Bill Roper Talks Hellgate, Mythos, and Blizzard

N'Gai Croal's Level Up blog once again delivers a several-part interview, this time chatting with Flagship Studios' Bill Roper. Formerly of Blizzard Entertainment, Roper's company is currently best known for its work on Hellgate: London, but as Roper points out in the interview they're working on a good deal more than that. He and N'Gai also walk down memory lane, recounting his work on the Warcraft, Starcraft, and Diablo series. Here, he addresses the controversy surrounding Hellgate's somewhat controversial 'tiered' system: "N'Gai: There's been a lot of discussion online about the business model of the game. Going back to the genesis of Hellgate: London, at what point did you know that you wanted to go with a sort of hybrid model: a base game that would have standard PC game retail pricing, and then an optional premium subscription model on top of it as well? Bill Roper: We've actually, since the beginning, known that we wanted to do a tiered format. It was very, very important for us to be able to come up with a way to actually provide even more of an experience than we did with Diablo 2, with Hellgate: London. Basically, we noticed people had a lot of expectations from the team because of what we did with the Diablo series. Part of that was the ability to when they got the game, having that single-player experience and then being able to take that and go online and have that experience for free. I wanted to make sure we had that because that was the base-level expectation of our fans. That's what they got from Diablo 2."

Comments

Re:This is the man who made Diablo II.

[JanusFury]

Diablo 1 and 2 were built by Roper and the other folks at Blizzard North, yes, but not by them only. My understanding is that Roper primarily acted in a PR and oversight position, and while he's a great guy and nice to talk to he wasn't actually responsible for much when it came to what the game ended up being like. This is the reason why the things Roper says don't always make sense from the perspective of someone who worked on those titles.

That, and a large portion of Diablo 1 was actually developed by Blizzard proper, because North's team was really inexperienced at that point and they couldn't have shipped a game on their own. I'm not sure if that was the case for D2 as well but I wouldn't be suprised.

Re:This is the man who made Diablo II.

[king-manic]

He may have made Diablo II, but he, astoundingly, doesn`t GET Diablo II. Diablo II offered the same single-player experiecne online, for sure - but that's if you played alone and...well..why play online, then? No, what made Diablo II great was that you could hop into a game and combine forces with other players to dramatically increase your power, much more than even the same two players alone but combined would achieve. Not so with a tiered service. Why would a paying customer want to play with a gimped free player when he could play with other fully-powered paying customers? It makes about as much sense as a Wookie from the planet Kashyyyk living on Endor with a bunch of Ewoks.

It scaled in a good way with more players. You didn't just gang buster your way through if you had more then 1 person but if you had 5-8 people who were decently equipped and knew their role it made life easier. It only really matters in nightmare or hell difficulties. On normal any old group would wade through unscathed.

A big part of it however was showing off your gear. On a illegitimate server, you knew all the equipment was likely hacked. Thus having a party decked out in perfect gear wasn't interesting. But on the legitimate server you could brag about the storm shield you had (until the botting made it less unique). So their shooting for that, to addict people and then have people pay to stroke their vanity. Possibly they may make items that unlock. So you got the +5 storm shield of evisceration. If you pay $1.50, it adds an extra +1. HArd to say if what ever they have planned will work.