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It was complicated, and it sounds like the ambition spiraled out of control.
BR: Yeah. I think that was where our "growing up Blizzard" hurt us, right? [laughs] Because at Blizzard you just go for it. Every time you swing, you swing for the fences. A couple benefits we had there that we really didn't have at Flagship -- I mean, even Blizzard now, but Blizzard 10 years ago -- one, there was always support from Blizzard from the top-down, from the publishing-down.
We'd go in there and say, "We need to take six more months. This is why. This is the benefit you will see from it." And you always had to justify it.
There was always the support there to say, "You know what? If that's what you need to make this game great, then that's what we'll get for you. We'll figure it out." It's obviously very different when you are an independent company, right, and not owned by somebody.
It still eventually comes down to dollars and cents and time. I mean, I think when Hellgate: London came out... we knew it needed another four to six months. The publishers knew it needed another four to six months. Everybody was all in. That was kind of the mindset.
I mean, we didn't have any more money to put into it personally. The publishers were like, "Hey, we're invested. We're in. We're as in as we're going to get." So, the game's got to come out, right? You get to the point. Again, because it is a third-party game. When you're owned by the publisher, if you're the developer, they're much more vested in that happening.
Don't you think that's a mistake, though? I mean, that happens a lot. "The game's just got to come out."
BR: Yeah. I think it's a horrible mistake. [laughs]
Blizzard proves to an extent that polish is what sells.
BR: Sure. I mean, the Blizzard model is almost impossible to use as one to follow, right?
True.
BR: I mean, they will put unlimited time and resources into getting the game out. Every bet is huge. And you have to take everything into perspective. When World of Warcraft came out -- what was that, five years now, five plus years ago now -- when we were working on WoW, the biggest Western MMO was EverQuest. They had 330,000 subscribers.
By the time we were starting to talk about, and this is in '03, I think we were having these discussions... We had sat down and said, "Do you realize that we're going to have to have a million subscribers for a year to break even?" Like we started talking about how much money and how much time had been invested just at that point, and that was insane.
You can't plan for that. That's like saying, "Hey, we've got a great band. We're coming with our first album, and we're going to put all the time we want in the studio, and all we've got to do is sell 10 million copies, and we're gold!" It's like, no one plans for that. And I think at one point, that got really scary.
And if World of Warcraft wouldn't have -- not even do what it did -- but if it wouldn't have been a financial success, a lot of heads would have rolled. The time was right. The market wanted that, and as with all their games, when it came out, it was just as polished as they could get it. Now, people also forget that WoW was pretty flawed in some ways when it came out. Its servers were down all the time and, you know, all these things.
I think the difficulty there is that it seems like a simple enough formula, right? "Hey, put in all the time that you need, make sure the game is perfect when it comes out." But at some point, you have to pass that bottle test. You got to pass that gut check if you're on the publisher side and say, "Am I really going to pay for another six months? Is it good enough to come out?" You start second-guessing that stuff.
You probably went through some of the most harsh and unpleasant community reaction experiences a developer has had in the last decade. [laughs]
BR: [laughs] Yeah. The community reaction put the hell in Hellgate.
To a good extent, we were our own victim, if that's going to make any sense. You know, we had to put together a good chunk of money to make that game. We had to sign a lot of deals, and we had a U.S./Europe publishing partner and an Asian publishing partner. I mean, there were a lot of moving parts in that. And to go out and get the support we had...
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Not really an MMO but still charging like one. I'm not surprised they went under.
The only sucky part about the game was the subscription model. I mean on the inside cover of the box release (that I still have) it was promised that there would be additional classes for subscribers, guild vs guild warfare etcetera. I was a subscriber for 9 months and only recieved an extended inventory. Had they mad eexpansions a "single Purchase" and introdced new features that way then it would have been a lot more sucessful inhte long run.
Great game, fantastic vision, horendous business plan.
I never thought it was a bad game at all. Definitely buggy, and not nearly as good as Diablo 2, but a lot of fun, and a lot of the same appeal as Diablo 2, with the added bonus of run n' gun action. If they had just made it single player from the start, it would've ended up amazing.
That, and the horrible last 10% of the story-mode with the broken "casual multiplayer minigame"-style missions, which caused me to never have finished the game.
Despite loving the setting and enjoying the story.
Hellgates various and varied flaws, to me, were easily overlooked when considering all the game had to offer and was attempting to offer.
And yeah, Roper was successful at Blizzard - a great company that does many things to make it's employees and projects successful. Oh yeah and gave him alot of press time to make a public name to get other offers / funding. And Roper took that for granted, ditched, and thus inherited the responsibility on himself - be it good or (the real case) bad. As he said they were their own victim.
I applaud the openness, and it sucks to hear about personal life being damaged/affected by work (if that was the case). In my opinion, a responsible designer would take on something much more manageable as a first project. As I understand they did have Mythos as some form of proof of concept, it's just a shame that the magic there was lost in the process of the "grander vision".
Roper is proof that many developers/publishers in the game industry are a bunch of sheep who follow the herd. They become so out of touch with gamers they can't use their imaginations anymore.
1. The promotion for the game started way too early. And since you have to keep building it up till release, the hype got to the point where the game could do nothing but disappoint.
2. The optional subscription. One of the big selling points was that it was free to play online, like the Diablo games. The sub made people feel like they were going to be second-class citizens unless they paid extra. And there did not seem to be a solid plan - to customers, it felt like a desperate, last-minute money grab, not to mention a slap in the face considering that the game wasn't quite finished yet. And the item inventory space for non-subscribers was way too small, rubbing some salt in the wound every time you ran out of space.
3. Business model. Development in San Francisco is expensive, especially when you are also spending money lavishly on non-development stuff. What happened to the console versions? The sub model appeared to be a kind of last minute "uh-oh, we'll never make our money back, I wish we'd made an MMO instead."
4. Too many chefs. The game design was not tightly focused. It wanted to go in more of an action direction than the Diablo games (which was about as much of an action game as an RTS), but it kept the OCD stat emphasis of RPGs. There were powers that would have worked well in a Diablo game, but in a FPS view, with fewer enemies, more enclosed spaces, and three dimensions, they didn't fit all that well. There was FPS with guns, but it felt like a gimped FPS because of how fired projectiles would just disappear after a certain distance. MMO-style fetch/kill quests thrown in at last minute for good measure, but with an inventory system that was really not suitable for the item drops associated with it.
5. Too ambitious. The "scrappy start-up" picks a modest target at first, gets a game out and refines the process and pipelines. Then they can make something bigger and better. Betting the farm on a semi-experimental idea isn't a great plan - better to iterate when it's not burning up a million dollars a month. It seems to me that the founders believed too much in their own legend, much like the people at Sigil.
Disagree with Sting above - if they wanted to cash in on the MMO genre, they would have made an MMO.
I agree with everything you said except that the whole 3D environment and third person perspective *is* mmo entirely, the fact that they wanted to charge subscriptions was just more proof they were influenced by MMO's during development, every game during that period had MMO influences because everyone saw the money MMO's were capable of pulling down. How you interface with characters, dialogue, etc, is entirely MMO like. They didn't understand the game they were making. Everyone thought roper and team were making an isometric action RPG rendered in 3D but still had the awesome goodness of the isometric action RPG, then they get this pseudo wacked out third person game.
Notice diablo 3 is totally in the isometric gameplay style of diablo 2, they didn't fundamentally break the gameplay. Quite frankly every gamer was expecting a game like Torchlight in gameplay style out of Hellgate, what they got was a big mess where the designers were clueless the were too influenced by MMO style games and you can see it in the design.
Consider what you just said " There were powers that would have worked well in a Diablo game, but in a FPS view, with fewer enemies, more enclosed spaces, and three dimensions,"
That statement is proof they were influenced by MMO's in a huge way.
As an FPS/RPG hybrid, Hellgate wasn't quite as good as Bioshock (as one example) in terms of pure shootiness and environment manipulation. This is simply because Hellgate was a Diablo-style numbers-heavy action-RPG first and an FPS second. But I enjoyed it for what it was.
EDIT: Oh yeah, despite the HORRIFIC problem of the rest of the game literally not acknowledging it was there and forcing you to look up FAQs, it had one of the best crafting systems of any game I had played. Until Minecraft, which also forces you to look up stuff on the wiki, Hellgate was the most fun crafting experience ever. (I would say Torchlight was even better, except Torchlight's crafting system basically is Hellgate's, just a little more refined.)
Every factor and feature that Roper mentioned as being included in the game, in the many interviews i read before the game was released were indeed there.
It was peoples pre conceaved notions of what it would be and how it would look that let them down, not Flagship.
I played for a month then opted for the lifetime membership as the game was realy good and had an original feel.
The game started out good and after the patches ended up being great.
I still see HGL as one of the best online games ever.
Thanks Roper and all who worked on Hellgate.
I'm still hoping HanbitSoft's Hellgate Resurrection makes it out8)
There is only one question worth asking Roper, that is never asked: Why so many grey zombies?
The game has them in 70% of the zones. The same grey zombie you see in the first area, is still there in the last areas. They had red and green zombies, but they were very rare and only appeared for quests.
That just isn't standard for the genre. Dragon Warrior 1, Rogue, Phantasy Star, Pool of Radiance... these games had a moving progression in their bestiaries..
Secondly, the subject, Roper, comes across as a very vain guy who honestly had no business being the CEO of anything. If you can't tell that your box sales aren't going to dig you out of a hole before the boxes hit the shelves, you are not good at running a business.
The baby with the bathwater, in this case, seems fitting. This whole interview is just one big apology, stopping just short of begging to be respected again. Sad.
It must be lovely passing judgement on people from up on your cloud.
It makes me wonder how badly can someone's career be burned by a failed product. I have no doubts that he is a good designer.
Or maybe it was something that happened at Cryptic that burned him with the development community?
"We'd talk with developers, and we'd be like, "Oh. We understand what it is you're looking for now. Yeah. We can definitely do something... That would work in our game." But we didn't get a lot of feedback. Everybody needs that. Even the best writer needs an editor, right? Everybody needs that. I think that was a huge thing we didn't get."
It's an angle I hadn't really thought much about before beyond the obvious "you should QA test games". Interesting...