Xfire Chat with Hellgate: London Developers

Xfire held a chat yesterday with some of the developers from Flagship Studios, responsible for Hellgate: London, which also released yesterday. The entire chat transcript is now available online, but it’s a fairly lengthy read, so I’ve taken a choice excerpt and included it below. One noteworthy item was how the game handles subscriptions ending and your characters that might be in extra slots that subscription status granted you.

Question: What will happen to characters located in slots 4 to 12 (subscribers only) if subscription runs out or is terminated? And we also see similars problems for items located in the extra part of the stash…

Answer: If you cancel your subscription, then those characters will become unavailable. They’ll still be saved on our servers, so if you should get your subscription back, your characters will be waiting for you. Similar situation with the extra stash space.

Question: What are you planning to do to keep both subscribers and standard players happy?

Answer: Bill Roper: We have a LTO of things there for our free players that are so far beyond what we’ve done in the past.

Bill Roper: In fact, we opened up some areas to our free standard players that are more than they get in single player and were also going to orignially just be for subscribers.

Bill Roper: Our Elite Difficulty mode is a great example of that, as is making PvP available to everyone. Dave Brevik was also a champion for gettinf Achievements into the game for th dya one patch and making them available to everyone.

Bill Roper: For subscribers, we’ve already started themed events and special content, and we’l be rolling out a lot of stuff in December.

Bill Roper: The goal is to strike a great balance so that people who want to get more content can do so eaily and contantly while still providing an incredible online experience for no extra charge.

[Flagship] LeeDot: In regards to Evoker Balance – One of the interesting things about HG is that each of the classes offers a distinct play experience from one another and the Evoker is at the extreme end of one of those play styles. We ill be trying to continually balance any areas that seem out of whack but I would expect that each class will always have some areas of the game that they struggle with more or less based on their nature.

Read the full chat here.