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Well, like you've said, Americans have a certain philosophy of "we pay for it, we get it all". And also like you've said, people think that you're hiding stuff from them that they would have gotten otherwise.
BR: Yeah. That's the really interesting thing. If you had plans for something -- and we literally would go like, "We probably shouldn't working on something like that even if we have time to start working on it, because if we come out with something like that within the first month, people are going to think we held it, even if it's not true." Because you would never do that.
It's like "We're not just going to hold it so we can release it." It's like, "No, if it's ready, ship it." I think that for some reason, and I don't know if it's because they've been burned by a lot of games they've bought where they thought were going to be something else... Like, I don't know what it is, but I think that gamers have become really jaded.
I mean, a game comes out, and they're like, "Oh God." You're always ready to find out what's bad about it. As opposed to saying, "Oh, this is really awesome. Oh my God. These guys kicked ass. And they came out with all this cool extra content like, you know, a few weeks after the game came out." They're like, "Oh. Like, what was the trick? How were they able to do that? They were holding onto it."
I mean, one of the things I've found is I've spent so much after Hellgate, I mean, to a degree... To me, it felt like trying to reconnect with gamers and going, "Hey, I'm not any different than I was before Hellgate." I think I was very disappointed that followed into going Cryptic. You know, people go, "Oh, great. Now this guy is going to come here and screw everything up." It's like, if only I ever had that level of power.
Yes, I was CEO at Flagship, but it wasn't like I made every single decision, right, and did everything. There is no individual at any company... Except maybe Sid, right. Sid Meier, maybe, because Sid still goes home and codes and brings in stuff. I mean, there's nobody at a game developer who is that one guy or gal who comes in and say, "No, pfff. Everything, every decision that was ever made is me."
Certainly they're not their own funder. You know, do you think there wasn't pressure when we were running Hellgate to say, "Yes, you now have to make the hard choice of are you going to fire 20 people so you can stay open for two extra months?" or whatever it is. You start coming to these decisions... Or it's like, "No, it's good enough. You guys are out of time." Or "What can we do? We can't drop that feature because we're contractually obligated to do it."
You know, there are a million things. And I think that to a degree, it's very hard to get that across. The thing that became, I think, maybe the hardest for me was I would go and I would do an interview, and the interview comes out, and I'm reading it, and I'm like, "Good. I really feel like I was trying to get stuff comes across."
But because of how something is phrased or there's no tone or just the way people would read things, then I would see comments like, "Oh, look at how greedy he is," or this, that, and the other thing. I'm just like, "You don't even know me. I'm just some guy that makes video games. I've been really lucky to have done it for a long time, and I feel like I'm pretty good at it."
That, to me, I think, was that tipping point, especially in the post-Hellgate stuff, where it went from "I didn't like your game" or " I don't think your company makes good games" to the personal assault level.
And maybe that's just because I've been a face for so long -- in quotes, "a face for so long" -- you kind of get that thing where it's like, "Oh, yeah, there's that guy. I know that guy." That thing gets attached. That's nothing I ever wanted. I didn't start making games like, "Yeah. Someday, I'm going to be doing interviews, and I'm going to be giving speeches," and this whole thing.
Well, I think what you ran into also is cultural. Americans love an underdog, but they also like to see people fall from on high.
BR: People hate the Yankees for a reason. It's interesting. I think Blizzard is very rare in that... Somehow Blizzard made the transition from the beloved underdog to the beloved number one. But absolutely, everybody... "Come on, you can do it, scrappy start-up guys." But then when you've had a couple hits.
Well, look at Runic.
BR: Yeah.
Much deserved, everyone was ecstatic to support Torchlight.
BR: Yeah.
And partially because it came out of the wreckage of Flagship.
BR: Yeah. Again, I think that part of this was tied into, definitely, how we elected to represent Flagship, but a lot of it was how we had to represent Flagship to go out and do what we were able to do with that company in such a short amount of time was going like, "Yeah. These are all top flight games and executives from Blizzard."
You had to sell the story, right? And I think that the way that came out, to make a music reference, when a supergroup gets put together and you're like, "Aw, man. We've got the lead singer from this group and the bassist from those guys." And you're like, "Holy crap, these guys are going to be great." And then you listen to them, and you're like, "Wow, that really wasn't as awesome as I thought it would be." They were never going to make the album I thought they can make.
And I think that was the way that we had to present ourselves. And I'm not even saying it wasn't true. We had amazing top flight talent there, but when that's a part of your story and you're pitching that, then people say, "Okay, then I'm immediately raising the bar on what I expect."
If you're like, "Hey, we're a bunch of scrappy guys that just want to make games," people are like "Okay, well, gosh, I hope they do well," and you come out with something good, they're like, "Oh my God!"
It's hard to say because you can't really find this out... If Hellgate would have come out from a different developer, how much different would the reaction have been? Like, "Hey, here's a start-up. We made this game." You know, would people have gone like, "You know, it's flawed, but wow, holy crap. What an amazing first effort"? Or if they would have been like, "This is a train wreck and a disaster, and I hate you"? Which is what we got.
Again, we were the victim of our own success previously and, you know, hey, that's how we put ourselves out there. We felt that's what we had to do to get the funding to do the company and everything. From that perspective, I understand where some of that backlash comes from.
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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...