I.S.: Actually, I dont think that our game Hellgate:London so far is a demonstration, because it‘s something where people really have to sit down and play because you access a lot of skills, you get a lot of weapons over time, you‘ll find new environments and new monsters. But when you walk between 50 other sweaty dudes trying to play the game for 5 minutes, you don‘t appreciate any of it and I really think that it doesn‘t do our game justice, you can‘t experience whats fun about it. And when you mention the Shulgoth fight, which isn‘t a big deal, because its just a first minor boss that you meet in this demonstration, in the final game we have a lot of gameplay scenarios and instances planned like that, that will be special and unique and won‘t be in keeping with your standard hack and slash dungeon crawl. But no one will ever see that at the demonstrations, because it all takes a little while to get there.
GU: Yeah, I am really exited to get over level 20. Something about death effects. In Diablo 2 we had that kind of feeling, that if you hit with a sword, there was a real hard sound and it was like „Bam, I just hit him and now he‘s dead“ but in Hellgate it is as if they are going down like butter, as if you hit though the enemies, so that sometimes you don‘t even know if they are dead or not! (Hello, we are talking about Zombies dude?) What are you going about that?
I.S.: There are a lot of discussions and arguments about that in the office all the time. I honestly don‘t know whats gonna be done about that because it‘s not my department. The only thing I do know is that they have commissioned sevral new melee attack animations and they kinda string together, so that they are more impactfull as opposed to the highly stylized dancer-like swordsmenship that is currently in there, so it should give you a better feeling to finality when you crack a zombie on its skull and it falls down. But I think a lot of that also has to with the way we implement physics, so it may feel a littel buttery just because they kinda floosh down and swim around the ground and thats not finalized physicscode basically. And i think that will improve, the physics code will naturally improve as the game goes on in development and the animations will help a lot, too. There also gonna be new effects apllied to characters, so now the effects are just flame explosions when you kill someone I tink there‘s gonna be spectral explosions and ... every way you could kill someone should have a better explosive death sequence. We are aware that there are some people that take issue with that and it‘s something we discuss regulary in the office, so it will get better on that feature.
GU: Yeah I liked these firey explosions, they were really powerfull, it was like „Yeah, I just killed 20 of them“.
I.S.: If I had my way, everytime you hit a monster, it would riccochet of a building, fly high into the air and than explode, I just think there should be something totally insane about killing somebody.
GU: Like a gunshooting sword.
I.S.: Yeah, a sword that shoots guns.
GU: A sword that shoots guns.
I.S.: Yeah, we have a sword that shoots bees, so I figured why not have sword that shoots guns that shoot bees. (laughs)
GU: Yeah, I have already seen that, its a great weapon, I really like it, filmed it about ten minutes. Something about music. In Diablo 2, the music was just awesome, it was recorded with an orchestra and it was really imperessive in every way, especially in act five. It had a great atmosphere. In Hellgate, we didn‘t really hear music until now, because there are one or two tracks looped and dimmed down. Will there be something like a preview track? Fans would really like that.
I.S.: Right now, I think we only had a couple of commission tracks for the cinematics, at this point we haven‘t actually had music in the game, especially in this build, I don‘t think there is any music at all, but our audio director, Dave Steinwedel, at this moment put just several tracks into the game and those will propably be in the TGS build. How we go about previewing them? I don‘t know. I don‘t know if we are going to release some of them or when. But they just weren‘t in.
GU: Okay, somehting about Ping0. Thats..well..the name is really promising a lot. You don‘t even get ping 0 in LAN play. How do you want to make that name fit? How do you want to be better than the battle.net?
I.S.: I have no idea. Thats the role of the networking engeneers and technicans. And I don‘t know anything about the name, as if they got it whispered into their ears when they were sleeping. No, it‘s governed by the networking engeneers and technicans and people whose math and programming skills are way beyond my comprehension and I don‘t know how they gonna make it happen, it‘s all them and I just sort of smile and nodd my head and it‘s all way,way beyond me.
GU: What about female players? I have seen a lot of women standing around at the booth, saying „This is not an RPG, you just kill people“. They were some kind of disgusted and shocked by the monsters and the look of the characters. In World of Warcraft, they are able to chat and it‘s much softer. There are cute and cuddly Dwarves and.. well.. I think Hellgate:London is a male game, isn‘t it?
Tricia Gray: We are working on the female character design and we are getting comments on it, even if we are in China and Taiwan and show the game. A lot of female players are saying that the faces aren‘t so great, and what we are going to do about it. Well, this is not a final version, we are working on all that, we will put the RPG elements in, and as Ivan has commented earlier on the demos, you can‘t get the RPG element of the game when you sit there for five minutes, the quests are not implemented in. But we gonna have auctioning, we gonna have chat, we gonna have all that stuff World of Warcraft has. Unfortunally you can‘t really see or play that in a build like this, but in the final game all that stuff will be there and there will be pretty faces for you to play, too.
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