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

Interview: Bill Roper and David Brevik.
Date: April 27, 2007
Source: 1up.com transcript. Video versions: Bill Roper, David Brevik.

1up.com Interview

To conclude our week's coverage of Hellgate: London, we present full transcripts of two interviews we conducted at Flagship the day after playing the game. First up, Dave Brevik, followed by Bill Roper.

David Brevik

1UP: It feels like you guys are really comfortable and having a good time, and I just wanted to talk about how that's coming through in the game -- because there's just a lot of stuff that just feels like you guys are having fun with it. Are you having fun with it? And what are you doing that's fun and how is it different building this game, having built a bunch of games before? And does that put you in a different comfort zone? And where are you at with that?

Dave Brevik: Yeah I'm having fun. I mean, if we weren't having fun, I don't think that anybody would do this -- it's ridiculous the amount of time and effort we put into something like this if it wasn't fun. I don't know; it would just be masochistic or something. Well, I think we are anyway. So I think it's a lot of fun, I think that it's a lot of work, and we are very comfortable at what we're doing. And I think it's mainly because we've done it so many times, and that experience gives us some confidence about the direction we're taking.

1UP: So what's the difference then? What is it that makes it different? What do you learn and how is it different, I guess is the question.

DB: It's almost an impossible question to answer. You learn so many lessons going through the process that really a lot of the decisions we make are based on doing this for over 15 years -- no, more than that now. Sixteen years I've been doing this. Every time I do a project or participate in design for a project or something like that then I learn something about where we're going. I try and twist things and stuff like that. And so I think that a lot of my design ideas come from previous experience as well as a lot of new games that I'll play and things that people are doing; I try and observe those tricks that they use to try and get people involved in the gameplay. Those kinds of things really go a long way into the way I design. And so I think it's a lot of experience that we've had, we know what we want, we set out, we have this vision that we know exactly what we want, and a lot of times it's like, "Oh, this thing is missing and I think that our pacing's not right because we're missing this," or "How about we try this?" All that builds on experience from playing other things as well as our previous experience with doing Diablo and stuff like that.

1UP: So I guess that's where probably a lot of what I was feeling comes across.

DB: Yeah, exactly right. A lot of the feeling of Diablo came from the fact that we did Diablo, so that feeling is just kind of the way that we make games. That feeling just kind of permeates Hellgate because we did that, then we design the same way, we code the same way, the way that we control the games -- we try to keep things simple and a lot of our design and balance philosophies are still there. A lot of people will play Hellgate and will get that kind of feeling that it is very similar to Diablo, but yet it's very different to its new interface and it's 3D and all that kind of stuff. So it's kind of an updated version of that, set in the future with guns and stuff. But, still, at that core it feels a little bit like Diablo.

1UP: Yeah, I guess to draw a different way of looking at it is that, as I'm reading the text in the quests and I'm going through the progressions and doing stuff, there's a comfort level and a naturalness where it just goes together and it works and it meshes. And, you know, my most recent comparison would be to draw to, like, Titan Quest, which was a cool game. I mean, it looks good and the general ideas and stuff are there, but when you're in the quests or when you're playing through the pacing of the game and those kind of things, it's just quite not there. It's not quite at that same degree of "Wow, I'm having a good time," or "This makes sense." Or like when they try to throw in a joke, which you guys -- you guys have a lot of jokes in Hellgate; there's a lot of inside jokes in there, right? -- but none of them feel forced. How much have you learned about how to deliver that comedy material, or that inside joke stuff like that, but still keep the game on its feet and never feeling like, "Oh, they just slapped me in the face. They're forcing this?"

DB: God, I don't really know. That's always been something that's been kind of a natural thing for me, personally, and I don't really know how to describe it. As I'm playing a game, I'm constantly running through my mind, "What would a person think playing this that's never played it before?" It's a test that we used to call our mom test. You know, if my mom was playing this game, would she get what we're doing? Is the pacing right? Is it going to keep her interested? And if my mom could play it, then I think that a general audience can play it. I try to keep that in mind as we're going through and it's like, "Oh, they're not going to be able to make this leap; I can see how this could be confusing" or "They may not understand this, but the people that are in the know might get this little off-joke, but even if they don't get it, they're still going to enjoy this content." Things like that. All that kind of comes together. I don't know how to describe it. It comes from a lot of experience. It seems like something that's been natural that I try and put myself in the position of somebody else while they're playing and try and give feedback in that way.

1UP: I think that makes a lot of sense, actually. If the inside joke doesn't work for people who don't get it, then it derails everything. What you're saying is that it's got to still work, even for mom, but if it works for everybody else who knows the inside part then it's all the more funny for them. I think the next question is: How's Hellgate doing right now on the mom test?

DB: Well, I think that we're always trying our best to do that and there's always changes that we're making. I think that overall it's very good. We did a lot of things -- tried to make a lot of autotargeting and make these things as simple as possible. I think it's different than Diablo; I don't think that it would pass as well as Diablo did, mainly because, in my opinion, the WASD keys and the mouse and stuff is a level that's almost not a mom test. I don't really think my mom could really play an WASD game very well. But, at the same time, we've tried to simplify that enough that, hopefully, if she could get that control down, then it would be all right. It's a little different...you could play Diablo one-handed, you know, with one finger almost. But I think that you need two hands [for Hellgate]. And that adds a level of complexity, but I think that people are more and more accepting of this control scheme and it's more of a general audience -- once something that's as big as World of WarCraft uses it, then people can kind of handle that. I'm hoping that wasn't too big a leap for us. My only concern on the mom test has been that. Other than that, I think that we're adding a lot of things -- like we've never done a tutorial before, but we're going to try and do a tutorial for this game and stuff like that that would really get people going on the right foot.

1UP: Help overcome that barrier of control and different things -- what have you had the most fun working on? I mean, now that you're getting close, it's getting down to the wire.

DB: The thing that I enjoy the most is doing the quests and the pacing and all that kind of design, and getting a story and getting the whole thing kind of together and giving the player goals and subgoals and fun things to do. I think that design and that process is the most fun for me.

1UP: Obviously, we don't want to blow the story so we're not going to go too far into the actual story arc itself, but if you're comparing the games you guys did before, back on the Diablo series, and how the story arc on that went versus the story arc here -- what's the weighting? How much of this is central plotline stuff, how much side plot stuff, [and] what are some of the highlights we have to look forward to?

DB: This is much more of a true RPG than we've ever done. There's way more story and way more story quests than we've ever done before. The overarching storyline I think in Diablo I was maybe four, six quests or something like that. So it was extremely simple. And there were some side quests or whatever. There was maybe half a dozen or something in the first game. In the second game we had a few acts and we had maybe six quests or eight quests -- I can't remember -- associated with each act, and some of them were story-centric and some of them were side-questy. This time it's much, much bigger. We're talking hundreds of quests, so I think we've done a lot to really kind of expand that. The storyline quests are very involved; there's all sorts of unique things that come up.

One of the things that I like the most about doing storyline quests and doing quests in general is that I like to try and change up the gameplay a little for short amounts of time. I think that those really add a lot of flavor to the game and add new experiences. You're able to use your skills in different ways than you normally would. There's the normal gameplay of "I'm going through and I'm shooting monsters and collecting treasure and leveling up and doing all those kinda fun things," but then it's like, "Ooh, I'm going to throw a little wrench in it" and the gameplay's just a little bit different for five or 10 minutes and it's like, "Hey, that was kind of interesting; I got to use skills that I normally wouldn't use or I got to do something that is a lot different than what I've done before." And that kind of keeps it fresh and it's new and it's a little twist and it's kinda fun. And then you get to move on and go back to collecting.

I mean, you're going to be killing monsters and going up levels and collecting treasure and all that anyway while you're doing these little twists in the gameplay, but you get to go back to the bread and butter of what we have.

1UP: What character class are you going to play when it comes out? What's the first one you're gonna play?

DB: I think the Marksman's my favorite. When I originally thought of the idea, my pitch in my living room was "let's make a first-person shooter Diablo," you know? And I think the class that portrays that vision of what I had in mind the best is the Marksman.

1UP: In a nutshell, what was the first pitch?

DB: That was it. [laughs]

1UP: What did you see the story being like? Did you already have the Hellgate thing planned?

DB: No, no. The way I design and the way that I think that a lot of people design on the team that we have, we are very focused in on "OK, what's the game going to be like?" And then the story kind of fits in after that. It's like, "OK, we've got this great idea [where] we're going to go around and shoot monsters and level up and get treasure and stuff and instead of having six or eight guns, or 12 or 16 or whatever, we're going to have 100 guns. And we're going to have all these skills. We're going to just take that fun-ness of the first-person shooter and allow you to level up and get some skills and stuff." And that was really the original idea. Shortly after that, within a few days, we decided on a setting. It would have to be future if we were going to have guns involved, plus we had done traditional fantasy, almost gothic fantasy, for a while. People wanted to do something new. So the future, futuristic sci-fi kind of thing was really [it] -- and then, I don't remember exactly who suggested it, but somebody suggested London...

Bill Roper

1UP: I just have to start off this way: Dude, your game is awesome. How awesome is your game?

Bill Roper: Well, we've been working on specifically the awesomeness quotient, and we're looking for a meta-awesome of hopefully about a 90. So we're really pushing toward that. We've got a lot of pretty awesome stuff in there.

1UP: Seriously, I've played the game a bunch of times and I was impressed playing it this time because, like we were talking about yesterday when we were playing it, it's really starting to feel like it's meshing. It's starting to come together. You talked about how you guys have really worked on the beginning part of it. Take me through a little bit of what the thought process there was and how that relates to where you're going with the Hellgate design.

BR: One of the things that we wanted to do in the beginning was to make it really focused, and that meant really reducing the size of that first station that you start in. And it's really now almost like a landing strip; it's a platform that's there. Everything's laid out really linearly; it's very simple to see who you're getting a quest from, what you're going to be doing next, and where to go to exit. And that was really important because we found that when we had even a slightly larger station, people would kinda get lost and confused and run around and not be sure where they were going.

So we wanted to make it really, really easy for them to know right away to go out, really kinda following almost that old-school Nintendo concept. We want it to be as fast as we can to get you into gameplay. Right away you get a couple of really simple quests, then boom, you're outside playing. And we start things off very simply -- give you an almost unloseable situation. We want you to go out there and have success right away, get some points, work on skills, spells, start that very low end of the learning curve. But by really refocusing how the very, very beginning gameplay works, it's made it very simple for people to get into and start experiencing the world and getting their hands in the nuts and bolts of the gameplay.

1UP: We heard about the mom test for game design and for Hellgate. What do you think? Where is this game as far as the mom test or accessibility for the mass market?

BR: I think it's actually pretty accessible. I'm sure that Dave talked about what our biggest concern has always been, and that's been the control scheme. We did kinda make the leap to having to have both hands active. With the Diablo games, you really could play the whole game with just the mouse. We found a lot of people, the more advanced players, would then start using their left hand for hotkeys or items in their belt or opening things quickly, but you could have a lot of success with just the mouse, just playing and never using your left hand.

Because we are using the WASD keys to drive, now we kind of lock you down in the standard gamer configuration if you're a PC player. But I think the part of that that helps is that it has really become the standard PC gamer position. I think there was even an episode of Psyche -- I don't know if you've ever watched that, it's a detective crime show with a really humorous bent. He's acts like a psychic, but it turns out he's just really observant. It's a snow job. And he comes in and he's talking to his partner, who's on the computer. And he's like, "oh, I'm doing something," and he's like, "no you're not. You're playing a game." And he's like, "how do you know that?" And he says, "well, your left hand is on the WASD keys." So he can tell just by how the guy's sitting that he's playing a game. So the upside for us is that it's at least permeated that far into pretty much straight-up normal culture that people are used to when they're a PC gamer. So I think that that hurdle has been the biggest one for us and that mom test theory is that you have to be using both hands to play as opposed to just one, but we've done a lot of work in terms of the UI and in terms of the control scheme to take advantage of that and make it as simple as we can while still requiring for us probably the most advanced interface that we've had to design.

1UP: What about alternate controls? How much thought ever went into maybe trying something completely different?

BR: We tried tons of stuff that was completely different. We tried point-and-click for a while. We tried lockdown camera angles, everything from locking in first-person over the shoulder... we tried a lot of different stuff. We tried non-rotatable camera views. We tried everything. That's something we do a lot of, this constant iteration. We always talk about how we have a very organic design process, and a lot of that centers around the fact that we just put things in and we try it, and we try it, and we play it. And does that work? If it doesn't work, we change it; if it does work, we do more of that. And the loop we came up with was a really pretty free-flowing system where players really do have that freedom of if they're using ranged weapons, for example, going all the way into first-person view and playing it much like an FPS or pulling all the way back, pretty far out where you can actually get much more of a Diablo-style feel, even though you are kind of driving with the WASD. So we've tried a lot of different ideas and concepts on how to actually control the characters, and I think that's why, when the game comes out, hopefully that interface and control scheme feels so polished, because we put so much time and effort into it.

1UP: What's up with people trying to shoehorn the game into different categories, and seeming to miss the idea that it's just an action-RPG? I mean, what else would you expect from this team? It's going to be an action-RPG. Except everybody wants to say, oh, it's a first-person shooter, or it's an adventure game...what's going on there? Why do you think that's happening?

BR: People like to have easy ways to describe things. They want that five-second marketing bullet. And I think when you start breaking outside of those boundaries and designing something that is outside of the box, they still want to have a label for it. And it gets harder and harder to put a label on it. I remember we used to have religious arguments that would be occurring in the press and the fanbase over Diablo II about "is this really an RPG or not." And there'd be all this discussion why it was and why it wasn't.

And we think we're going to have a lot of those same types of arguments occur. What is Hellgate? Is it an RPG? Is it an FPS with RPG elements? Is it an RPG with FPS elements? And then there's the whole online scope of it as well. What is it online? Is it this, is it that? And it's the kind of thing where we just want to make a fun game. And that's always the goal: making a game that's fun. And as we start adding different elements and different experiences that we've had and different influences, a game takes shape out of that that really becomes, then, what it is. It is what it is is maybe the easiest way to describe it, but that looks really crappy on the back of a box or in a marketing call-out. Hellgate: London: It is what it is...

We always pitch it as it's an action-RPG. That's what it is at its core. But then it has a lot of other layers and elements that we really do think are going to be attractive to other gamers.

1UP: So now the other side of the coin here is that we've talked about making it easy to play and easy to get into and then one of the things that struck me the most yesterday is just how many layers there are to the game. And one of the things I want to get you to talk about in a minute, and we're going to come to this, will be how the item system is really tied more into developing a character than ever before. But let's just start off on the first level of, like, if you're trying to make a game that's appealing and accessible to everybody, where were you as far as developing the character sets and then the factions and the classes and how do you balance having so much out there and not losing people in "Oh my god, what do I play?"

BR: Well, the first thing was design the factions, and for a long time they were called the classes 'cause it was just easier for people to think of it that way, and we didn't really dissuade them from that. So there was the Templar and the Cabalist and the Hunters. And really the idea was presenting three kinds of core archetypes, not only in the way they would be presented in the world of the storyline, but then also from a gameplay mechanic [point of view].

So the Templars were going to be your melee characters, the Cabalists were going to be your spellcasters, and then the Hunters were going to be your ranged characters and they also were going to represent that FPS mechanic. And then when we started to push past that is when we started to introduce things like, "OK, the Hunters are really specifically going to be designed around introducing an FPS mechanic into an action-RPG." The Cabalists -- we wanted to be able to divide those out into more of a pet class with the Summoner and more kind of a blaster-style class with the Evoker. And then with the Templar, having the big tank guy and then having more of the kind of real fast melee/crazy combos hack-and-slash guy.

And so it was more setting up those archetypes first because it's easy to get their heads around that. Like, "Oh, yeah, I want to play a fighter. Oh, I'm gonna take a Templar." Then the idea's like, once I get into that mindset, then which type do you want to play? And that's really then, as we just started designing the classes out, where that focus started going into. And we always knew that we wanted those three archetypes; we always knew that we wanted the fighter, the spellcaster, and the ranged attacker. So those were really there from day one. The thing that was kind of interesting as we were going through and, over the course of the last few years, kind of talking about the classes -- what the factions were going to be, and then the classes past that -- it was really interesting how the fans of the game, through the development process, were kind of going down the same path that we'd gone. When we announced the Templar first, they were like, "Oh, that's awesome...but what about magic? Are they going to have mages?" And then the Cabalist was the next one we talked about. And they're like, "Oh, that's great, but, well, the game's got this really cool first-person engine, too. You guys should do some FPS thing."

1UP: We need a dude with a rifle.

BR: Yeah, exactly. And so they just kind of were naturally following the same progression that we had thought of at the beginning. And that was, I think, a really good indication for us that we were kind of on the right track, too. You know, we were thinking the same way the gamers were thinking and vice versa. So, in terms of how we then delineate that out into classes is then looking at -- we're taking the Templar, for example -- how do we want the Guardians to be different from the Blademasters? What's going to be fun for someone who wants to play that tank who's in the middle of combat -- sword, shield, sucking up tons of damage, you know, drawing all the agro -- versus the guy who wants to dash in, do some crazy maneuvers, kinda have a more intricate system in terms of how they're weaving their melee combat in and out, you know, kind of striking and moving and what, and they really end up playing very different and being very complementary. And so, as we go through and design each of the classes, that really becomes the focus: What do I, as a player, want to get out of this style of character?

1UP: I think there's a big difference here between where you guys have gone with it and where some other action/character-building RPG games go. So, for instance, just because everyone knows it, let's talk about World of Warcraft for a minute, because we both played it. We talked about this experience yesterday in that one of the things I think we both agree kind of frustrated us is that, when you go in to play the game, there's -- especially at a highly competitive level -- there's this funnel. And everybody's trying to reach the top of the pyramid for whatever your class is. If you're playing a fighter, there is the ultimate fighter build, with the perfect skill tree and the perfect gear et cetera. And so everybody's trying to get to that one spot. Whereas, what was coming through to me in the hours [of Hellgate] that we played yesterday is that it's the similar system, I mean there are skills, there are items, but there seems to be so much breadth there that there's not going to be just one marksman that's the right way to run a marksman. So, working with the context of doing the item system that you did, how did you guys build that? 'Cause I know it was intentional. How did you guys get to that point and what's the degree of sophistication to build multiple good builds for one class?

BR: It's really interesting. I think a lot of that, honestly, though there is a chunk of planning, a lot of that happens just from emerging gameplay, as we go through.

1UP: OK, I'm going to stop you for just a second, because that's a buzzword and I'm Buzzword Killer. When you're saying emerging gameplay, what are you meaning this time when you're talking about character design?

BR: Right. So, for us, with emerging gameplay, we mean we put the skills there, the items are there, and then, as people start playing the game, they naturally find ways that different item types interact with character skills. It's not like, "oh, we planned where, at level 42, you would get this skill and this type of item, and that would make this combination for this to occur." It just happens because players start experimenting with things. The goal for us is to try to create an open-ended enough system to where you are encouraged to try these different things, to try different builds. It's...one of the reasons that we tend to see a lot of players that will have a lot of different characters.

Your speed to get to a fairly high/medium level like level 30, or 35, or 40ish is much quicker than [in] a lot of other games. Because we don't anticipate that, like, "oh, I'm going to be grinding on this one character for months and months and months and months and months" -- it's like, you know, "I'm going to spend a couple of months on this guy and I'm going to get him to a certain point and I'm going to be like, 'oh, I should try that like this.' OK, I'm going to make another guy. And then try that like that." And that was something we always found that worked with Diablo so players could kind of find these really unique builds that would take into account not necessarily specific items, though sometimes something unique would come out that would fit their scheme, but more I want to get items that have the most of this type of attribute or help my character in this way, and then I'm going to use this skill and that skill and they're combinations that we never thought of. So that's what I mean by emerging gameplay.

We kind of plan for...Eric Schafer, who's the lead designer, always puts it best that when we're designing skills and items and everything, we have all these ideas and kind of throw all these seeds out and we work on them and they kind of grow up and then at some point some aren't as good as other ones and some are higher. And we just kind of try to lop off the topmost crazy ones, but it's not like they're all perfectly balanced. You have some that end up being a little better and some that aren't as good. And then, for us over time, we try to balance that hedge out a little more, if you will. But we know that there's gonna be times where a player might get lucky and might find this combination or get some weapon that drops that kind of makes you overpowered for a couple of levels, but that's part of the excitement. That's what makes it really fun for them.

1UP: Wait, wait, wait -- so being really powerful in an RPG is a good thing?

BR: ...is really fun. I know, it's shocking. It's crazy...

1UP: You guys have an interesting approach to helping that process along with your character advocates, of which you are one. And so talk a little bit about the character advocacy and how that worked as far as developing the characters in the game because I thought it was interesting. You hear character advocacy and you think, OK, they're going to be talking about all the good things of my character, but in fact...

BR: Right. No, our character advocates here are a group of us, usually two to three people on each character class, and we play those constantly through playdays, on testing, and our job is to go back to the lead design teams and tell them why the character sucks. It's like, "I'm not good enough here; this isn't fun." You know, it's all about the downside of your experience. Now you approach it from the standpoint of, "And here's how I think that it could be made better." And you talk about what the solution is. But the things that are fun, that are working really well everyone sees and recognizes. And so our job as advocates is to look at those and say, "OK, this is what's broken; this isn't fun; I'm not using this skill." You know, "Gee, I played for 12 hours over the last couple of days and tried three or four different builds and I never used this skill."

1UP: You're doing Cabalist, right?

BR: Yeah, I'm actually the Evoker.

1UP: Describe one of those times that you went back to Eric and said, "Oh, Eric, wait" -- in your meetings, or however you do that -- "this is completely busted."

BR: Here's an example. There was a chain of skills that were all physical in nature, where they were doing physical damage. The Evoker is basically a big blasting class and has a lot of different skills that focus on kind of manipulating the different elements and dark forces. And in the physical chain, it wasn't that the skills themselves were bad but they just kind of felt lame -- if that's a generic, broad enough term. So that was more going back and saying, "You know, these would feel a lot better if we changed the particle effects -- if we changed, you know, as opposed to this being this force bolt, if it was a demon spine and it looked like I was firing out this big bone-constructed crazy thing that was firing out as opposed to having, like this wave of force as if we had like bone shards."

And so when this physical nova effect went off that pushed guys back and damaged them, it looked like I was casting all these bones. So we kind of made this physical tree the bone tree, right? And other things we'd be playing and it's like, you know, "I tried using this and it felt like I didn't ever need to use this skill." I think we just last week dumped a couple of skills because they just were never getting used. We're like, "No one really uses"...I don't remember what it was...blood surge or something. There was a skill that we were using where it was like, "Gee, nobody uses this skill because we don't have to. If I use this skill and that skill in combination, it's more effective and gives me what that skill gives me. Individually they're more effective and combined they give me what that skill gives me." So it's like, "Great, let's get rid of that skill and add another skill in." And that's the kind of thing where you go in, work with Eric and Tyler and the guys and say, "Look" -- and that's usually a big one right now -- "I'm not using the skill. It's a waste to have it in the trees. So let's put something else in that I would want to do that would be fun." And that's when you start talking about, "Well, what are you doing a lot of?" "Well, I'm using this, I'm using that, I'm doing this." "Oh, great." "Well, how about something that augments those or plays off of those ideas?" Because those are things that we realize are fun and are working.

1UP: So it's been a long road getting here. It's getting close. Before we get to the end of this conversation, I've gotta ask you: Why's it always take so long?

BR: You know, games have gotten ginormous. Gigantic and enormous. It takes a lot of talented people a lot of time to build the games. I think it's why, to be honest, you're seeing a lot of people pushing more toward [saying], "Oh god, I'd love to do some small games, or do some casual games because they're one- to two-year cycles." Sometimes even less than that. But when you're building a triple-A title, and especially -- I mean, the scope of what we're doing in Hellgate is honestly maybe a little crazy: We've got a standalone game, it's an online MMO experience, it's an action-RPG but it's got first-person shooter elements, we had to design our 3D engine, build our own online space...

We bit off a huge chunk to do and I think, in the end, it will definitely have paid off, but at the same time, that takes a lot of people a large amount of time to do. And I think part of that is also coupled with the expectations of players. You know...if we came out today with the original Diablo or maybe even Diablo II, people would be a little disappointed. They'd be like, "Well, geez, I was kind of expecting more." If you go back to what the original Diablo was, that was one town.

1UP: Maybe the original Diablo, but Diablo II...

BR: If you even think about D2, let's look at the online component. It was a chatroom. And then you went and played games with people. And there was no way to really build up a social network. There was no friends list. There were no ways to really, truly build that community. You weren't ever your character.

1UP: But Hellgate: London's just one town. [laughs]

BR: It's London, but there are many, many places within London that we're centering out of, right? The thing that I think is really interesting is that, especially in terms of online, the expectation of players is really...you know, there's been so many standards [that] have been set. I think, if you look at the scope of games that come out, unfortunately I think that people tend to forget that the games that they're playing now that they really love, especially when they're online games, have usually had one or two or three years to mature. And they kind of forget what that game was like when it came out, and they think about how it is now.

And then when another game comes out, they're like, "Oh, well, it doesn't have A, B, C, and D." Even though it's got a laundry list of things that's in it. And they forget that when their game came out that they love, it didn't have all those things either, but it does now. And that's really I think kind of the kiss and curse of where we are in terms of not only how long it takes to make a game but then when you get into the online space. The upside of it is that you have the time to do that continuing content, to iterate, to make the game bigger and better and continue to grow off of this experience that players love. The downside is that, when you're in a game like that, you kind of forget that, "Oh, when it came out two or three years ago it didn't have all those things, but it does now." And so that's my level of expectation.

1UP: Well, knowing that players are out there that appreciate those things and expect those things has to push you guys a lot, too.

BR: It really does. I mean, we sit around and talk about it all the time. It's like, "Well, can we get this in? I don't know, but maybe that's something we have to push to get in because people are going to expect that." I think that rolls back to if we released Diablo II today there would be people who would be disappointed. Because they're saying, "Well, gosh, how come I just go into a chatroom and then I go and play with people? How come I'm not my character when I log in?"

1UP: As we wrap this up, what are you most proud of with where the development has come from or over the process -- big points, highlights for you?

BR: Probably the biggest one is the team, to be honest. We started with four of us at Dave's house...sitting around, figuring out what this game was going to be, and in about three and a half years or so, we built up to a company of almost 50 people. There's 18 of us that worked on the Diablo titles together, so it was great to get a strong core group of us together that had worked on games and kinda could finish each other's sentences from the game design standpoint.

But then building this company and building this team and bringing in people from outside the gaming industry and bringing in people from other games and other companies and their experiences and how they layered in has really been a phenomenal undertaking but so, so incredible and a wonderful thing to be involved in. First and foremost, it's where the company's come in that amount of time and the contribution it made to the game. And I think just in terms of the game itself, it's the fact that we did have this vision originally and how, over the course of development, we've actually stayed really close to what that initial kind of core framework was -- that in the absolute nutshell, Diablo II meets Half-Life 2. That was really Dave's pitch, day one. It's like, "OK, we talked about a few different game ideas; OK, here's my high-level concept." And it just started iterating down from that. And from that kind of central nervous system watching the game grow but always being able to look at it and say, "Yeah, that all fits into that core element" has been really pretty amazing.