This morning Newsweek ran the first part of a Q&A between editor N’Gai Croal and Bill Roper — this specific conversation took place in January at CES. N’Gai has some great things to say about the unique look of the levels in Hellgate and focuses in on Flagship’s “breaking new ground with its pervasive use of randomization.”
Can we talk a little bit about the level design? You talked about the architecture, but looking at this level right here–I’ve seen a lot of like war-torn cities that are World War II-ish, and they all start to look the same. This feels interesting and unique and fun. It has a really good sense of place. It’s familiar, but it doesn’t look like a lot of those World War II games which have a same-y-ness in the way they look.
Well that’s one of the big things that has been a challenge for us in terms of using such a well-known city. A real strength of Hellgate: London is the fact that every time you go out into an area, every time you go out adventuring, you’re going to a randomized dynamically generated setting. So it’s not like we actually map out London specifically. But what we’ve done is we went to London, took photo reference for textures and everything, so when you’re in different parts of London, it’s built out of things that feel right for that section of London. However, the actual layout that we’re going through is completely randomly generated. The huge upside of that is you never lose the sense of exploration that you lose in a lot of RPGs, “Oh, I’ve been through this area before. I know where everything is. I know what items they drop. I know where to hunt for them.” Here, the monsters are different. The items they drop are different. The layout’s different. You never know what you’re going to get. And depending on where you are in the game–
But that’s even more impressive. I remember reading that it was randomly generated, but I’d forgotten obviously when I was asking the question. I mean it’s randomly generated, but it doesn’t look lame, though.
Yeah. And that’s–I mean it’s a real tribute to our background guys. The background artists and our programmers do these things we call DRLGs, Dynamic Random Level Generators, to design pieces that flow together naturally and look right; that care about how many phone boxes you’re putting on the street. We do a lot of variation as well. That’s the key is to do, like this little piece that has the car here that I’ve blown out. This is a variation of this smaller tile chunk, and there’s fifteen of those, or twenty of those, or you know, as many as we can make, that have boxes or ladders or blown out buildings or different cars. And we’re putting more and more and more of those in. There’s a ton more in this game than I even have in this demo here.
The first batch of automobiles they started putting in were more like you know, public transportation vehicles and cars people own. Now the stuff we’re putting in is military vehicles to show that there was this big struggle that went on. And really the goal is that we want you to go through the game and no matter how many times you’ve been through a certain kind of area, it should never feel like “Oh man, I’m just seeing this same old thing over and over again.” And it is really difficult. It’s a very, very difficult task, but the payoff is great because then you get all the replayability. You can keep going through the game, it always feels fresh, it always feels new. But you don’t get that sameness feeling. It is really difficult.
Bill also conducted a follow up interview with N’Gai in June, touching more on the depth of the game and explaining Hellgate’s hybrid online model. Look for the next three parts to the series to hit over the next three days.
