Jörg Langer Roperviews Flagship’s CEO
March has become the month of the interview flood, it’d seem. The latest to appear on the radar is the exchange Jörg Langer, former editor of the German magazine GameStar, had with Bill Roper, CEO of Flagship Studios. In it, Langer questions Roper about topics ranging from his history at Blizzard to truly in-depth inquiries about game mechanics and how Hellgate: London will feel to gamers.
Bill Roper: …our aim is that even when you feel like you’ve gone through that type of level many times before, there is always something new which could happen, which is more than just a new level layout or the exact kind of monsters you encounter. And this is something which you really miss in an MMO: Once you’ve explored an area…
Jörg Langer: … you never really need to come back, or it’s even pointless to come back because you no longer get experience from there.
Bill Roper: Exactly, and that’s “level grinding” to me. When you have to repeat a repetitive function and there’s no surprise to it. Like having to kill these spiders in this swamp area so that I become level 25 so that I can go on to the next area. There’s no exploration, there’s nothing new. And that’s great in Hellgate: If I go to a new area and I feel it’s too hard, I can go back into that area and it will be randomized differently. New monsters, new layouts, new treasure. So you are always exploring, even if you’re repeating an area.
Jörg Langer: What other differences are there to Diablo?
Bill Roper: The way the classes work and interact. When you play Hellgate in multiplayer mode, it feels like and MMO and not like a “lobby”. It’s a huge difference. In Diablo 2 you would go online and have a chat room, and then you would go out with your friends and play the game. In Hellgate, you meet people and trade and form groups and you’re the character you’ve created all the time. Today, we couldn’t launch a Battle.Net anymore, because the expectations from the players are so much higher in terms of interactivity.
This is quite honestly one of the best Roperviews we’ve seen to date.
– Scaper-X
