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A whole slew of new wallpapers of the equally new classes have been made available on HanbitSoft’s Hellgate: London site. Other wallpaper-sized images are also available there.
Kudos go to SuE from Hellgate Station for the find.
– Scaper-X
Flagship Studios has supplied the Korean media with character sheets consisting of the newly announced Engineer, Marksman, Evoker, and Summoner classes. Also included are the Guardian and Blademaster classes. Check them all out here:
Individual class sheets are also available.
The information in them is the same as what was written up in May’s PC Gamer. Find thanks go to Hellgate Master.
This has been a great competition, and we’ve received quite a few really great submissions. The choice wasn’t easy, but we stand by our decision to award the following people:
First Place in Group A
Kotoko for “Hunter Targetting a Carnagor”:
Second Place in Group A
Harbinger for “The Cookie”:
First Place in Group B
AngelicFaces for “The Templar”:
Congratulations to all our winners! I’d also like to thank everyone who participated in this contest. You guys have done a really wonderful work! All submissions can now be viewed in our Got Paint? thread.
The winners can now PM me with their contact information. The prizes will be mailed when all information is received.
One learns a quite possibly unsettling amount of information about the developers of the game they run a fansite about. That said, I invite my fellow Gurus in wishing Flagship Studios’ CEO and founding member of the Poxy Boggards, Bill Roper, a happy birthday. It’s worth noting that I couldn’t find his birthyear but I suppose that’s just as well. Instead, I managed to find this slightly dated image of him for the day:
A good many of us have been waiting for PC Gamer’s May 2007 issue for a fair amount of time now. Word was that the four classes, those of the Hunter and Cabalist factions, would be announced in an upcoming publication. We then heard that the same PC Gamer that covered Guild Wars 2 had an exclusive on Hellgate: London’s classes along with sample skills for each. Fortunately, we came across some scans of the article late today and have posted them up for all to see.
In the spirit of northrop’s QuickFacts forum thread, Sulfuric has compiled a fine list of new visitors’ first questions about Hellgate: London we like to call “GuruFAQ” as it is born of suggestions and quotes from our forums and news. Sulfuric has added himself to the growing list of Hellgate Guru members who have taken a idea and turned it into a full-blown fansite project, continuing our site’s two-year history of supporting and nurturing such endeavors.
The fruits of his labor can be found here or by clicking on “gurufaq” along the horizontal navigation bar on the front page.
– Scaper-X
As you may know, Mythos was given a nice press release throughout the internet today, and FiringSquad seized the opportunity to conduct an interview with Phil Shenk on the subject of Mythos. Here’s an interesting tidbit on the foundation of Flagship Seattle.
FiringSquad: First, how did the idea come about to form a separate Flagship Studios team in Seattle?
Phil Shenk: Travis Baldree, and the rest of the team were all based there already, and they had worked together in the past. It seemed like a good idea to keep them there, since they were already settled with their friends and family. It also has worked out well to have them somewhat insulated from the core Hellgate development, just avoid any problems with focus. We know from experience that when the schedule gets tough, and crunch schedule starts, it’s hard to resist the temptation to pull folks over onto the project that’s feeling the heat. Having them up there avoids that temptation.
They also have developed an intense pride in what they’re doing, and there’s a very friendly rivalry between the teams. Ideas that show up in one game will often make it into the other. Having them up there helps them feel like they’re doing their own thing, and building something that will stand on its own.
Finally, having a Seattle office means that we can hire talented people that don’t want to move out of Seattle. It gives us access to a wide variety of candidates! There’s a lot of good reasons to have them up there… it’s one more step on the path to Flagship World Domination.
You can find out more about Mythos at Mythos Guru.
Heads up! Brent has given me the word that a new temporary Flagship Studios webpage will be coming pretty soon (this Thursday morning) with more pages and a job listing. It won’t be the final site, but there will definitely be more to see than the picture that’s currently online.
Update: The update is complete. You can now check out the Jobs, Games and “What’s up?” section. They’ve left this message for us:
We’ve had the same website for a while and we decided it was time for a change. Over the next few weeks the changes are coming. Stay tuned!
March has become the month of the interview flood, it’d seem. The latest to appear on the radar is the exchange Jörg Langer, former editor of the German magazine GameStar, had with Bill Roper, CEO of Flagship Studios. In it, Langer questions Roper about topics ranging from his history at Blizzard to truly in-depth inquiries about game mechanics and how Hellgate: London will feel to gamers.
Bill Roper: …our aim is that even when you feel like you’ve gone through that type of level many times before, there is always something new which could happen, which is more than just a new level layout or the exact kind of monsters you encounter. And this is something which you really miss in an MMO: Once you’ve explored an area…
Jörg Langer: … you never really need to come back, or it’s even pointless to come back because you no longer get experience from there.
Bill Roper: Exactly, and that’s “level grinding” to me. When you have to repeat a repetitive function and there’s no surprise to it. Like having to kill these spiders in this swamp area so that I become level 25 so that I can go on to the next area. There’s no exploration, there’s nothing new. And that’s great in Hellgate: If I go to a new area and I feel it’s too hard, I can go back into that area and it will be randomized differently. New monsters, new layouts, new treasure. So you are always exploring, even if you’re repeating an area.
Jörg Langer: What other differences are there to Diablo?
Bill Roper: The way the classes work and interact. When you play Hellgate in multiplayer mode, it feels like and MMO and not like a “lobby”. It’s a huge difference. In Diablo 2 you would go online and have a chat room, and then you would go out with your friends and play the game. In Hellgate, you meet people and trade and form groups and you’re the character you’ve created all the time. Today, we couldn’t launch a Battle.Net anymore, because the expectations from the players are so much higher in terms of interactivity.
This is quite honestly one of the best Roperviews we’ve seen to date.
– Scaper-X
Flagship Studios’s new community manager, Brennan Ieyoub, has introduced himself by posting pictures of his personal character in Hellgate: London, Takka the Guardian, in a new on-going series.
I’ve only been a member of the Flagship team for about a month now, so as you can imagine I’ve been spending a lot of time acquainting myself with Hellgate: London. It’s a whopper of a game, and from memorizing the substantial mythology of the setting and the factions and the lead characters to mastering the skills and weapons of all the classes, I have quite a bit on my plate. Enter Takka:
Takka is a high-level Templar Guardian with a special affinity for Japanese blades and high-flying aerial assaults. As my first serious character in HGL, Takka and I have spent many hours together fighting off the forces of hell. As you can imagine, I’m quite fond of him. Here are some special screens of Takka getting krunk on demon-kind.
An offensive powerhouse, a master of defense, and one hell of a handsome fellow, Takka and I have just started our journey together and I’m happy to share our experiences with you guys every step of the way.
You can check out Takka the Guardian right here in our screenshot gallery or on Brennan’s Picasa webpage here.
Related: Forum thread.
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