Hellgate: London interview

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We quiz lead dev Bill Roper on his devilishly good RPG

Oct 5, 2007

Hellgate: London opens for devilish, action RPG business in the first week of November, offering an apocalyptic view of the good city and a healthy amount of demon bashing. We tracked down Bill Roper, ex-Blizzard chap and Diablo developer, to get the inside track on Hellgate's inception.

GamesRadar: So, first off, why make Hellgate: London as an action RPG?

Bill Roper:[At developer Flagship Studios] wereally like action RPGS. We like fighting lots of demons, and having you feel really heroic with your character. A lot of us play a lot of different MMOs, going all the way back to Ultima Online, and earlier with MUDs and stuff. There's plenty of WoW players in the office, and Dark Age, so it's not that we dislike that pace of gameplay, but we just prefer action in our RPGs.

Just like when the original Diablo came out, we think there's a big hole in the gamer's palette for this style of game. There's a few that do come out. But it's the ones that focus not only on the action element but the randomisation element that we know gamers love. Diablo II players especially are going to keep waiting for that next big thing they can latch on to, and hopefully that'll be Hellgate. Because we definitely love that style of game, and that's who we made it for - for us and for them.

Ben_Richardson

Ben Richardson is a former Staff Writer for Official PlayStation 2 magazine and a former Content Editor of GamesRadar+. In the years since Ben left GR, he has worked as a columnist, communications officer, charity coach, and podcast host – but we still look back to his news stories from time to time, they are a window into a different era of video games.