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And you had two publishers in America, which was confusing.
BR: Yeah, we ended up with two publishers in America. And we were kind of Namco-funded but EA-published, but Namco still a little bit. And HanbitSoft was the Asian holder for the publisher, but we had The9 in China, IAH in Southeast Asia, and Hanbit was in Korea. So, there were all these partnerships, because we were really trying to maximize penetration for all those markets and support in those markets.
We wanted to work with experts in their markets. But to do all that, we really had to go out and honestly hype like hell. You've got to be showing these people that are investing tens of millions of dollars in your project and company, "Yes, your investment is worth it."
And I get excited about the projects that I work on. I don't think that I talked any more about what the game would be, or could, than I would with Blizzard product. I think that just when a Blizzard game came out, it got close to matching that.
And the things that weren't there, that maybe at some point we had talked about that didn't make the final game were overshadowed by the final product. When Hellgate came out, I think there was an expectation that it was going to change the face of PC gaming, right? And it didn't.
It might have! Not the way you're suggesting. [laughs]
BR: But the backlash, honestly, was staggering. And I think it was, to me, the level and the depth of the backlash. It wasn't just like, "Hey, I played this game, and I didn't like it. It sucked. I hate this game. This game is the worst thing ever." Okay, you didn't like the game and all that. But it got to the point where there were personal attacks on developers.
It seems like the layers, one is like, "Did you like the game or not?" You could say, "I think this game is horrible." Perfectly fine. "Hey, I think your company is crap because it makes bad games." Okay, you know, whatever.
But then I started to get... It got to this level where at one point, on our forums, at the same time... Kind of the backend of this all happening is I was actually going through a divorce at the same time, and somebody found that out and posted on the forums, you know, "Well, I'm sure that his wife is leaving him because he lied about the size of his penis like he lied to us." I'm like, "Oh my... Really? Really? This is where we've come."
And I don't know if it's just because we happened to strike a chord where people had such high expectations for the game... I mean, we had high expectations for the game. We didn't deliver on what people wanted.
And maybe, also at that time, that's just to where the internet -- I hate to use that broad-based term in quotes -- had gotten. Like, people love flaming. The whole thing is all -- they want controversy. They're going to say things. It's like, "Hey, you don't know who I really am. I can say whatever I want." You see it in the press now.
Sure.
BR: It's not limited to gamers and gaming forums. It's become this, you know, almost outspoken Wild West in some instances...
Well, it was a mixture of things, too.
BR: Yeah. And there was a lot going on. We all felt miserable that the game didn't do what we wanted to, not just because we wanted to make money, but because we wanted to make a great game. And I think there were a lot of great ideas there.
I think there were a lot of things that happened in that game, and in the backend. When I talked earlier about how we got much bigger than we wanted to, we had to start a separate company. We had to start Ping0, which did all the backend, the game servers, the support, the billing, like everything. We never thought we would have to do that.
That was originally part of the deal. That was going to be provided. And then when that didn't happen, we said, "Well, we actually need to serve the game, so we have to start a second company." I was CEO of two companies at one point.
It's like now we're making games, and we have a second game we're working on. We tried to have something, like we talked about, having something coming up. Oh, and there's a tech company we're running. So, we had a hundred employees, where we wanted 25.
Things just spiraled out of control.
BR: Things got real big, real fast. But I think that's part of the process. We had really strong people there. We had really intelligent people there. That was a great team, and I think that we were all willing to do anything we could to try to get this game to come out like we wanted, and a lot of times that was just great. "Yes! Wait, nobody is going to do this? Screw it. We'll figure out how we do it."
And I think in the end, we tried to carry way too much of a load, and ultimately we dropped the ball and nobody was happy. Even things like the business model. I talked to people in the industry, they thought, "I thought that was a great idea, especially at the time, for a business model." "Hey, the game is free to play? Oh, but if I want to give you $10 a month, I'm going to get everything you ever do? Sure, I'm in." But gamers hated the idea.
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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...