Hellgate: London is an RPG. It is played in first and third person modes

Hellgate: London looks like very much like a first person shooter, but it's in fact an RPG. It has all the traditional features that you would come to expect from an RPG, including the acquisition of new weapons, armor, various upgrades, and inventory management. Equipment is attained as you defeat monsters and looted from their fallen bodies. You can look at your character, play around with your inventory and equip him with items.

The First Person Shooter Aspect

Unlike first person shooters, Hellgate: London places emphasis on your character's attributes rather than your personal skill.

I'm a lousy first-person shooter player, but I get on well with this. It's much more forgiving. The goal is to let players of all abilities enjoy the game straight away without having to come with Counter-Strike skills. Of course, players that like the FPS style of play will concentrate more on ranged weapons and that's great, but we also wanted to make sure that people weren't punished for using melee weapons.

The Weapons
The use of weaponry in Hellgate: London is based on your character's skills. The skill system is simple, but extremely effective. At the bottom left and right hand corners of the screen are two circles. They correspond to the left and right mouse buttons. So you choose your skills within the skills menu, assign them to a circle, and activate them with your mouse buttons.

Having two skill circles lets you dual-wield any two weapons at any time. You can dual-wield two identical ranged weapons, two different ranged weapons, a melee weapon and a ranged weapon, or two melee weapons. Flagship Studios has also designed all of the weapons to be easy to use. They don't require FPS-style twitch reflexes or really, really accurate aiming skills. For instance, there is one ranged weapon that sticks to enemies as you sweep your aim across them, and continues to stick to them as you move around, within reason. There is also another weapon that throws out an acid-style ammunition with an area effect, so the player does not have to aim it perfectly, just get it in the general direction of the monsters in front of me. Another example are these weird genetically engineered locusts that swarm on monsters and eat away at them. The locusts have a life cycle, so they'll home onto a monster, kill it, move to the next monster, and keep going until they die.

So all the ranged weapons are designed to be area-effect, or soft targeting, or auto-locking, or homing. That doesn't make it easy. But it does make the game much more about what skills and items you have acquired, and not just how accurate you are with a gun.

A Combination of Arms

Part of the strategy - and the fun - is finding two weapons that work particularly well together. The locust weapon, for instance, is quite slow-acting, so it's good to use that to drop a demon's defences and team it with a rapid fire weapon that will finish them off. I think we'll see much more weapon swapping than is the norm in our games.

The weapons in Hellgate: London are essentially spells, so players will use them in the same way. In other games you might open up on enemies with a spell that slows them down, and then follow it with a fireball spell. Players are to use similar tactics with the weapons in this game.

Melee Weapons
In addition to ranged weapons, melee weapons are equally as important in Hellgate: London and serve to provide a different sampling of gameplay to players preferring a more visceral approach.

If you want to fight with melee weapons like the Firebrand [a blessed flaming sword] you go into a third-person viewpoint. Flagship Studios did this because they really liked seeing the character swing and swipe and it shows off the kind of moves you'll be able to do much better. But more importantly, third-person gives a better feeling of range and that's really important for successful melee combat. All in all we really liked the tight third-person feel. It's kind of like Jedi Knight.

Customizing Your Arms
All the weapons are randomly generated within the gameworld, so you won't always find the same weapons your friend has. But we also wanted to make the weapons very customisable. Every weapon has customisation slots for items and holy Relics you find within the world, and they change how the weapon works in very specific ways. By adding these modifications to their weapons players can create very personalised ways of dealing with enemies.

Okay, here's an example. I find this item in the world. It's randomly created, and its effect on my weapon are totally random - how much extra damage it will do, how much speed it will add, how much extra ammo I'll be able to carry and so on. I go into my inventory and pick it up, and it tells me where it fits on my weapon. When I add it on it not only changes the specs of my weapon, but the way the model looks in the gameworld. Better yet, it could change the appearance of my weapon's discharge: the muzzle flash, the trail of the projectile, the explosion, the effect on the monsters and what physically happens to the monsters when they get hit. For us the biggest thing was that you're going to see your weapon a lot, and we wanted players to be able to customise it so that it becomes an extension of their character.

Randomly Generated World
Everything in Hellgate: London is randomly and dynamically created. An example of this is when you encounter some enemies - some of them could be high level, Legendary demons, or they could be cannon fodder. We're really pulling from the Diablo model, where the game experience was randomly created everytime. In fact, with Hellgate: London, even the true 3D world is created randomly and dynamically every time you play.

As you play totally random events will take place. For instance, you could be battling along a street when a Templar comes running out of the Underground pursued by demons. If I help him fight off the monsters he'll then stick around and I'll get a companion. But that event is totally random. It might happen at any moment. It might not. But it's kind of a reward for the player. With this example we were inspired by games like Half-Life 2 and cooperative online games. In most RPGs it's just a field of monsters and you, and maybe your robotic NPC buddies. We wanted to create a gameworld that was always changing and really fell alive.

Other events won't happen right in front of you but you'll get an incoming message and a marker on your map.

The Quest System
Quests in Hellgate: London are really big things in the world that change the world and the NPCs within it.

For example, after one quest we return to the Underground Station to find it has been attacked by demons in our absence. It's messed up, the defences are weakened, and an NPC called Bodger has had his arm ripped off by a demon. These things really drive the storyline and the feel of the world. Our quests aren't little FedEx missions, but large events that physically alter the whole world.

The London Setting
Hellgate: London, is as the name describes, set in the demon-ravaged ruins of London, England.

About half the fighting in the game takes place above ground, and the other half takes place under the city. Another reason we picked the city is that it has this really rich 'city beneath a city' heritage. There's the network of tunnels that makes up the London Underground, there are Roman aqueducts, there are World War 2 bomb shelters, there are Victorian hospitals, and there are plague pits. It's a perfect dungeon-type environment that we can randomly generate and then explore.

The stations in the London Underground are safe zones which are similar to towns in traditional RPGs. They're always safe and they're always static in design so you don't have to find your way around every time you go there and you always know where the NPCs are to trade with and speak to.

In multiplayer games these are common areas where everyone comes to join together. That adds a real community aspect to the game - you can form and meet up with guilds, trade, by or sell objects with other players, and indulge in all those good community things that you get from traditional MMORPGs.

Skills and Abilities

Players will visit trainers in the Underground stations to learn new skills as they level up. In addition to that, Flagship Studios has extended randomization to the skills. When you buy a new skill, you will only get the base skill, but there are random skill nodes out in the wilderness that teach you skills to the gameworld. If you pick one up, you can learn a totally new version of a skill. It might have a slightly different effect, a different range, and so on. The skill nodes are a totally random reward for players and help to further personalise the character.

Attributes
Attributes are one of the aspects that define the traditional RPG, and as such, is one of the core aspects of character development in Hellgate: London.

We've definitely got the traditional RPG aspect of deciding how your character will develop. How many skills you can use at once depends on your Concentration level, so every time you level up you can decide whether you want to have a lot of different skills I can use, or do I want to concentrate on some core skills so I can, for instance, carry bigger and better gear. That definitely brings out the meta-game of deciding how your character will turn out.

The Demons

For every monster we've created we wanted to come up with something totally unique, something that makes it special. For example, we've got the Grotesque. He's a big, disgusting zombie who spews out death maggots that crawl towards you and explode. On top of that, when you kill him a few zombies crawl out of his putrid insides, so you've got to take care of them too. We've really made every monster unique.

There are four different castes of demons. One of them is the True Demon. They are the most intelligent and fearsome of the castes, and because they're so smart they can use any weapon that you can. That makes them really tough to kill, because they're competing on equal terms with the player.

The Online Component
Hellgate: London will feature a big online component, comparable to the likes of Battle.net.

We definitely have a very big online component in this game. One of the things we're doing slightly differently is that every time you go into the world - whether in single player or multiplayer - we put you in your own specific areas of the world. Other people call that instancing, but what it means is that there are never any other players in the world to steal kills or attack you when you're questing. Basically we want you to be able to play with only the people you want to play with. It's another example of how we want the game to be unique every time you play - you have control over who you are playing with in your very own unique part of the gameworld.

Another thing we wanted to get away from was the idea of separate realms or servers. We hate not being able to play with our friends because they play on a different server, or they chose to start in a different area of the world. So you'll be able to play with anyone from around the world in Hellgate: London. That also makes the community and economy far more interesting because you can reach everyone who is playing the game.

Action and RPG

We really think we've got the best of both worlds. We've got very strong RPG elements, and we've also got lots of things that will appeal to FPS and action game players. But it's not just about how good a shot you are - our range of weapons and weapon customisation system adds a real sense of strategy to the action. The best thing is that it all works perfectly together.