Electronic Arts’ David DeMartini has granted an interview to GamaSutra about his plans with EA Partners, and he also touches upon the subject of the failure of Hellgate: London, a game that EA heavily invested in.
“We’re certainly sad with the results for Flagship and what’s happened with Hellgate, because at the time we signed it, we were trying to get involved in a very complicated relationship between Namco and Flagship.
We were coming late to the party, and trying to do whatever we could to sprinkle the game magic on the project and get it headed in the right direction.
I think that’s an example where all three parties had the best interest of the game in mind, and sometimes the game doesn’t work out. Hellgate is still an incredible concept.”
EA certainly performed its due diligence with the game, but DeMartini believes that at that point it was already too late for the damage to be undone, as most of the game’s fanbase had simply left. DeMartini elaborates:
“We were co-publishing with Namco. I’m not going to dodge a bullet — we had people who were actively working with them on the title.
We thought it would have been slightly higher quality than it turned out to be, and I think the problem with the game was that by the time it got really good, we were four to six months post-release. That was too late; we’d lost the fanbase.
It was strictly an issue of the gameplay and game quality needing to be higher at the start. Unfortunately, Flagship was in a situation where they weren’t in a position to hold the game any longer, and the situation kind of took over.”
Shayera has just pointed out that the recent German Magazine from the German EA website, which incidently includes a free Wasp Dye Kit for the first 5000 people to take up the offer, also includes the entire Game Map for Hellgate London.
Click the link below, as the map contains some spoilers
Many curiosities and oddities find their way into my inbox thanks to the search filters I run to hunt juicy HGL-related content. This is certainly one of the niftier things to have done so. Vice Magazine and Electronic Arts are throwing a launch party for Hellgate: London on Halloween, October 31st. While this information is available on Viceland.com, the official Vice website, more details on the event can be found on FunCheapSF.com:
Vice (a joint record-label venture with Warner Brothers and home to Bloc Party and The Streets) is hosting a free Halloween night party at Fat City (at 11th and Folsom, South of Market) sponsored by the roll-playing game Hellgate. There’ll be a complimentary bar, plus live music by Chromeo pictured (an electrofunk duo based in Montreal and New York City. Check out their hilarious video of “Bonafied Lovin” which is a send up for Dire Straits’ “Money for Nothing”) plus DJs Franki Chan and Omar from Popscene. Free, but you must RSVP to get on the guestlist.
The open bar is for three products, Tito’s Vokda, Colt 45, and also Whiskey, and will obviously be only until supplies last
Cost: FREE* (with RSVP)
Website: http://www.viceland.com/hellgatehalloween/
Venue: Fat City
Address: 314 11th Street (@ Folsom), San Francisco, CA
The “roll-playing” bit is as written. I must ask, do these guys all a huge favor: don’t RSVP if you can’t attend in the first place.
– Scapes
Decided to combine these into one post as Im not sure if they were at the same place or not.
EA had a Campus Party in Valencia and there was a Spanish preview of Hellgate by EATV.es, while this interview is in Spanish, you get to see the European EA P.R. Manager although his speech is translated into Spanish The part about Hellgate starts at 7 mins 24 seconds.
There is another interview with EA, which may have been at the same place or at Redwood. It’s conducted by ElHabib who is a reporter with Game Trailers, and he interviews Ulf Johansson who is the European Product Manager working from EA’s Geneva office. He talks of Hellgate London, and talks of where it’s based, what it’s like, but there is no new information. He talks of other EA games too, so the Hellgate stuff is throughout the video.
This just in, Electronic Arts and Namco Bandai, publishers for Flagship Studios’ Hellgate: London, have posted this press release regarding the game’s pre-order packages and the elusive beta start date:
Redwood City, Calif. – September 14, 2007 – Electronic Arts Inc. (NASDAQ: ERTS) and NAMCO BANDAI Games America Inc. today announced three special pre-order promotions for the highly anticipated action RPG Hellgate™: London in North America. Gamers who pre-order either the regular or Collector’s Edition of Hellgate: London will receive:
* A key to an exclusive Beta starting next week and ending October 7, 2007.
* One of four exclusive dye-kits 1 that will give your hero’s gear a cool color theme right off the bat when Hellgate: London officially opens on Halloween.
* Eligibility to take advantage of the Hellgate: London Founders Offer, giving hardcore players a chance to purchase a lifetime subscription 2 to Hellgate’s premium service for $149.99.
“We’re excited to get our most passionate players into the early Beta test, and to reward them with a special look once the game goes live on Halloween,” said Bill Roper, CEO of Flagship Studios. “The Founder’s offer is designed for those die-hard fans that will have had time to really get to know the game during the Beta phase and plan on spending a lot of time with us online.”
Also, be sure to read the fine print at the end of the press release as it details the definition of “Dye Kit” and “Lifetime Subscription” as well as the limitations of both.
– Scapes
Hellgate: London was one of the prominent PC titles featured at Electronic Arts’ Fall 2007 Press Event. Here is what gaming news site FiringSquad.com had to say about the event and the game.
Electronic Arts held a massive press event on Wednesday at their Redwood Shores campus as they showed off all of their games that are due out this fall and early into 2008. In fact there was so much to see during our brief few hours at the show that we really only spent a brief time with each game that we were interested to see. However there was a lot of goodness to both see and play at EA and its clear that the publisher will have a number of major sellers in the next several months for both console and PC platforms.
[...]
Flagship Studios’s long awaited action-RPG is less than two months away from release. The first person oriented game has been previewed to death (and we should be able to go into more detail when we get our hands on the promised beta version) but Flagship’s head Bill Roper still managed to surprise us with a couple of cool upcoming features. One was footage of a massive boss battle with a character that is 30 stories tall and looks like Godzilla with massive stone piledrivers for legs. You have to defeat the boss by leading it to fixed turrets that shrink the monster down to (almost) your size but then he fires fireballs and generates small minion creatures at you as well.
To quote Lee Dotson, you never know what the BOA (Beast Of Abaddon) will do.
– Scapes
Electronic Arts. The name is now synonymous with such words as behemoth, 80,000-pound gorilla, and monopoly. Suffice to say, they’re big. However, this gargantuan gaming industry company is now ready and willing to answer questions posed by the gamers who made Electronic Arts what it is today!
As the title suggests this is your chance to ask EA absolutely anything your heart desires be it about any of their games, franchises, policies, controversies (like the wikipedia entry or the EA spouse thing) or even job requirements (just keep it a bit civil). All of your questions will be answered in a week or so on Tech2.com.
To submit your questions, follow the directions at the bottom of this article.
– Scapes
Hellgate Guru was founded in mid-2005 and has ever since been one of the most popular fan sites and forums devoted to Hellgate: London, catering to a wide range of interests, as well as having a dedicated team of staff members who keep the website full of constant updates, news and generate activity and hype around the game. More
The part about Hellgate starts at 7 mins 24 seconds.
