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."