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

Interview: Bill Roper, Kaiser Hwang and Dave Steinwedel on content upgrades, end game, PvP, and more.
Date: June 9, 2007
Source: Play HGL.

PlayHGL.com Interview

For the content updates that are scheduled every few months for Hellgate: London, will it be for multiplayer only? Or will there also be single player content in those updates?

Bill: All the continuing content is focused on multiplayer. That’s a very important thing for us, as we do that continuing content, things that will kind of trickle out every month or every time we do those big content patches, those are designed for the ongoing content. That isn’t to say, there may not be something in the US and Europe for single player, but our main focus after the game launches is being able to support those players that are there online, experiencing the game with us and growing it online.

Kaiser: Just to add, if you have a specific item that you get as part of patch, you can use those in your single player game.

Bill: And also obviously any bug fixes, or tweaks or balance changes, would translate back to parts of how the single player would work. But the moving forward, the continuing part is online.

What will be the end game be for Hellgate: London? If say, I have completed all the missions and quests and it is 3 to 4 more months till the next content update.

Bill: The idea for the end game, is that there isn’t a single thing, is that there will be multiple things that you can do. And that’s a lot of what we will be doing during those very first continuing content updates, is all through the beta, talking with our players and seeing like what parts of the games do they like, what’s exciting, what are they having fun with, and what are you wanting to see more of and how we can fill that out, once you are done with the storyline, for example.

I think what is pretty compelling though, is the fact that we can do things like introduce difficulty levels, introduce different types of areas that you can move out into. So, because everything is randomly generated, it’s not like once I’ve gone through this part of the world, then I always know what it is like. That is one of the things that kind of disappoints me about classic MMORPGs. Is that once I’ve explored it, I know where everything is.

So when I start another character, or when I play my ALT or whatever it is, it’s like oh yeah, I got to go through here again and do this exact same thing. We really don’t have that, even if I’ve been through the Victorian Sewers 50 times, I am always finding something different when I go through there. Whether it is new layouts, or rarity within levels, there is always new things to have fun in that way. So, I think it will be a combination of the fact that the game is never really the same twice, plus then, coming out with all this different storyline and game play modes that you can go to. In fact we have a whole station built around that idea right?

Dave: The Templar base is one of them. Yeah, and so the idea is that not only are the levels randomly generated as far as how they are laid out, but the types are random. So the Kings Way Sewers might next time be the Kings Way City. Even though it is the same level, you know, as far as the path and the game, it could be a different level type. And then on top of that, you have different sets of monsters that may or may not be in there. So the last time you played the Sewers, you may have been fighting Zombies and the Fell Horde Diggers, and then the next time you could get Stalkers and Minions or the Wraiths. So playing in the Sewers is going to be a different experience each time, on top of the fact that it may or may not be sewers. So there is so much of that going on in the game.

Bill: And then there is rarity too, which we never did in Diablo games right?

Dave: Right, then we have rare levels. You might come across a rare level, which all the monsters will be ramped up and there will be fire everywhere and you’ll get extra special drops, you’ll find better weapons, you know.

So is there a cow level?

Dave: What’s that? Is there a cow level?

Bill: Oh no. We haven’t added a cow level specifically.

Dave: All we need is a cow.

Bill: If we had a cow we could make a cow level.

Bill: Yeah we definitely want to have some things that...

Dave: That will be the equivalent of a cow...

Bill: Like a rare thing that you have to find and know how to open it. We like those, those are fun.

There’s PVP in the game, is there a storyline to it or is it currently just a game mechanic?

Bill: Right now, the PVP is pretty much more like arena combat and duelling. We kind of want to find out what it is that our players want out of PVP and how that would work with Hellgate: London, because the game is so different. That would be something we are actually kind of looking forward to building with our community. And we can always introduce a much deeper PVP model with storyline included and things. Our game world will make that, a little I think, interesting and challenging to do because it is really pretty much designed to be PVE. Where you are the humans and the demons come in, and there is not a lot of infighting, but even when you get to the storyline, you find out that not everybody gets along. So I think there is some foundation there to be able have some kind of story driven PVP as well.

For multiplayer is there friendly fire? Is there an option to turn it on of off?

Bill: There is no friendly fire, so can’t hurt each other

Dave: Can’t hurt yourself either.

Bill: Yeah can’t hurt yourself either

Can’t hurt yourself? Grenade at your feet?

Dave: Yeah, that stuff won’t hurt you.

Bill: The only thing we talked about was maybe having barrels exploding do damage to everybody. Like if something in the world blows up.

Dave: Right.

Bill: Well that might do global damage. But we don’t want to have you like worry about, because you have so many monsters and so much going on and all these crazy effects of the weapons. We try that and it was like “Don’t get in front of me!”.

Maybe Hardcore mode?

Bill: Hardcore would be terrible if we gave them friendly fire. We could have a game play type where friendly fire counted.

Dave: That’s like a toggle. We could, if it was fun, we may. But at this point, but some things are to predict, like if you are in a tight area, is your nova going to bounce back and kill you? Because you don’t want to be able to not use your nova. Maybe you do! That could be something we could try, that’s certainly possible.

Bill: It’s not that hard for us to try. But we always end up with whatever is fun. Maybe that could be even a game play mode we can go into, friendly fire.

Dave: We have a lot of those things that happen accidentally and we’re going, that was kind of fun, let’s do more of that!

Can you import your single player character to multiplayer or vice versa?

Bill: You can’t bring single player to multiplayer. The big reason being that when in multiplayer, we’re in secured servers, so all the character data is stored in our servers. In single player, we don’t know what people are doing to their characters, whether they are hacking or cheating or using trainers. So we like your online character to be secure, if somebody has something, you know they got it, they didn’t just cheat it out themselves.

I’m not sure you can bring multi to single. Theoretically you could, but you wouldn’t be able to bring them back…

Kaiser was saying that Elite items could be used in single player?

Bill: If you were getting those continuing content releases, because you were subscribing online. Those would show up when you are playing the game by yourself.

As drops?

Bill: Yeah, yeah, because I opened that content. But that does not necessarily mean that I can take my multiplayer character and bring it to single player. But that the equipment and such things would start showing up.

It’s been mentioned that the difficulty will scale depending on how many players are in the group.

Bill: It scales both in terms of number of monsters and their health points and things. But not like Oblivion, you know how Oblivion...

By levels.

Bill: We don’t change the level of the monsters. If you are in a like level 15 area, just using a general number, and you got 8 people in your group and then 4 leave and you have 4. It is still a level 15 difficulty area, which is now taking into account that you only have 4 people in your group, not 8. So the monster will have fewer hit points, they will do less damage, we adjust of the monster, but it still maintains its level if that makes any sense.

What I meant to ask was would the number of monsters increase or decrease, or would the difficulty of the monsters increase of decrease?

Bill: It’d be number, not difficulty. Depends on what you mean by difficulty, they are easier to kill because you have fewer people, but there are also probably less of them. Instead of them having 1000 hit points, now they got 500 hit points, but their attack may still be the same. There are a lot of attributes and variables that we adjust on.

The best way to explain is, if I had 3 level 20 characters and 3 level 5 characters, and the level 20s were kind of dragging the level 5s through, because they were say fighting in a level 15 area. If the level 20 guys leave, the level 5 guys can’t play anymore because it is too hard, because it is still level 15 difficulty. Even though the monsters would scale down, for example, in numbers and possibly in their hit points, and a few other slight adjustments. I don’t know how that explains it, but we make it so it is balanced for the number of the people that are in the game, not necessarily for their level. You have to be the right level, to be in the right area.

What is the level different between a high and low level player before it is not worth partying each other?

Bill: We don’t have that set right now. It will probably be something maybe like 4 levels or 5 levels. It will be pretty close, that is something we will play around with during alpha and beta testing, so it’s not set. It will be a fairly small range, but not too restrictive so you don’t have to be exactly the same.

Will there be a collector’s version?

Bill: Yeah, that will be something that we will work with each distribution partner. Yeah, definitely have plans for a collector’s version.

I was trying out the game just now and noticed a lack of music, will there be music in the game?

Bill: Oh, that was kind of weird, yeah. I don’t know if they turned it off because it was going to be so loud. Sometimes they do that, when we have a lot of computers in an enclosed space like this. They’ll just turn the music off, because with all the music and everything else, it’s loud. There’s full music in the game, and the music is dynamic, so it changes depending on not only where you are, like in the stations, there are different types of music. But when you are out adventuring, like the more fighting you do, the pace of the music picks up and the density of it, and if you have more monsters around you and go to certain areas. It is a fairly complex music system that is in there that actually cares about what you are doing and where you are in the world, as opposed to just kind of playing a soundtrack in the background. But there is also just ambient sound. I guess they probably just turned the music off when they were testing it because wow, there was too much going on.

Last question, I noticed Wart in the game, and you mentioned the Cow Level before. Can I expect more of the old school humour like from your previous games?

Bill: Yeah, there is definitely. When you really get into the game, there is a lot of NPC dialogue that are pretty funny. We have some kinds of quirky characters in our world, there is also some serious characters in the world. Wart was definitely a nod to our past. There will probably be a couple a things, not a lot, for the old school Diablo 2 player, they’ll get a smile, we want them to get a little smile out of them.