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

Feature: Bill Roper's talks about continuing online content support plans.
Date: June 9, 2007
Source: Play HGL.

Asian Launch Event Presentation

It is a great pleasure to be here today. Very exciting to be able to bring in the very latest version of Hellgate: London. So I wanted to give you an update on our current status, where we are with the game. We are currently working towards our first external alpha testing of Hellgate: London. We just sent our “Friends and Family” invitations earlier today, in the US, we’ll be doing so this week. And the game contents, we’ve locked down for quite a while, so we are in the finishing, polishing, balancing and bug fixing stage.

So I just want to let you know that Hellgate: London has come quite a long way since the last time that we actually brought the game to Korea. We’re very excited to give you the chance to play the latest available code, so in many ways, every one here who plays today will be really our first alpha testers. We’re really very excited to hear feedback and comments on what we’re doing with the game.

So I also want to talk a little bit about the future of Hellgate: London. As we move towards working on getting the game completed, we have a lot of additions for the game moving forward since we are an online RPG. We have many plans for supporting the game, providing things like updates and special events every month. Hoping to release the larger content based patches every three or four months, and intending on focusing initially on four ongoing patches and having a lot of things in these patches.

So I wanted to briefly just talk about some of the different things that we will be doing in the first upcoming year after the game launches. There is quite a lot of areas that we are going to be focusing. So those will everything from:

• special server types
• and game modes
• and hard core PVP
• role playing
• expanded guild support
• guild housing
• shared guild stashes
• auction house access
• expanded social support
• in game e-mail
• out of game web access for your characters
• classed base epic quest for what we call ultimate equipment, so very, very high end equipment that you will be able to get
• Expanded group management
• auto-group matchmaking, well if you don’t have anybody to play with right away, we can put you in a group that will meet your play experience.
• a modification system for armour, we already got that for items like weapons
• trinkets
• usable stationary turrets

Basically new things in every area of the game:

• from monsters
• to weapons
• to armour sets
• to individual pieces of armour
• to tile sets
• to locations
• to skills
• epics
• character classes

Basically, our goal with Hellgate: London is that we put as much into it as the players do. So, once the game launches, very, very complete experience, very fun and then we already have our plans what we want to include into the first year, and not only what we are doing from our plans, but the feedback that we get from the community, so you are a part of what we are doing too.

And the last thing that I wanted to do was to actually announce that we will be starting close beta testing in Korea. We’ve been working very, very closely with HanbitSoft, determining when the best time would be in terms of where we are with the code in the US, and then taking the time to test here. So, we’ll be beginning a limited Korean closed beta of Hellgate: London some time this July. So we’re very excited to be moving into the alpha and beta phases, and making sure that Korea is very, very top of our list in terms of who are able to get it.