News Bill Roper on the closure of Flagship Studios

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2008/08/20/bill-roper-on-the-closure-of-flagship-studios/1

Bill Roper, one of the original designers for Diablo II, discusses the closure of his new company and the effect of Hellgate: London.

 

HG:L was a fairly decent single player experience IMO, but the multiplayer content didn't add any value and I'm guessing thats what sucked most of the money out of the company. If they had kept a more hands off approach to multiplayer then they would probably had some success.

 

I hope the Franchise survives in some form. I think its a fabulous universe that has a ton of mileage in it. And with the lessons learned in Hellgate, Hellgate 2 would have been stunning.

That said, Hellgate was getting more solid and refined as time went by, but fickle PC gamers wouldn't hang around for "what might be".
I applaud them for trying.

 

WTF is that fella talking about?! The PC market was at it's prime last year with more AAA+ titles than we had seen in the past 5 years (Bioshock and the Orange Box to name but 2).
I think they deserve it - the only succefull multi-genre title has been GTA and it was a perfect combination.No one has been able to top it.

 

QFT

singleplayer was ok, but the multyplayer was lacking (or, in other words, could have used several monthes of polishing).

 

i think when he said the market was lousy, he was referring to the market from the developer's and publisher's point of view. when that many quality titles come out, the less likely your game is gonna sell well since there is more choice for the consumer and more competition for you, even if the genres are different(unless you hype it up really well so that ppl buy even if it is mediocre). last year was nirvana to us but a struggle for some dev's.

 

The problem with HG: L, is that they spent 90% of the budget on the intro and 10% on the game. The intro was so good, that virtually any game would have seemed like crap after it.

 

Never played the game.... looked very dated with neon crap, glowing stuff all over the place and bland everything else. But it had an expensive FMV intro you say? They still make those??
Seems like these guys were pretty clueless.