Hellgate: London Cover Story, Day Five

1Up has published the fifth and final installment to their five-day Hellgate: London feature, this time offering a video interview with Flagship Studios’ Bill Roper. There’s also a full transcript if you’d rather just read the Q&A:

Q: What’s up with people trying to shoehorn the game into different categories, and seeming to miss the idea that it’s just an action-RPG? I mean, what else would you expect from this team? It’s going to be an action-RPG. Except everybody wants to say, oh, it’s a first-person shooter, or it’s an adventure game…what’s going on there? Why do you think that’s happening?

A: People like to have easy ways to describe things. They want that five-second marketing bullet. And I think when you start breaking outside of those boundaries and designing something that is outside of the box, they still want to have a label for it. And it gets harder and harder to put a label on it. I remember we used to have religious arguments that would be occurring in the press and the fanbase over Diablo II about “is this really an RPG or not.” And there’d be all this discussion why it was and why it wasn’t.

And we think we’re going to have a lot of those same types of arguments occur. What is Hellgate? Is it an RPG? Is it an FPS with RPG elements? Is it an RPG with FPS elements? And then there’s the whole online scope of it as well. What is it online? Is it this, is it that? And it’s the kind of thing where we just want to make a fun game. And that’s always the goal: making a game that’s fun. And as we start adding different elements and different experiences that we’ve had and different influences, a game takes shape out of that that really becomes, then, what it is. It is what it is is maybe the easiest way to describe it, but that looks really crappy on the back of a box or in a marketing call-out. Hellgate: London: It is what it is…

We always pitch it as it’s an action-RPG. That’s what it is at its core. But then it has a lot of other layers and elements that we really do think are going to be attractive to other gamers.