Q&A: Bill Roper opens up on Hellgate

GameSpot has published up a question and answer session with Bill Roper, where they mainly chose to talk to him about the upcoming patch as well as how the team at FSS feel about the game so far.

GS: Hellgate launched with more than a few serious bugs. Was this a matter of staying true to the ominous Halloween date, or were outside forces to blame?

BR: Honestly, we tried to do too much with the game. We created our own engine, tools, and online destination from scratch in just a few years. We are really proud of the work we did, however we were perhaps a bit too ambitious.

If we could have waited another three months to ship, we would have, but the challenges of an independent game studio are much, much different than what we had during our days at Blizzard or the guys at Arena.net face (since we often see comparisons with them and Guild Wars) as they were owned by NCsoft before they had to ship. We don’t shy away from the fact that Hellgate: London was far from perfect when we launched, but we’ve also stayed dedicated to the game and our players and have been exerting every effort to make amends and get the game to what we envisioned. We’re thankful to our fans that have stuck with us, and encourage people who maybe tried the game when it launched or never checked it out because of early concerns to give us another look with The Stonehenge Chronicles.

It is interesting to see that FSS has more or less admited what a lot of fans have been saying of them being too ambitious, however they also seem to confirm a lot of people’s reasoning for why they couldn’t delay the game much longer.

While the entire interview is a very intersting read and I recommend everyone to read it, here is a snippet I found particularly interesting:

We’re continuing to give all of the classes in-depth evaluation and will be making everything from tweaks to whole-sale changes as required. We’re also very close to starting up a “Team Advocate” program where specific members of our community will be organizing feedback in several areas from our player base and then speak directly with the design team to see these issues addressed. We have a lot of very passionate players in our community, and we think this will be an invaluable way to best get their feedback and improve the game.

As well as:

If you look at a game like Eve Online, for example, they started with a very small number of players, but had enough to sustain themselves while they grew the game. Today, they have a healthy and dedicated player base that makes them a success story.

Really the entire article is worth a read, so go read it now!