotten a little better about it, because we're all older" - "It made me five years older inside of a year," grimaces Brevik - "and have families now... I think some elements will be a little easier, and others will be way harder. There may end up being zero net difference between the two. The upside is that even if it's the same amount of work, so much of it is new work, not just: 'Oh, here's where we do this again'. There's an air of familiarity, but there's a lot of new challenges."

It looks to be a similar sensation for the player, unseated from the action-RPG's traditional omniscient viewpoint and pitched down among the demons with all the vulnerabilities of firstperson perspective. "It's a totally new interface for us - no more mouse cursor!" Brevik grins. "That's something we've never done before."

Hellgate's interface draws on familiar signifiers from both the FPS genre and Flagship's back catalogue: the minimalist screen displays and corner-slung gun barrels recall the former, but the iconic displays for actions bound to each mouse button are future-proofed Diablo. Similarly, combat is still broadly a matter of point-and-attack, with most weapon impacts triggering area damage effects and therefore never demanding headshot-perfect accuracy (pointedly, there's no locational damage, just hits and misses). On a mechanical level, Hellgate's expansive arsenal is updating a yew tree's worth of magic wands, often reproducing familiar Diablo spell patterns - target-leaping chain lightning, scattershot electrical charges, radial blasts.

Melee combat also remains an option, with at least the Templars intended to be as handy with a longsword as a slug-thrower. Sadly, the proof of that boast was absent from the presentation build, with close combat implementation a current focus of development. "We all pretty much agreed that in every game we've played, melee from firstperson was... not good," explains Roper. "So we've been experimenting with thirdperson views - but we want to make it work well, whether that's having your guy fully in the plane of view, or what if the guy's on the right side of the screen, almost like your weapon is? We have an organic development process, which some people found difficult to get their heads around, but Namco grasped it pretty quickly. Hellgate's been played in some form since the third or fourth week we've been working on it: just to iterate and try it, try it, try it. It was wireframes and boxes - an item drops and it's just a box called 'Item 2', but that lets us know that items are spawning. You pick up Item 2 and it changes your stats, so we know that's working. Building piece by piece lets you see when things aren't working and just tear them out. We throw tons of stuff out..."

"The skill system," prompts Brevik. "Yeah, we had a whole concept for a skill system that we talked about, did some early planning on, and then when it started getting into a deeper implementation Dave was like, 'That's not going to work: it's going to be too complex, people aren't going to understand it. Let's try something different'. The skill tree in Diablo 2 is a great example: there was a wholly different way to do skills in Diablo 2, and as I recall Dave had an epiphany in the shower, and came into work and said: 'Skill tree! Skills are being done totally differently!' I was down at Blizzard South and got a phone call later that day saying: 'OK, we need an extra four months to completely rewrite the skill system'. But I knew it would make a better game, because they'd been playing with the current system for months, and could see even in theory the new version was better than the practice they had going on. So having the game constantly running, constantly being played, gives so many good areas of feedback."

Even with a development team that doubles as the game's most critical playtesters, Hellgate's hasn't been entirely insulated from outside opinion, as Brevik notes: "You have to listen to feedback from your friends you bring in, from QA, from your PR people - from all walks of life - and understand where they're coming from and use that feedback wisely." And there's a speaker-bursting storm of feedback coming: not just from an imminent E3 playable demo showing, but from a dedicated fan community that has been following the game through one-and-a-half years of development on nothing but a trickle of concept imagery and promise. "It's flattering and difficult," Roper says. "I have to give amazing props to our fan community, especially the ones who started fansites when all they knew was the name of the company. It's really humbling that they've liked what we did in the past and took the chance that we were going to make something else they were going to like."

Hellgate's challenge is twofold - justifying their faith even with its sweeping changes, and levering those changes to draw in gamers left cold by being kept at mouse pointer's length from the action in Diablo. The initial sensation is that it can achieve both, though appraising a title at this stage in development carries inevitable caveats of balancing and tuning: whether character advancement will describe that perfect curve of demands and returns, if reward will be constant but never quite eclipse risk, if character types can be compelling enough to drive single player yet symbiotic in multiplayer. Flagship's trump card is the solid gold-mastered proof that the studio has already succeeded twice before. As to how that confidence informs development, the answer appears to be 'cautiously'.

"It's let us take a couple of things in bigger leaps, like doing 100 weapon types," says Roper. "A hundred sounds crazy, but we know that's actually a number we can achieve. Or the number of mod types, and how they affect weapons. Dave and Erich [Schafer] worked on all the skills for Diablo 2, Erich and Peter [Hu] did most of the items - Peter specifically did the entire 1.10 patch, and that revamped everything all over again: all the skills, all the items. So when we brought him here he was like: 'OK, this is how the items have to work now'. It doesn't mean it's a slamdunk, and we can crank it up without caring, but it gives us a footing that makes us very unique as a team - to be able to make a game that has all these random elements."

"But when we come up against a wall, I panic," laughs Brevik. "I think there's a lot of pressure because we've done it before. I know I have the confidence to do it again, but I don't want to be too cocky about it - it's a lot of work, and you've got to have the patience and insight to see when something's working or not... we're going to be very careful about what we do." We feel an old-school Blizzard North statement coming, and Brevik doesn't disappoint: "When it's done, it's done. When it's ready."

On thoughts of retaking St Paul's from the True Demon garrisons, sparring with nightmares in the Bakerloo line plague pits or desperate firefights on the hallowed ground of Hawksmoor's lost churches, the wait for Hell to freeze London over isn't going to be easy.