HellgateGuru.com - Press Coverage

"It's very much, 'Hey, you got your shooter in my RPG! Hey, you got your RPG in my shooter!'" says Dave Brevik, creator of Hellgate: London (and formerly project lead, design lead, and lead programmer of Diablo and Diablo II ). No doubt, the game reaches across the shooter-RPG chasm-and into totally new fantasy-game territory-in more ways than one, though the most obvious is the inclusion of first-person gameplay. Although melee combat always takes place in the third person ("There are lots of visual moves and melee skills associated with animations, and you'd lose all of that by being in first person," explains Brevik), both first- and third-person play are at your disposal through the rest of the game.

"I love shooters, but I hated the lack of depth. I hated that I was limited to six guns, and that I went through a maze and at the end I fought a big boss and I won," Brevik says. "I never felt like I was changing my character or there was any story involved. So I said, what if we have a first-person game where we randomize the levels like we did in Diablo, and there are not six guns-there are 100 guns? That's the game I wanted to play: a first-person shooter with an RPG on the back end." Which pretty much describes Hellgate to a T. "It's action oriented; you're shooting all sorts of monsters and there are lots of things happening. But at the same time, it's very much an RPG: You're doing quests and there's a story and you're building up your character and modifying stats-things that aren't in most shooters."

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