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

Interview: Peter Hu at E3
Date: May 12, 2006
Source: The Amazon Basin

Amazon Basin Interview Report

Guild Cap
"There are no plans in terms of a guild cap. It’s not like we go in and say there’s going to be a 50 person guild cap or 500 person guild cap. It really depends upon the technology. So we build the technology and see how many people it can support. And we try to make it support as many people as possible. There’s no goal that we’re only going to support a guild of say 500 or anything. It’s not so much a design issue – it’s a technology issue. We’ll try to support as many people as possible in 1 guild."

Guild Chat
"There will be user created channels. You can create private channels; you can create moderated channels or whatever for yourself. So you should be able to do that for your guild, within the scope of the game."

Guild Halls
"We’ve definitely been talking about it, but it’s not one of our primary features compared to say, creating random levels and random loot and stuff like that. So depending on time and how the schedule works out, it’s possible we’ll have those, but it’s not definite. If everything is done and guild halls are not done, we’re not going to delay the release just for guild halls, but it’s something that we’ll be able to add in the future. If it’s something that we can’t put in the initial release, we’ll definitely look to do it in a future expansion or something."

Guild Storage
"Everything within the scope of guild halls falls within the guild hall. We’re still planning on having storage for your account, but features like guild halls and storage are extraneous and will be done if we can get it in there. The guild itself is very important to us so we’ll have those, but the extraneous stuff that just makes it nicer – we want to have those, but we’ll just have to see if we have time to get to them."

International Servers
"No official word on that. Definitely it’s very important to us to get to allow people to play with their friends. And we realize that peoples friends are all over the world. Especially in this day and age. There’s some issues. HGL is interesting because we have different distributors in different parts of the world. And we’re gonna have to work out some sort of deal. If someone who is distributing the game say in China, they may not want to allow players who buy the Chinese box to log onto US servers because they would be losing income from that. But it’s definitely something we feel is important. So we’d willing to work with these people to get that deal setup so that it’s something that is reasonable for us to do. We’re not going to be doing some sort of IP lock which prevents people who get a US version in china or wherever to play on a US server."

Duping / Hacking
"We’ve completely redesigned all our databases to make duping as hard as possible. That’s something that was really important to US. The way we designed the database for D2 was more of a legacy of the databases we had at the time. These days we can do a lot more and we can actually architect it so that it is much harder to dupe. And definitely we’re designing everything client/server. There’s always going to be hacks. But we’re going to have a team that works with this sort of thing and stays on top of them."

PK'ing
"Being able to kill other players we’ve talked about as being more of a consensual type thing. There’s definitely talk in the office in terms of some people like it and some people don’t. Some people prefer arenas – and some people don’t even want that. So it’s something we’ll have to hash out. The general consensus is that it shouldn’t be where it’s just global where you can kill anyone you want any time you want. We don’t want anything like that. Even if we decide to do like a certain ganking type of D1 or D2, we prefer to put that on a separate player base or character base. So that you could create a PK character so that everyone who has created a PK character would kill each other. WE definitely don’t want people to have their character and fun disrupted by people who just want to go around killing people."

FSS Online Stat Bible (Arreat Summit type thing)
"I don’t think we’ve gotten that far in terms of decisions. Our new website has brief descriptions and movies – maybe we’ll just do more of that. As a small company I don’t know if we have the resources to maintain that sort of thing. Personally I don’t think we’d do as good a job with that as some of the community sites anyway."

Auction Houses
"That’s something that we have on our schedule for development. It’s something that we’d really like to have. We want that feature in the game. We’d love to have auction houses."

Weapons Tied to Characters
"We’re definitely talking about having a mechanism that ties certain weapons to characters, but there will also be weapons that aren’t. Mostly quest items would be tied. Certain items that we’d give away based on an accomplishment – we don’t want you to trade those."

Guild Ladder
"We’d like to add it, but it’s not the highest thing on the priority list."