Bill Roper on the Hellgate 12
eToyChest has an interview up with Bill Roper, formerly of Blizzard Entertainment, discussing progress on the action-RPG Hellgate: London. From the article: "Hellgate: London is playable as a stand-alone single-player game, but it's the multiplayer components that we believe will really make it shine. We're building our own online destination for the game that is comparable in features to any MMORPG. This means a client/server structure to provide safe and secure gaming, character databases, customer service, guild support and so on. We want to provide ongoing content for the game long after it has shipped, and we're building both the game and our infrastructure to lay the ground work for doing just this."
Randomized maps and items (Score:4, Informative)
However, the nebulous release date of '2006' seems to be far off for me. Also, he mentioned that single player and multiplayer are two different tracks. I hope they adopt the idea of the Diablo open and secure characters, allowing us to copy over single player characters for 'open' games just between friends. But he seems to imply coop, though in a game such as this, I wonder what happens to the story.
The game itself seems to be pulling from a couple different areas though. There are a couple others that tried this and failed. (*cough*diakatana) And of course, some that succeeded, like System Shock. Going to be interesting to see what they can do with it.
Re:Sounds good, but... (Score:2, Informative)