Hellgate London - More Subscription Details @ TVG Q.&A.

TVG: You've announced the Elite subscription as a means to accessing content updates, can you elaborate on this with regards to regularity, length, themed tie-ins?

Sure, the big thing for us is that we always want to remind people is that you're getting more than you actually got with Diablo 2, you get the [online] game for free. There seems to be a big hang up which people have where they feel somehow we must be doing something to screw them, which I don't understand at all. Players make this big deal about the fact that when you get the game in the box you get 40-50 hours of standalone play, and that's obviously the first time you go through it, but with the character classes and randomisation you're going to get really different gameplay as you go through several times. Then you can go online and have that same experience with your friends in a secure server environment for free, we also give you stuff for free that we were never able to do in Diablo like being able to be members of guilds, auction houses, in-game e-mail and all kinds of things like that. So you get that Diablo 2 experience plus and we've worked very hard to ensure that we can do that for free. Then for the gamers that want to keep going with that experience, and that was definitely something that we had a lot of requests for back in the Diablo 2 days, players wanted to get more, they wanted more stuff, more items, more spells, more monsters, more areas, on and on and on. But we were able to do one expansion set then another year and half went by and there was another content patch, but that was really it. We did not have a dedicated staff on the project, we had no ability from a supportive model or from an engine/technology standpoint to really be able to do that continuing content. So with Hellgate that was really, really important to us, and of course maintaining a team to create this kind of content, not just do things like fix bugs, but make substantial new content which we can release on regular schedules, we have to pay for that somehow.

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VG: Speaking of expansions, the title Hellgate: London seems to lend itself to the possibility of extending into other cities in the future, is this an idea of the team's?

I think it's something we would love to do. For us the city of London was a big part itself for development of the game, the fact we had the great architecture, the gothic style, and the mix of styles....
The idea was we're telling the story of what's happening in London at this time, and I would love to be able to do that in other areas, to be able to look at that in other parts of the world, look at their archetypal heroes, their beliefs, how magic works and all those types of things. So that's something I do hope we get the opportunity to do, because it was a lot of fun to do with London.

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