(Note: Since posting our original news item on the matter, Shacknews has been contacted by Electronic Arts, which is co-publishing the game along with Namco Bandai. EA noted that there has not in fact been any final decision made as to Hellgate: London's online pricing model--meaning that it may not even end up a paid subscription based service at all. In the interest of presenting to our readers as complete a picture of the situation as we had, below are Roper's opening comments given when asked about the model behind Hellgate: London's multiplayer mode.)

"We'll probably have some kind of detail in the next month or two as to our pricing model, but the design is both a standalone as well as an MMO, so we want to be able to hit both markets just like we did with the Diablo titles. There are a lot of people that in some instances actually can't get online, and there are also people who are online but for gaming they aren't sure if they want to make that commitment to pay the monthly fee and go online. They can get the game and play the standalone, and get 30 or 40 hours' worth of gameplay. If they like that, they can go online and we'll have a good ramp of some kind for them to go online and check out some of the services. Exactly how we handle that, whether it'll be a trial or whether they can check out some of the game for free, we're still hammering out the final details. Then beyond that it will be pay to play, and again we're about a month out from announcing more on that. But what you're getting with that service is you're getting 24/7 customer service, secure servers, databases, and the biggest thing is that you're getting continuing content. We'll have a full dev team that's on the project from day one. Actually, right when you buy the game, when it launches there will already be content available that you can't get in the single-player--additional monsters, areas, all the community and economy things, you'll be able to form guilds, auction houses, all those things you expect from MMOs."

Update: Today, Shacknews followed up with Roper, who clarified his comments and stated that the monthly fee subscription model is only one option currently under evaluation by the studio and its publishers Electronic Arts and Namco Bandai Games, and that his comments were intended in a theoretical context. For more on the matter, see our latest report.

MMO or not?

Drawing from games such as Guild Wars and of course Diablo II, Roper admits Hellgate: London's online component doesn't necessarily neatly slide into the MMO genre. So is it an MMO? "I think that just as Diablo and Diablo II started this religious argument over whether they're RPGs or not," he mused, "Hellgate will spark that same debate over whether it's an MMO or not." But what does Bill Roper think? "It's really an MMO," he said confidently.

In many ways, the Diablo series and particularly Diablo II serve as a touchstone for Hellgate. Many of those looking forward to the game were massive fans of Blizzard's action RPG series, and Roper himself frequently refers to the franchise when talking about his game. The multiplayer concept, which revolves around individuals or groups trawling through legions of enemies in a heavily instanced world, is evocative of Diablo II's. "There's even Hardcore mode [available online], like in D2 where you get one life and that's it," he added. "Hardcore mode was very popular to a very vocal group of people who took a huge amount of pride in having a high level guy who's never died. You tend to play the game very differently."

That said, there are major differences between the games. "The biggest differences between Diablo II online and Hellgate: London are that Hellgate: London has been built from the very beginning to be sustained online as part of the original design, whereas D2 really wasn't like that at all," he explained. "We had dreams of being able to do continuing content [in Diablo II] but it really wasn't possible at all from a code standpoint. Hellgate has been set up to do that from the beginning. The other big difference is that in Diablo II you were in a chat room. Here, it's like other MMOs: you're in a town, you are your character, you're interacting with people and getting quests. But we're also giving you that single-player experience, which World of Warcraft doesn't."

Hellgate: London's main quest storyline is identical in single-player and multiplayer; players can get the full story experience either way. However, the online side will contain exclusive content and modes unavailable in single-player. These include guild-related and raid-level events, PvP arena combat, new enemies, quests, and items, and so on--all features familiar to MMO players.

Unlike most MMOs, the primary storyline is actually finite, and can be completed even in online mode. "You complete the storyline, and get that big overarching sense of completion that you typically don't get in MMOs," said Roper. "Then what we do to continue the gameplay past that is to create all these quests you do that take into account that the world state has changed for your character. You've completed it, finished the task that was set before you. The thing that's really nice about that is that we can create all this online content that you don't get in single-player that takes into account that you did finish the storyline of the game."

These changes can manifest them visually, so that after completing various parts of the storyline you actually see world physically differently due to events you triggered. NPCs might also react to you differently. "Depending on what you've completed in the storyline, there will be actual changes in the world that you notice. If I'm level 5 and you're level 30 and you've done a lot more stuff, your perception of the world is probably different than mine," Roper added. He explained that these are atmospheric changes rather than gameplay changes, allowing players to potentially coexist in the same virtual world even if they perceive it differently.

Social aspects

MMOs are, in part, characterized by having some kind of social aspect; in Hellgate: London, Flagship Studios has tried to focus on social interaction with a particular emphasis on the friend level. When in a station, the neutral town areas for conducting business and talking with NPCs, players can use a group browsing terminal to see what kind of open groups are being advertised in the world. These can be filtered by various criteria to best fit the player's needs. Once you've built up your friends list, it will actually show you which friends are already in groups you can join.

This filtering applies to other areas as well. As in Guild Wars, town areas are layered to allow large numbers of people to congregate within them without overcrowding. Unlike in Guild Wars, when you enter such an area, the game automatically places you within a layer filtered by your social network; that is, if you have friends already in a town when you arrive, you will end up in their layer rather than having to find out what it is then switch over to it. The game prioritizes groups members first for layer selection, then guild members, and finally regular friends.

As far as other typical MMO trappings, Roper made several references to auction houses being present in towns, as well as banks for storing excess cash. From towns, players can also instantly warp to waypoints in other towns they have already discovered. Though it was indicated there will be a guild system in the game, Roper did not go into detail as to its workings or requirements. There will, however be raid-type content of some kind for larger guilds.

Though it may not necessarily be available right off the bat, there are apparently plans in place for city areas that are significantly more impressive than the relatively small early stations. Roper went to far as to draw comparisons to the World of Warcraft capital cities Ironforge and Stormwind in terms of the scale of what's being cooked up. He also suggested there could be themed arease, such as a Cabalist town that players would have to visit in order to get the best Cabalist mods.

Random loot, and everything else

One of the best loved aspects of the Diablo series is its randomly generated item system, which supplies the players wire far more loot than one expects in most games, with a huge amount of variety in both minor and major ways. Hellgate: London uses a similar system. "Everything in the game is dynamically generated with rarity, even more than we did with the Diablo games," explained Roper. Rarity applies not only to items but to locations, elements within locations, and the chance of happening onto a particular quest.

I was curious as to how Flagship plans to ensure that dynamically generated content remains compelling when taken to such a large scale. I got a lot of answers.

"There are pretty complex algorithms we ended up using, but we also make sure when we create the content that we're building tons and tons and tons of variation," he said. "At this point, most of the world set backgrounds are done, so areas like the outdoor city sets and the underground tube sets and the sewer sets are done. Those background artists have moved on to doing specific theme rooms and boss rooms that have to have a unique feel to them. The other part is then making sure that we have the ability to go through and make all the variations of those base sets."

Flagship has hired the work of an external contractor, overseen by a former member of the Diablo II team, for the sole purpose of creating as many world objects as possible--crates, vehicles, wreckage, religious artifacts, and so on. Each item has its own rarity within a given tile set.

Entire environments can also be overlaid by randomly occurring themes. "You might be outdoors," Roper described, "but you've gotten a fire aspected version of it--the sky is red, you're seeing flames, all the demons have some level of fire aspect to them, all the weapons are giving fire damage or offering fire protection. You're getting a random version of that set with this other aspect of it."

"Another thing I think is really important is the ability to get--it's almost impossible to say in our game--the 'best' item for your particular character," he pointed out. "It's not like WoW where you're a level 24 warrior and this is the best sword you can get. You can be soloing and get a chance to get an amazing item. In a game like WoW if you're not in a specific place it's almost impossible to get the best gear."

Questing

Since Hellgate's online component consists of the same main storyline as the single-player game, that's still the method by which you'll be initially led throughout the game world. All actual adventuring, that is anything outside of cities, is instanced. "To some extent to get to the next chunk of areas you have go through the storyline quests, so it is your main driving factor in getting through places," said Roper. "However, in between, we have randomized missions, some that are built out of sort of a Mad Libs template, and others that are more intricate. There are little quest chains that have stories associated with them that are not necessary for the main quest."

Tying into Hellgate's randomized generation system is the chance event system, by which quests linked to certain map tile sets have a small chance of appearing when you uncover a room. Roper recaled one such event: "If I'm running around the maintenance rooms, there's maybe a one in a hundred chance that I'll run into this Templar who sends me a help request on my PDA by putting out a beacon. When you find him on the level, he'll have a side mission for you that takes maybe 10 to 15 minutes to complete. He was escorting some Techsmiths--the engineers that help keep everything running--to check up on a disturbance, and they were ambushed by demons. He barely made it out alive, but they're still in there and you have to go find them. The catch is that it's pitch black, so he gives you this luminous monicle that you wear in your goggle slot. When you play in first person it's almost like the flashlight in Doom [III], and when you play in third person you have this arc of light in front of you. Enemies are hidden in the shadows, some drop out of the ceilings; it's a very different gameplay concept. So though the storyline quest is very important, you could go in and play for quite a while just doing random events and chance quests."

He went on to explain a facet of dynamically generated content with broader effects across all character levels: "You might be running through a level, but there's a grating in the ground you've never seen and it leads to a hidden passageway. Maybe it only happens 5% of the time or 1% of the time. You might be playing through the dried Thames riverbed, and you've been playing the game so long that you've been there 100 times, but this time there's a monster you've never seen, or a quest there you've never done, or a fissure in the wall that takes you to some crazy side instance. That's the power of the online portion, being able to create that continuing content. As we keep coming up with those ideas, we can keep layering them into the game. So that affects not only the high level guys--and you always have to keep playing the high level guys who have been there the highest and have the level cap--but when you put in new damage types or sprinkle in rarity within background levels, those affect things that you can find all the way down to level 1. You may decide to make a new character because, say, you've never played a Cabalist. If there was something new added to the game that day, you might find something at level 1 your level 60 guy never found."

Grouping in instances

With a heavily instanced and friends-level community fostering--as well as a Diablo lineage--group play is obviously an important part of the game. Unlike most MMOs, groups are set up to be adaptive in various ways. "The instances are both open and dynamic, which makes it different from Guild Wars, which we are sometimes compared to," said Roper. "The big difference there is that if you've got eight people in your group and four guys have to drop out for some reason, you're not screwed. Your game isn't over. You don't have to restart, you can advertise your group. People who are looking for a group can go to a terminal and see you're doing what they want to do. You can make your group and give it a name, a description, a maximum number of characters, so it's all set up for what you want to do." Players who are back in town can find your groups and join from the group terminal.

Alternatively, you can choose to leave the group close, in which case the game will scale down the number of enemies in the instance proportionally to correspond to your new party's size. However, it will not scale the enemies' actual levels to match your party's new average level. This means that in a party of two level 20s and two level 10s, if the 20s leave, the instance will likely be far too difficult for the remaining 10s.

PvP and crafting

Hellgate is very much set up around PvE, not PvP combat, but it won't ignore the latter entirely. "We know that players want to test their characters against each other. They want to test their build against another build, or see how a Cabalist and a Hunter face off against each other." To that end, Flagship will have arena-based PvP to allow individuals to spar. "If there's a big outcry saying, 'We want a really complex PvP system,' and they want honor and rewards and all that, then that is something we'll address in the ongoing content," Roper continued. "We'll find a way to work it into our systems."

I inquired about the presence of crafting, and was informed that while it is not currently in the game, there are some potential designs for it in the works. "It's very different from a lot of games because we have so many randomized items," admitted Roper. "It's not something that's heavily configured into the game like some MMOs." As such, crafting is likely more to deal with item modification rather than item creation. For example, players may be able to create new item modification, or add new or additional mod slots to items.

So is it an MMO?

Well, Roper thinks it is, but he's not too concerned what people decide. "Really, it's less about about trying to fit within a neat genre description," he concluded, "and more about how to create a really fun and compelling game experience."

Namco Bandai Games and Electronic Arts plan to ship Flagship Studios' Hellgate: London in summer 2007. A beta program is expected to be launch sometimes prior to the game's release.