E3 07: Hellgate: London

"We'd never be able to do this at Blizzard," said Flagship director of technology Tyler Thompson, but I'm not really paying attention. Instead, I'm trying to catch a tidbit of a shotgun statistic as it flashes on-screen. 72-100 damage, rate of fire... but I'm too late. Already Thompson is out of the menu and blasting dog-like monsters with what he calls a "shotgun of rockets," or what FPS gamers would commonly refer to as a "big fucking gun." With one carefully-aimed blast he reduces a creature to a pile of flesh, laughing as he moves his character further down into a decayed subway dungeon, looting all that he sees.

Thompson has every reason to make comparisons to his former employer. After serving as a programmer on Blizzard's Diablo II and as lead programmer on its expansion pack Lord of Destruction, Thompson left the company in 2003 along with former Blizzard director Bill Roper and a sizable crew. Forming Flagship Studios, the team's first major project bears much in common with the Diablo series, both in title and in practice. Hellgate: London may look like a shooter, but nearly every other aspect of the game is an evolution based on the addictive formula of Diablo, right down to tech trees, randomized dungeons, and the frenzy of click-based combat. One of these evolutions addresses the problem of markedly rewarding players for their personal achievements, rather than leaving rewards as random draws amongst group members. When a monster dies, you only see an item drop that is specifically attached to your character. No other players in your group sees this item, and they all can receive different drops depending on their class and level. "We're not going to shove it in your face all the time," Thompson remarked, referring to the frustrating experience of finding loot that your character can't use in other games. Logging out of the rifle-based Marksman class, Thompson activated a Blademaster character, and began stylishly hacking away at incoming enemies. One enemy approaches that spreads flame as it moves, a random effect that has been attached to that particular entity--a holdover from the Diablo series, as he quickly notes. While the game looked and ran solid, it's impossible to judge an MMO based on a few minutes of gameplay, so I soon gave up and focused my attention on the creator of the code. Before we get too far into our chat, I asked him a question that was raised by a Shack community member when news of Hellgate's subscription fee was announced: what happens to a subscribing player's subscription-based items when he stops paying for the service? The answer, Thompson confirmed, is that the items simply become unusable. Players can can leave the game for a period of time and subscribe again later, reclaiming their bonus materials at any time for the $10-a-month fee. As Thompson continued to mass a pile of monsters at his avatar's feet, I spoke with him on a number of non-technical topics related to Hellgate. Read on for the industry veteran's comments on pricing models, online item trade, incremental updates, and future expansions. On pricing models: "There's a $10 a month subscription. We're not doing any models. We are doing a $10 a month subscription. This is our model. We have one model. [Pauses for effect. Laughs.] Any time you do any new model, you have lots of debate, but we're sticking to our guns. "You pay 10 dollars a month. You get extra storage space--and by the way, I think the basic storage space is more than enough. I've been playing a lot of these characters and I haven't even put anything in my storage locker yet. But you know, people are item oriented, they'll get more space. You have access to hardcore mode. And then ongoing content, extra features, extra stuff in the game. New weapons, armor, character classes. Guilds, guild officers, guild creators. Average players will go online and say, 'You know, I'm playing this game a lot. I want more characters. I want more stuff. I can pay $10 a month to get that stuff.' And the new content, they'll have to evaluate it and see if it's going to be worth it." On MMO currency trade: "It's definitely a sign of a healthy economy in a game, when items have value, and currency has value. That's a good thing. If people are actually putting value on those things because they're putting value on their time, that means people are really enjoying and playing the game. As far as the actual economics of it, and whether it changes the game or not, I'm not too concerned about it. Because we have instance play, you're not gonna be running into gold farmers that are going to be stealing all your stuff or taking all your kills. It won't be a physical annoyance to all of those players. "I know plenty of guys who like to go online and buy those cool items and make the guys stronger and go out and play. You know, that's fun for them, they have fun with that, and that's cool. We can't directly put monetary value on the things within our economy. And so, we don't directly participate in it." Turn the page for Thompson's thoughts on gold farming, post-release updates, and RPG mechanics in other genres. _PAGE_BREAK_ On designing games around gold farming: "I don't know what we could do to stop the gold farmers. You're not gonna see the gold farmer come by and steal your kill. It won't be an annoyance. It'll be a invisible, existing thing that's only gonna be obvious to you if you actually go participate in it. "I'm hoping for a healthy, happy economy, where gold and money has value, items have value, and people will exchange money for the time it takes to find it. Yeah, they'll probably cause some inflation. I don't know if it'll be out of control or a problem, but they usually cause some inflation. But it's also--this is like Diablo was. Diablo's got gold farming going on. You kind of have your guy, and you go out, and you do your thing, and you participate to a limited degree in the economy. It's kind of up to you. I never felt like I had to go buy stuff or go buy Stones of Jordan or barter or something. It never was a part of the plan. "I don't think the average user is going to feel the impact of it. The main way of finding and getting items in the game is not buying it through somebody else or buying it online. You will find the cool stuff out there fighting. The loot comes in at enough of a pace that you don't have a sinking need that, 'I need to find another way to get good stuff.' Which is what I have the feeling a lot of times in a lot of online games where, 'I know I'm just getting the crap. I know I'm not getting the things I need to play.'" On item restrictions: "We have some items that are no-trade. We don't do that much. We initially made that technology explicitly for quests, because you don't want to trade your quest items. We have in some cases made other items no-trade, but we don't swing that around very often. I'd be surprised if there are more than five or six items today that are marked as no-trade. You know, we'll see. If [item sales] look like a problem, we have measures we can take. We can mark a bunch of items no-trade. We can come up with more money trades for players. We can change how much gold you find at high levels. It's only a problem if players perceive it as a problem, and are running into it in a way that affects their gameplay. If it affects the economy in a natural way, that's not the end of the world. At least that's my opinion." On bringing action to RPGs: "I think you're seeing every game try to incorporate RPG elements, because RPGs have a fundamental, addictive, interesting nature to them. Advancing your character, your world, your place in the game, your money to buy cars--the customizing of their car, customizing and gaining a currency, making choices with that currency, picking attributes that make you better at the game--all these RPG elements enhance any game. Until you start to see almost every genre start to have that. "The one thing that's different about us is that we've done this for a long time. We know what we're doing with making an RPG good and fun and addictive. So taking that to a first person shooter for us is a very natural step that we're able to do quite easily. Some of these other genres are really struggling with the pacing of advancement and rewards, and they don't quite know what they're doing with that. They're still trying to figure out the basic mechanics of RPG-ness. For us, this is all we do. And so, they're all trying to come closer to us is the way I look at it. And they could learn a lot, if they would just look at what we're doing. " On incremental updates: "About every three months for a significant update. We'll fix bugs and things as we're going on, but as far as a big set of features coming. I've seen teams that do it monthly--I don't want to live that life, to be honest with you. It's a constant under-the-gun lifestyle. Also, they don't get much press or attention, because it's every month it's not really news. Because you guys are always asking, what's news? 'They just did that one last month, they're doing another one this month. Am I going to cover this month's?' So if we do it every three months, you're willing to talk about it. That's important. "The coolest part is that it's so easy for us add things to this game. If you saw the expansion pack for Diablo II, we added things to the entire game. There were items that dropped for the whole thing, there were new character classes, new monsters, AI changes, tons of stuff. Because of our random, crazy nature, it's really easy for us to add and grow. I put in three or four weapons in a single day. And the the sound guy has to do his thing, and the particle guy has to do this thing, but as far as getting missiles to explode, bam, bam, bam--I can knock those things out. I gave an intern the job of taking four base monsters and adding four new behaviors to every one of them, and he finished it in like three days. That's part of the ongoing content--we can crank this new stuff out, for both subscribers and non-subscribers." On future expansions: "We have not announced any expansion stuff, and we've not really been talking about it much. There's definitely potential there and we'll talk about that in the future. Part of it is that we're going to grow our team to accommodate development of expansion packs. We're still at the size--a little bit over the size, but not much--of what it's going to take just to do ongoing content and keep "feeding the beast." We're giving birth and this giant beast is going out there. We have to keep it happy and help it grow and keep it fed, and that's really the focus for the first few months after release, more than anything else. This is a living, breathing, active thing that I will be working on for a very long time."

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