Hellgate Guru

IGN has posted up a short report from GC about Hellgate London. They don’t really go into much detail other than one quest, however they talk about the technology that FSS uses to test various statistic in their game to help them figure out how to balance it better.

In one case, the team was getting feedback from players that the Swordmaster “sucked.” Digging a little deeper, the Evil Eye data revealed that the class fell behind the power curve at level ten. It turns out that nearly every single Swordmaster player choose the Dual Wield ability once it became available at tenth level but the ability wasn’t quite offering up the same damage out vs. damage in ratio that some of the other classes were getting at the same character level.

The Evil Eye information allowed the developers to make some intelligent choices about how to solve the problem. Rather than just tweaking it through trial and error, the developers can see exactly where the imbalance is and address it directly. In the case of the Swordsman, that meant adding the Dual Wield ability as a default ability for the class and slightly increasing the effectiveness of swords across the board.

Though it was originally built for the beta, Flagship plans to use Evil Eye to continue balancing the game once it ships. (EA is also currently encouraging other developers to incorporate Evil Eye into their own development processes.) Given all the extra content that the team has in mind for after the game’s release (new classes, new weapons, new events), this balancing feature will definitely come in handy.

Enjoy