Hellgate: London Interview

IncGamers has cranked out a new Hellgate: London interview that they conducted with Flagship Studios’ David Brevik back in August.

Flux: The Guardian. One balance issue is that they have so many auras now. I believe earlier in development you could use more than one aura at a time, stacking them at the cost of your power feed. Now you can only use one. Do you think that will need changes, with the character having 15 auras and you can only use one at a time?

Dave: Maybe. We’ll see. I think we’re pretty happy with the way it is now, but it could change for sure. We can easily do things in the future when we’re adding skills or masteries or whatever. If it’s something that will help the character.

Flux: The irony is, if you look at the faction forums the first day after each patch there are 50 posts in the Guardian and Blademaster discussing what’s changed, bitching about what still sucks, etc. Meanwhile there are 3 posts in the Evoker and Marksman forums since those chars are working so well there’s nothing to talk about. (This changed later in the alpha and beta when the ranged characters started to get nerfed a bit.)

Dave: *laughs*

Flux: It’s almost like you want to have characters who have issues since the players get more interested in them and talk about the changes and come up with strategies.

Dave: We have this program called Evil Eye and it keeps track of everything. An insane amount of stats. The number of times skills get used, deaths, where they leveled, leveling rates, almost anything you can think of. It’s this webpage that’s updated live and we can go in and look at what’s going on in the alpha. So that’s really helping us balance the alpha. We look and see, “Oh, the Guardian’s just dying way too much. Or he’s not progressing as fast as the others, and things like that. This skill’s not being used, people aren’t buying second versions of skill, only first versions…” Things like that are really useful for us, and they help us. These are the best tools we’ve ever had for determining these things and balancing. And I think that with that in combination with reading the boards we’ll be able to get feedback and a better balanced game by the time it comes out.

You have to remember how broken World of Warcraft was when it started. It had all sorts of huge imbalances and it took them a year and a half to balance the game, and every single class has to be completely reworked. *laughs* It’s not an easy thing to do, and we are aware of a lot of the problems and I think we’ll get most of them fixed.

I like the Evil Eye concept. Other games should really do something like that.