Hellgate: London Interview

The guys at eToychest were able to track down Flagship Studios’ Bill Roper for a six-page interview about Hellgate: London. Here’s a bit of what was talked about:

Q: Clearly from what we experienced at E3, equipment, and the ability to upgrade and modify the tools available to players plays a key role in the game. Can you elaborate on how equipment is managed an upgraded in Hellgate: London? And what of inventory management?

A: We’re huge fans of items and randomization, and we really are pulling out all the stops when it comes to creating equipment for the game. Since weapons and powers are so closely tied in the game – so much so that we design them to be (spell delivery systems) as opposed to just guns or swords we want players to be able to individualize them as well. This is accomplished through Mods.

Mods are smaller items such as fuel cells, batteries, relics, ammo, runes, gems, and so forth that modify the abilities of the weapon. Everything from increased range to different damage types to affecting rate of fire and on and on and on can be achieved through adding mods to a weapon. Not every weapon has Mod slots, and not every kind of Mod fits on a weapon. It is a very simple, but very deep metagame that players can dissect for hours and hours, looking for the perfect combination of weapon and mod effect.

As far as inventory management, we’re currently using two (sizes) of items large and small. Large items are things like weapons and armor. Examples of small items include Mods and health packs. We’re constantly playing with the inventory interface, changing how many of each size of item you can carry, how to more effectively access and manage your inventory and so forth. As the game grows, so does our understanding of what players want to get to in the inventory. User interface design is something that takes a long, long time to get right, so we put UI in very early in Hellgate: London and will probably be tweaking it well through our beta test.