Flagship on Hellgate

The Max Schaefer Interview on Eurogamer talks with the Flagship cofounder in a conversation that mostly centers around Mythos, their upcoming MMORPG. Towards the end of the article a question about lessons learned from Hellgate: London prompts a confession that they bit off more than they could chew with the action/RPG:
Oh yeah! [laughs]. If we made a mistake with Hellgate, it was trying to do too many things for too many people. We wanted a cutting edge graphics engine, we wanted multiple business models with subscriptions and free play, and single-player, we wanted to combine third-person play with first-person play, we wanted to do random 3D levels, and when you're starting with a brand new game studio with very limited budget and no existing technologies, that was probably biting off too much. We ended up rushing it to market and not keeping it in the oven long enough, just out of necessity.

We learned from that, and going forward as a studio, it's a new emphasis of ours to do things that are more efficient and better-planned, and smaller teams on smaller projects so we can get more ideas out there. With Mythos we're definitely taking our time, we're well within our budget and our means to make it. It's a little bit of a turning point for us - don't try to do everything for everybody. Just be more realistic about your design goals. Bring it back to nine tenths instead of ten tenths and things will go much sooner.
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Re: Mistake
Jul 7, 2008, 15:07
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Re: Mistake Jul 7, 2008, 15:07
Jul 7, 2008, 15:07
 
www.flagshipped.com

Mythos is a *cute* game, I find the sound effects to be pretty stupid though. And yes, D3 may have killed it even though it will probably have a year to a year and a half to exist before D3 is released.

As far as Hellgate:London is concerned, I'm not sure, as far as consumers go, who wanted a $10 a month rental subscription model so Flagship probably wasted MONTHS of programming the sub model when they could have added better, less repetitive MoBs and Tile sets. They also probably wasted to time coding in Microsoft's Massive Advert Engine product that also took away development time for the game.

The Hellgate:London rental subscription model has to be THE biggest ripoff in the history of PC Gaming. To date, there has only been one content update (Stonehenge that has ZERO quests or storyline, just a grinding sandbox and is ~ 1/5th of the core game that cost $40-50 at release) that has cost some subscribers up to $80 so far (twice as much as the core game itself).

This comment was edited on Jul 7, 15:19.
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