Flagshipped forumers interview Travis Baldree of Runic Games

• August
• 23

Posted by Agamemnon 12:42 pm            Game: Hellgate London

Hey, everyone else is doing it. ;)

Many thanks to Necx, Project_Xii, lonethar, and Travis Baldree himself for being part of the interview.

—

This was a chat-turned-interview that occured today between travis, Necx and some others. Kudos for Necx on asking such good questions.
Hellgate and Mythos may be dead, but it’s always interesting to hear about the going’s on during their short lives, and also find out some tidbits regarding Runic Games future plans.

Travis Baldree Casual Interview

Necx: Out of curiosity, Travis, have you ever played Hellgate? Did you ever compare Mythos to Hellgate?

Travis: I’ve played some - but I haven’t had time to finish or get beyond Act 2 or 3.

I think a bigger boat is a lot harder to steer. With Mythos we didn’t have to do anything very innovative at all - we went out and replicated a gameplay style that already existed. Let’s be honest - Mythos is just D2 style of play with more MMO bits, and a lot less story and, let’s be honest, style.

Hellgate attempted much more than that - a 3D, first or 3rd person shooter/action-RPG hybrid, with a new setting combining new weapon mechanics that aren’t the staples of the Action-RPG genre. They shot a lot higher than we did, and I sure respect that. With Mythos, we played the safer, simpler bet.

For the record, NOBODY ever thinks their game has no issues. Nobody. There is ALWAYS a feeling on release that you didn’t get in the things you wanted to, or feature A isn’t all it could be, or this part is too short, or you don’t like this UI mechanic. Unless you have enormous resources, game development is a series of hard choices on what to shortchange and still come out with something good and worthwhile at the end. None of those choices are easy, and they can often turn out wrong. The key is usually in making the choices soon enough that you can react and fix it if you made the wrong ones.

I’ve got a laundry list a mile long of things that bugged me to death about Mythos, and that I would have changed. I was always unhappy with the lack of story. I thought our UI was much clunkier than it should have been. I wasn’t happy with our randomized dungeons and thought they all felt much too same-y. I thought at least 80% of our monsters didn’t have interesting enough behaviors. I thought all of the skills could have been better. I thought our bosses weren’t anywhere close to the kind of setpiece bosses I would have liked to have seen. There’s hundreds more entries on that list.

Everybody has a list like that at release. You just try to make sure that the things that ARE in the game still constitute at least a percentage of what you WANTED to achieve (which is usually unachievable given the time you have), and that it’s enough for people to like it. It’s been ages since I played Mythos straight through - it’s hard to afford the time to do it in perpetual crunch. Instead you rely a lot on your testers and QA to give you feedback, and you trust them enough to react to it. I played CHUNKS of the game at all times - hopefully just enough to get a feel for how things are going. Usually chunks scattered throughout - but beyond a certain point, that’s all you can do if you want to get any work done.

Necx: Fair enough. So, from the little that you played, if you had “Endless Pots of Gold”, would you buy HGL under your Runic banner? Would you also try to acquire Mythos back?

Travis: If I had a pot of gold? Hmmm.

I probably wouldn’t buy either IP at this point - Mythos didn’t have the benefit of real preproduction, so it’s a middling IP at best. There’s not enough story there or world to be worth the cash, in my opinion. The strength we had with Mythos was a good community, and a reasonably enjoyable core game that because it had large instances was different than anything else. So don’t take that the wrong way - I love Mythos and I loved working on it, but I’m excited at the prospect of doing a new IP that we can take some more time developing.

Hellgate isn’t my IP - I’ve always thought it was an incredible concept, but it isn’t mine, and I’d feel very odd working on it. I’d LOVE to see a gothic Hellgate prequel set in medieval Germany, played isometrically with a lot of the same demons, and big nasty swords, polearms, and spiked shields, and huge gothic churches, and corrupted priests, and other cool stuff. I think that would rule. But it’s not my IP, and again, I’d just feel uncomfortable.

The network technology for the games was great. If I could get enough of the original engineers back to run it, I’d totally buy it. It would be a huge leg up in getting a new game out. But I’d want to build a new IP - one that our whole team got to participate in, that had some real story, and some unique elements that made it much more interesting.

Necx: That’s interesting really. I surely thought you’d snap up Mythos in a heartbeat.

Travis: We all sort of had to come to terms with losing it - we went to a lot of effort to excite ourselves about starting over, so it’s sort of hard to imagine changing direction now. The opportunity to correct a lot of mistakes we made is pretty attractive.

Necx: Did you enjoy your game (Mythos)? If you didn’t make it would you see yourself playing it?

Travis: I did like Mythos. It’s the kind of game I like to play. I would have liked it to be a lot better, but I enjoyed it. I could have wished that it looked as awesome as Diablo 3, but there you go.

Necx: Did your whole team provide input for Mythos, or did [you] have outside source telling you what it had to be?

Travis: We were allowed to make what we wanted to make - but the whole team wasn’t involved in the start of it because of how slowly we grew - they just weren’t there yet. So everybody got to have input, but after you’ve gone a certain distance down the track, you can’t fundamentally change everything. (Runic Games) is an opportunity for the whole team to be involved right at the start, which is substantially different.

…

Flagship and Bill were very good to me. We got to make Mythos, and I’m extremely thankful for that. Bill wrote our first manual and did voices for us, just because he wanted to help out (this was quite some time ago, and no, didn’t impact Hellgate’s schedule in any way). Hellgate was not the success that we all hoped it would be, but that doesn’t color my view of them as people at all. I love those guys.

Necx: I don’t know man… I’d feel pretty tainted towards him.

Travis: I don’t feel that way though - and I hope that, given that I was out of a job, and lost all of my work, and got to see most everything go down at the end, that says something about Bill. After all of that, I don’t think any less of Bill, because I saw the lengths he went to to save it.

I can understand that founders who’ve payed 150 bucks and didn’t get the game they wanted can be irritated and angry. I know a lot of you also have articulated other causes, but I think most of them stem from that. But losing your job and work is another kind of loss entirely. And if given that, I’m not bitter at Bill, I hope that’s somewhat telling. Don’t take this the wrong way. I’m not telling you you shouldn’t be irritated, or that you have no right to be so. I’m basically just telling you what MY feeling on the final outcome is, which is probably surprising to some of you.

Necx: “…because I saw the lengths he went to to save it.” Can you go more into that?

Travis: Bill was sleeping on the floor for 3 AM calls, and liquidating his retirement at 50 cents on the dollar. When you withdraw from a 401k prematurely, you take an enormous financial hit on its value - and of course, he doesn’t have any of it now. He blew away his retirement because it was the only thing he could do to get the cash to pay. People seem to have this misperception that Bill is a millionaire. Because Bill arrived at Blizzard North as a transplant from South, Bill didn’t end up with a pile of Diablo money.

The directors were in a long and sleepless process for months trying to secure our future - a future that didn’t even necessarily include them. They didn’t have guaranteed jobs out of it - even if the deals had gone through. The deals that they tried to close were to keep the doors open and keep people employed, not to give the directors golden parachutes. They’re out looking for jobs right now like everybody else.

Necx: Travis, I have to seriously question that man. Is he looking for a job? I know a lot of the team are looking and I hope they found jobs. Why haven’t you hired him yet?

Travis: Bill’s still in the process of shutting down Flagship, and trying to keep an eye out for a job at the same time.
There are lots of people that I like and respect from Flagship, but it doesn’t mean that at this stage I can afford to hire them though. It would be awfully weird for me to ‘hire’ Bill anyway, don’t you think?

If you’re at the point of liquidating your retirement at a loss to get cash, that means you really, really don’t have any lying around, or any other way to get it.

Project_Xii: Hmmm. It’s all rather sad. Just hard to find the sympathy to spare you know… specially after reading Roper’s interview and seeing him admit that they knew the hybrid was going to fail. Yes, it’s a rough course of events, but self-inflicted?

Travis: I believe Jeff’s question was - ‘at what point did you guys feel maybe you shouldn’t have done the hybrid model?’ To which Bill responded ‘before we launched’. That’s a little bit different than saying that we ‘knew it was going to fail’. Obviously people’s reaction to the hybrid model of a free and then a premium subscription was not a positive one. He said we didn’t have enough content to switch directions - to change over to an expansion pack model.

Here’s the brass tacks - to support the expense of the servers for the ‘free’ game, some kind of income is required. They’re crazy expensive. The entire business model and game was built around that constant income from subscribers. If you get to within a month of launch, and people are very unhappy about your subscription model, then yeah, you think ‘maybe we shouldn’t have taken this route!’.

But it’s impossible to tell at that point HOW MANY people are really unhappy with it from online reaction. And will they be unhappy with it when they actually see it in action? You don’t know. And you can only guess at the percentages. So since you’re pretty much out of money, and the engineering is done, and the game is going out the door - well, what do you do?
Pray. And it didn’t work out. If it had been all free to play, I don’t believe the financials would have worked out - there wouldn’t have been any money to pay for the servers at all, and it would all have been in the drink a lot sooner.

Necx: Well, he’s the one that gave you a chance. You have great respect for him. If I had someone I admired, I’d pick them up when they are down. But I understand for the sake of (namesake) you wouldn’t want him with runic. You would have a serious amount of people pointing the finger at you.

Travis: Let me be clear - I like Bill, and I would work with him in the future. Just because he’s not working with us now doesn’t mean that I don’t have a great deal of respect for him. And because I like and respect Bill, I don’t intend to treat him like some kind of pariah, just because he’s had to soak up most of everyone’s ire, being the frontman and all.

Necx: OK, enough of railroading Roper. I think you’re tired of answering for him; he needs to answer for himself. Where do you see Runic Games in nine months to a year?

Travis: Where do I see Runic 9 or 10 months from now? Well, #1, I’d like to still exist.
It depends on which route we go, but I’d hope to be getting close to an Alpha with people in and playing together, so that we can be iterating on that.

Project_Xii: You know, in terms of alpha/beta testers, certain members (not all, but that’s up to you) of the Flagshipped crew are probably very good candidates. At least you know we’ll give it to you straight, and not just worship/try to inflate your ego’s. We do WANT games to succeed after all.

Travis: As far as testers go, if they bother to post in the forums, that’s pretty much what you need. You figure at least 80-90% of your testers will treat it like a demo, and never visit the forums or provide feedback. They really just want to play a game. We had plenty of vocal (and sometimes indignantly vocal) members of the Mythos beta testing team. Their input was treated with the same respect as anyone else’s, and a lot of them became less indignant over time as a result.

lonethar: Include me in your testing as well. You have enough testosterone filled testers already. Oh…and I’m almost EXCLUSIVELY a SINGLE PLAYER GAMER!

Travis: I play MMOs solo. I very seldom group. Mythos was extremely soloable, and whatever we do will certainly be the same in that regard. I can’t abide being forced to group.

Project_Xii: That is a promise we’re going to hold you too.

Travis: It’s actually a bullet point on our project pitches.

Necx: Looking at where you’re at currently: do you have a story in mind? Or even a thought about what type of game you will be making? ARPG or MMO? How’s the team feeling about the change?

Travis: As to the game, I’ll be able to better answer in a couple of weeks. As far as the team, we’re all just excited to get back to work. Being unemployed sucks.

Necx: Regarding your thoughts on Diablo 3: would you want to make a game that detailed and storyline driven? Maybe a darker vibe or something?

Project_Xii: I’d like to emphasize the term “storyline” here, due to its importance.

Travis: Yes, lack of story was something that was hugely problematic for Mythos, and something we’d (like to) rectify.

We actually DID write a story after the fact, and it was sort of cool - but we didn’t have enough time to find a way to deliver it (no cutscene budget, or VO budget at that point!). We started sprinkling references in quests, but that’s not enough - you have to set the tone, and carry it through, and at that point with Mythos it wasn’t something we were able to do proper justice with the time we had.

Necx: You mentioned ‘time’: were you under a bubble to launch?

Travis: You are ALWAYS on a deadline. At least if you want to get fed. We were trying to get into open Beta by October, and released by Christmas, and there was plenty to do already.

Necx: What bugged you the most in Mythos?

Travis: Lack of narrative, uninteresting randomized dungeons, art style was too WoW ‘me-too’, quests were not epic enough. Those are some of the things I most want fixed. We were working on some pretty cool dungeon stuff at the time of the shutdown that we will carry on with in a new form.

Necx: Hey, less WoW’ish is a good thing.

Travis: I don’t think our Art team liked it either - it’s just a product of our weird process. We started out 100% outsourced since I was the only dev, and things tended toward WoW-ishness. After a while, you’re stuck with it, and when we started hiring in-house artists, and the project became a ‘real’ one, well, that’s a lot of art to redo.

Necx: Ouch. Why did you accept it (in the first place) then? I would have said “This isn’t what we asked for; stop playing WoW and follow the instructions we wrote”.

Travis: There weren’t a lot of instructions - I was making a six month ‘freebie’ project that that would be over and done with extremely soon. There wasn’t an art lead - we just tried to get ‘art’ made as fast as possible, and, well, that’s the way it turned out. I mean obviously, we cared - but the game didn’t have much identity then, because it wasn’t anything close to what it is now, and I was just making it up as I went along. I didn’t sit around for a month thinking of the kind of theme and look that the game was going to have - it was basically “Go! Quick!”

Necx: I guess they gave you the go ahead to make it a full project, and then boom, you had to sprint. If so the time you had to do what you did was amazing in game standards. So how will this differ on the new project? Still going to outsource, or going to take more time on the art plan?

Travis: We’ll still outsource, but now we have an inhouse art team from day 1. We’ll do preproduction, nail down our style and core story, and THEN outsource to that, with the art team serving as control for the look and feel, and doing main character work and ‘key’ elements.

If you watch the development of Mythos, you can see their influence start to gel the look of the game - it might not have been the look we all wanted, but the consistency began to exert itself - basically, they did what they could.

Necx: Why are so many companies outsourcing nowadays? Is it just so you can work on the story, quests and design more, while they basically lay out the structure and style?

Travis: It’s partly because the expense of producing the content is much greater than it used to be. Sprites = cheap. 3D assets = not so much. For an MMO or an Action-RPG, the sheer NUMBER of assets required for all the unique loot and monsters and props are huge. We just can’t afford to do it all in house. Part of the reason is because the art flow isn’t constant - it comes in waves and spikes, and then there’s a lull. If you have lulls and you have an ENORMOUS art team that is building your assets, then you have long periods where not everybody is working and you’re just burning cash. With outsourcing, you’re only paying for the hours required to make the assets (basically - it isn’t quite as simple as that).

That’s not to say I wouldn’t love to do all the art in-house - it’s just not financially feasible unless you can find a way to keep everybody fully occupied at all times, which is really, really difficult to do. What do you do once you’ve shipped the game and are only doing ongoing content? If your art needs have cut in half, do you lay off half your artists? Yuck. I want to keep my whole team.

Necx: Thoughts on that: if they come back with something you don’t like, do you have options to send it back or are you dealt the cards you are given?

Travis: Yes, you do - it has to be managed though, which is why you need an in-house art team, and in many cases, an outsourcing manager. You usually don’t get the assets ‘completed’ - you get to see their progress and comment. You’re paying by the hour, not the asset, most of the time - so it’s your time to burn.

That’s why it is important to have good conception, and to get on the same page as your outsourcing team, so that you don’t burn a lot of money going back and forth. You want to be in a place where everybody ‘gets’ what the right thing is most of the time.

Necx: How long does that process take?

Travis: The process of making an asset, or the process of getting on the same page as your contracting house? Per asset, obviously it’s pretty different from thing to thing - modeling a sword vs a character, there’s a wide range there. It gets down to polygon count, whether it has to be rigged, texture size, whether it needs normal mapping, spec maps, etc. As far as a contractor, it depends on the contractor - it took us a month or two with our last art contractor to get it nailed down. We hope to use them again, so that should make it go quicker this time out.

Necx: And one final odd ball question: your favorite game of all time?

Travis: Toss up between Cave Story, Wasteland, and (predictably)The Ocarina of Time. I’ll probably change my mind tomorrow. Planescape:Torment came dangerously close. As did Super Metroid. Wasteland will never get knocked off the top 3 though.

Necx: Well, once again, thanks Travis for your time. And everyone at Runic Games; Good luck on your new upcoming project!

Other Assorted Info - A Timeline on Mythos

Here is how Mythos came about and was developed, to the best of my memory.

• I (Travis) was offered a job working on Hellgate. I couldn’t afford to move to San Francisco at the time, so I had to decline

• 3 or 4 months later, Phil Shenk and I had the idea to do a small little game for fun, just as a hobby

• The idea arose internally at Flagship to do a test project to make sure that the networking for Hellgate could shoulder a large player population. Phil brought up the fact that we’d been working on something small, and they already knew who I was and had offered me a job prior. Because I made FATE, it seemed like a good idea to bring me on to do Mythos as a short, 6 month test project that would be released for free to test out the networking.

• I started work in October, nearly 3 years ago. The project was built on the Hellgate codebase (so that it could in fact test out the networking) - after about 4 months we really liked the game, and wanted to make it a real project.

• 6 months in I hired 3 people. We moved to a small office and kept working on Mythos. We forked the code.

• We slowly added a few people. We go to Alpha. I merge changes back and forth between the codebases manually during all this time. This is extraordinarily painful.

• We later decide to merge the codebases back together because doing the additions and fixes back and forth by hand is ridiculously time consuming. This too is extraordinarily painful and takes over a month to do. As a result inside the code there are large portions of shared stuff (stats system, networking, basic room stuff, layout, random generation systems, etc.) and then big branches that are unique to each game (Mythos renders everything a lot differently and has line of sight stuff, pathing is actually used for players and works substantially differently between the games, combat works differently in many ways, etc. etc. etc.)

• Hellgate is released, and Mythos goes to Beta shortly thereafter

• Hellgate and Mythos both continue work. Engineers and artists STAY on their respective projects.

• Cellwind moves up to Seattle, and continues the exact same work from here.

• Mythos Overworld release

• Shutdown

  

David DeMartini of EA Partners Discusses The Hellgate Failure

• August
• 22

Posted by Phil Hoper 4:02 pm            Game: Hellgate London

From an interview, published today, between Gamasutra and David DeMartini much was discussed about current and soon to arrive video game ventures affiliated with EA’s Partners Division (EAp is basically the megacorps most recent reformation of spin to seem less controlling of creativity and more friendly than monopolistic in the industry when working with studios).

Full interview is available here. It’s worth a read as some much anticipated games are discussed while the EAp talking head does a good job of sounding like the EA top brass actually care about video games beyond the profits. To save you the time of slogging through much of the text, here’s the parts on the HGL Super Suck from EA’s POV…

Gamasutra:
Over the last eighteen months, EAP has undergone something of a renaissance, putting the group more out in the open than it ever has been. Top-down directives from recently-appointed CEO John Riccitiello have stressed new degrees of studio autonomy throughout the organization — policies that have allowed EA Partners to attract top-shelf independent developers who historically would have balked at the idea of partnering with the megalithic publisher.

Last year, it released The Orange Box from notoriously independent Valve, Rock Band from Harmonix Music Systems, and Crysis from Crytek — but also the less successful Hellgate: London from now-all-but-defunct Flagship Studios.

Gamasutra sat down for an in-depth interview with group general manager DeMartini to discuss the recent deals as well as EAP’s overall philosophy, its understanding that not all development must originate from EA, its Metacritic scores compared to EA’s internal projects, and where Hellgate: London went wrong.

[…]

But, for example, Flagship and Hellgate: London did basically implode. Should you have stepped in more?

DD: Yeah, I mean… We’re certainly sad with the results for Flagship and what’s happened with Hellgate, because at the time we signed it, we were trying to get involved in a very complicated relationship between Namco and Flagship. We were coming late to the party, and trying to do whatever we could to sprinkle the game magic on the project and get it headed in the right direction.

I think that’s an example where all three parties had the best interest of the game in mind, and sometimes the game doesn’t work out. Hellgate is still an incredible concept. The guys who worked on it spent thousands of hours trying to make that concept work, and sometimes we just don’t see something. Sometimes, we just didn’t take enough time. Sometimes, things don’t work out the way you expect.

It’s kind of like a film with all big stars — on the script, it should be successful, but the movie doesn’t turn out as good as everybody hoped. That’s why EAP takes a portfolio approach with its games. You have to place a lot of bets, and hope for a lot of hits.

Were you actually funding it, or were you just marketing and distributing, or what?

DD: We were co-publishing with Namco. I’m not going to dodge a bullet — we had people who were actively working with them on the title. We thought it would have been slightly higher quality than it turned out to be, and I think the problem with the game was that by the time it got really good, we were four to six months post-release. That was too late; we’d lost the fanbase.

It was strictly an issue of the gameplay and game quality needing to be higher at the start. Unfortunately, Flagship was in a situation where they weren’t in a position to hold the game any longer, and the situation kind of took over.

Bill Roper said this week that there were conversations about EA acquiring the studio. Was that a serious discussion?

DD: I can’t really comment on any kind of acquisition conversation. I know I wasn’t involved in any of them.

How do EA Partners titles perform relative to the larger EA catalogue?

DD: The average Metacritic for the EAP titles was higher than EA’s overall average Metacritic last year. Obviously, [that’s] buoyed by great titles like Rock Band, The Orange Box, and Crytek’s Crysis — those three titles were all 90+ rated titles. We had a huge string of good fortune with some of the best partners in the industry.

With regards to sales, we were delighted by how all the EAP properties did. The notable exceptions would probably be Ninja Reflex and Hellgate: London.

[…]

Looks like even EA Got Flagshipped!

For a take on how the remaining players of Hellgate London are taking the news read the EA’s view on Hellgate message thread on the official HGL forum.

  

Skeleton Crew Managing Hellgate Screw Around with Main Server - Fan Boys Cream Their Jeans!

• August
• 21

Posted by Phil Hoper 4:45 pm            Game: Hellgate London

Some believe that it’s always darkest before the dawn, every cloud has a silver lining and “good” always wins out over “evil”. On the Internet such beliefs are held as near absolute truths by many an online socialite when it comes to understanding actions taken by the creators of services, software and media they have aligned themselves with as a die-hard fan. Logic goes out the window, recall of previous actions and announcements from the developers vanish, and willingness to accept any other possibility than the truth their mind has conjured up becomes reality.

Such was the case yesterday when a few of the handful of remaining Hellgate London Staff created an impromptu, stock content driven, event on the the Live (non-test) US Sever, word is still out on how many high level hardcore (one life, perma-death) characters were slaughter without warning. While this event was simply a couple of admins manually spawning boss mobs in various maps, the backend code running the game servers took it as a sign of the coming apocalyptic final shutdown and responsed by taking everyone to Tronsville until yet another manual restart was required as per the usual fix these days when things go wrong.

Rather than take this insta-”event” at face value, The Happening was posted on the still standing (thanks Bandai Namco!) Official HGL Forum by a player presenting this unprofessional screwing around on the same level as if another million dollar plus round of funding had occurred…

Hey guys.

I don’t know if I am supposed to post this, but judging by what Tiggs said, that we’d fill everyone in, I think it may be safe.

HGL ain’t dead.

I was just on live, in a mysterious ‘test’ with an entity known as Panda.

We ran some ‘test’ scenarios about some future things.
Like perhaps survival modes, maybe a raid thing, maybe a tiered challenge mode with a boss.

This is 100% no BS, and am getting pictures uploaded.

We had like 40 Sydonais in Devon Shire square,
4 Molochs in the Wilds, waves of enemies.

Someone has the reigns folks.

HGL IS ALIVE.

Pic #1 Test:

Pic #2 Test (for better forums size, am no forum whiz here kids)

A few posts later, a logic driven player tried their best to inject some reality…

Sounds more like A gm screwing around before the game bites the dust.

Pages worth of posts followed, from extreme die-hard fans to the most hyper critical, one things was certain, this was big news to many if only for the reason nothing has happened inside the actual game for months! No patches, no live events, hell only active subscribers at the time of the big layoffs, when the subscriber page “broke” can access sub only areas.

Basic as this spawning may be, it sorta worked for IAHGames, least a couple of months, when trying to keep their tiny number of remaining players interested while being (to this day) stuck at version 0.7.

Beyond the hardcore fanboy irrationality on this happening making such a thing out to be much more than even Tiggs said it was, it illustrates how bad of a decision it was to remove scheduled events from the game. MMORPG and scheduled events for real life holidays and other occasions go hand it in hand. Even summoning up extra mobs for the weekend would, for at least some players, would be a reason to load up HGL.

Yet another decision made by the FSS Team to try and maximize profits!

From a dev chat, in January of this year, well before everyone got fired and money was all spent…

<DevBot> [SF]Ayana :asks: We missed the x-mas event that we thought was going to happen… What ingame events are planned for this year?

[16:53] <Bogustus> As you guys have seen, we have had a real challenge getting holiday events to happen.

[16:54] <Bogustus> The difficulty is that it creates a hard deadline when builds have to be completed. Also, it requires that we make a bunch of content that goes away after a couple days.

[16:54] <Bogustus> We are trying to stop rushing builds, and we are focusing on content that will stay around for a long time.

[16:55] <Bogustus> I feel bad about it. I wish that we had more time and resources to work on it, but I think that it is the best choice right now.

Yet again $$$$ > Customers Enjoyment

Followup on this fail being discussed on the Flagshipped.com Forums, http://www.flagshipped.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=414

  

Hellforge Interviews Travis Baldree of Runic Games

• August
• 20

Posted by Phil Hoper 6:19 pm            Game: Hellgate London, Mythos

Sol Invictus, of Hellforge, Interviews Travis Baldree, former Mythos developer, about his and other ex-FSS Seattle Team members newly formed company, Runic Games.

http://hellforge.gameriot.com/blogs/Hel … Interview/

Here’s a few of the choice questions, rest can be read by following the above link.

Who among the team is joining you, are there any people from FSS?
We’ve hired back all of the original Seattle team, and Max Schaefer from San Francisco is onboard as well. He’s been effectively on the Mythos team for quite some time already.

What types of games are you planning to design?
We thought we were headed in the right direction with Mythos - I think our collective desire is to do that type of game right and get it out the door.

If you had unlimited resources what’s one specific game idea you’d really like to put forward and make?
Apart from relocating to the Caribbean?
In a world of unlimited resources, I’d want to build a game with the incredible depth and consistent surprise of Nethack, and the polish and presentation that Blizzard is known for. I have a feeling that’s what a lot of people want.

http://hellforge.gameriot.com/blogs/Hel … Interview/

Also a new Flagshipped.com message forum is now available for the discussion of this new company made entirely of former Flagship Studio Members from the Mythos dev team.

Flagshipped Forum » From The Creators of Diablo… » Runic Games (Ex-FSS Seattle Team)

  

More employees speaking out!

• August
• 19

Posted by Gapes 7:11 pm            Game: Hellgate London

We received a second source detailing more ongoings with Flagship Studios. Juicy details included in this one… Including inter-office power struggles. Below is what we received via email. I would bold the things I find most interesting here…but they are all very interesting.

• Employees were not paid for their last two weeks work. Bill Roper himself promised the employees in a meeting that everyone would be paid including what was owed to them.

• Employees were not paid out for retroactive raises that were to kick in from April and paid out on that last pay check

• Employees were not reimbursed for any outstanding dental bills or gym receipts per their benefits package

• Some contractors were paid (those that were with an agency) other contractors were not paid for their last two weeks.

• Some Employees were given information on the studios situation more then 30 days prior to the closing

• The closing down of the studio happened spur of the moment due to rumors that the funding didn’t go through. To many it seemed like FSS would have tried to go on even longer then they could had this rumor not started to float around that Thursday night.

• Cobra insurance was not offered as originally stated in the lay-off emails. It was later found out that legally cobra only was offered if there were employees receiving benefts left at the business. This came to a shock to many employees especially those that just had babies.

• Forums were run by the Marcom team. After Beta the Contractors/Moderators (Tiggs Minions) were not allowed to post outside of the tech support forums unless it was an emergency or they were locking a post per Scapes direction.

• Scapes was on an alert post spree despite his Marcom team telling him to focus on other duties. Scapes would alert 20+ posts a night. Scapes would tell moderators how to handle the posts if no action was taken then Scapes would delete the post or ban the user. Moderators/Contractors are taking the fall for someone that had no clue about a community. Scapes saw to it that no one from the CS Team (Tiggs and her minions) would ever be seen in the public eye. Marcom and CS had very serious issues and the two teams did not get along despite efforts to bring them together. Tiggs may come across very strong willed but she knows communities and answers questions. Much more then Scapes has ever done. Scapes would ban forum posters from the forums without following procedures (3 strike rule and then a time out). Mass bannings and deletions of threads were done by Scapes on the forums leading to arguments between the two teams in the days leading after the layoffs.

• Contractors/Moderators and Tiggs volunteered for up to two weeks after the news broke and removed (dethroned) Scapes ability to moderator. They are now working for NB under Mig Squared - Tiggs Company

• Mismanaged money was an understatement - Yoga at the office, Daily Lunches, Dinners, Beer/Wine, Xbox 360 and games, Wii and games, First Class Air Fare, the entire studio going to the movies, employees having full realm of using company credit cards, even a company picnic that unfortunately was the weekend after the layoffs. If a company isn’t doing well you tighen the purse strings! You weren’t on Blizzard’s budget anymore

• Large office space was opened in Austin that was barely used

• The billing application not working lost revenue for FSS

• Rumors have it that Former Seattle employees that are now employed by Runic games have been paid out their lost wages.

• Many former employees are having trouble obtaining unemployment due to FSS not responding to inquiries made by California and Texas unemployment offices.

• The letter on flagshipped from the board of directors is legit

• The other letter has two versions, one for Flagship people and One for Ping0 people.

• The California office had invited select people to the office after the layoffs to meet representatives from Hanbitsoft to discuss further career opportunities.

• The California office worked with other companies to introduce former employees for employment. This was not extended to the Seattle or Austin office.

This source tells us that ex employees are VERY unhappy about people coming to us with this info….this is what our source has to say about that.

“Some former employees are upset that you’re being given this information. The way I look at it is they should be more upset that people worked and weren’t paid. People banked PTO with the hopes of taking longer vacations and that is lost. People trusted to be reimbursed for benefits they received through the company and that didn’t happen.. Retroactive raises were promised and never paid out. The people that worked did what was expected and more and should be paid for what was promised by the company and by Bill in a meeting. Those former employees that are upset that you have the information can go F themselves. We have families to feed, new babies to take care of, mortgages and high California rents to be paid. You can easily tell FSS that you don’t need the money but most of us do need it.”

We were also given a copy of the Ping0 version of the termination letter..it reads along the same lines as the one for employess of FSS.

  

Flagshipped.com has insider source

• August
• 18

Posted by Gapes 6:31 pm            Game: Hellgate London

Yes, this is the news I was talking about. We received some emails from a dark shadowy figure claiming to be a former FSS employee with intimate knowledge of the ongoings there. We were skeptical at first with this and there will be more news to come of it all (unless we scare him away). Take this with a grain of salt if you’d like, but I believe the source.
First the source tells us that FSS DID NOT PAY anyone out of their pockets. The 30 days salary line was a load of garbage. People are still unpaid for PTO (paid time off). The source also tells us that FSS creditors will get paid before the employees do. Here is the letter that was emailed to the employees.

July 20, 2008

To all former Flagship/Ping0 Employees:

The Board of Directors regrets to inform you that the final payroll has not
yet been paid out as of today.  We are doing everything we can to get the
final payroll paid to our employees.  At this time it is likely that the
company will file for bankruptcy.  In that case, employee claims will be the
top priority on the list of debts of the company.
You will receive your W-2 after year end.  If your address changes between
now and then, please contact ********** at ***-***-**** to let them
know your new address.

Sincerely,
Flagship Studios/Ping0

The source also tells us that at FSS founding parties, instead of talking about future gameplay or art, they’d look at luxury car catalogs to see what kind of things they’d get with their money. The source also tells us that individually the brass there weren’t all bad but they played off each others worst traits, ignoring problems, self satisfied and appointing the least qualified to key positions in the company.

This explains quite a bit in my opinion, and as I said you can take take this with a grain of salt if you’d like, but we stand by our source.

There will be more to come of this I hope…..there are many questions to be asked and many that we hope to have answered. On that note I leave you with what sold us that we have a legitimate source here. The scanned copy of the termination letter issued to the employees on July 11, 2008. Stay tuned guys…we hope to have more info coming in the near future.

.

  

He’s dead, Jim.

• August
• 18

Posted by Agamemnon 2:14 pm            Game: Hellgate London

Remember that big news Gapes said that was coming around? Here it is. A full review with CEO Bill Roper of Flagship Studios that answers every question imaginable, courtesy of 1UP.

—

Bill Roper speaks out at last
Flagship founder breaks silence to talk about his company’s demise.

The rumors and dirt have been flying ever since Flagship Studios — makers of Hellgate: London and Mythos — announced massive layoffs on July 11, 2008 and subsequently lost the rights to both games. Until now, we’ve heard nothing from the normally high-profile and media-friendly Bill Roper, Flagship’s cofounder and CEO.

In a worldwide exclusive, 1UP.com’s PC games Editor-in-Chief Jeff Green sat down with Roper and got him to break his silence and tell his side of the story regarding the drama swirling around Flagship, Hellgate, and Mythos. What exactly happened here, from his perspective? What went wrong? What would he have done differently? And what’s next for both the games and the developers? Roper has felt that there have been numerous misconceptions floating around for the past month. Here is his take on things.

GFW: You’ve had an interesting last year, to say the least. So, how the hell are you, Bill?

BR: Doing OK, all things considered. Yeah, alive and breathing — better than the alternative. It’s definitely been an interesting six to eight months since the Hellgate launch. Been a lot of things going on since October. Seems like longer than that. I spent a lot of hours in the office, sleeping on the floor, phone calls all across the world, working on stuff….

GFW: So let me ask you one question about the office right now. Is there still a Flagship office that has employees in it?

BR: Sort of? I know it’s a weird answer, but, yeah, we do. We announced [on July 11] that we had to lay off the vast majority of the employees, but there’s still a small handful of the founders working on things. Really, our focus now has been on how we best take care of the guys that aren’t there anymore and help them find jobs with other teams. We handpicked everybody, both on the game-content side and the online-technology side. So we’re really working to get those guys placed. Then, past that, we’ve been spending a lot of time trying to take care of our creditors and other fiscal challenges. But it’s definitely at the point where we’re not exactly trying to plot a gigantic turnaround with a bright, rosy future at Flagship. It’s unfortunately more the other side of the coin.

GFW: So is it really a matter of how to end it gracefully? Is that fair to say?

BR: Yeah. It really is. We’re working hard on how to end gracefully. Obviously, we’ve got people we owe money to, so we’re doing absolutely everything in our power to get those people the money we owe them, whether that’s on an institutional side, lenders, or, equally as important, with our employees who aren’t there anymore.

GFW: OK, so let’s back up and talk a little about exactly what went down here.

BR: Well, we’ve basically spent the last eight months, after we shipped Hellgate and had Mythos in development, looking at what the next phase was for Flagship. For us, the main concern was trying to find the right partnership. We knew that we had to take the step past just project funding into studio funding. We were really open with our guys about that and said that this is what we’re pursuing. So we started that, talking with potential investors, other companies, publishers [and] trying to find the right partnership that would allow us to put the proper focus on making the best games we could.

GFW: So were you talking about actually being bought out?

BR: As a possibility, yeah. Acquisition was a possibility. Investment was a possibility.

GFW: Did you guys talk with EA about possible ownership?

BR: Yeah, we talked with them. We talked with a lot of groups. Some companies were really interested, and we had very long discussions with them. Other companies weren’t really in the position to do so because of other acquisitions they were in the middle of, or even, with some companies, acquisitions they’re still trying to make happen. Even giant companies can only do so many things at once, right? Those wheels, while they tend to be pretty powerful, are also unfortunately kind of slow. So we ended up having two or three different companies really interested in doing investments that would lead, potentially, to acquisitions…

GFW: This is in what time frame?

BR: This is over the last, oh, four or six months. At the high levels, from a business-management standpoint, that was the focus. This is a transition that we wanted to do. We knew that we wanted to do things a lot differently; we didn’t want to spend four and a half years working on a 10s-of-millions-of-dollars title anymore. We really saw Mythos as the direction we wanted to move — digital distribution, smaller projects based off of core technologies. So we were pitching those games, those kinds of game ideas. We were looking for other companies that had that same mindset to work with, and ultimately, we found a couple that we were really interested to talk with, and [we] actually entered into fairly lengthy negotiations with one particular company. Ultimately, that didn’t work out.

I think that, maybe, because we tend to think with our hearts a little more than [with] our heads, we probably chased that deal for too long, because we really wanted it to happen. We always were under a very firm belief that we would get this together. Such a firm belief that– much to the shock of the investment bank we were working with — we as the founders put up our own money into making it happen. And anyone in business will tell you that spending your own cash is a terrible idea. In fact, when we did eventually have to lay almost everybody off, the last paycheck we paid out all came out of the board of directors’ pockets because we had anticipated having a deal done by that time. And because we didn’t know if we were going to get [the deal] done within another pay-period time frame, and we didn’t personally have the money to be able to do that again, it came to the point where we had to [let people go]. It probably goes against popular belief, but just because we all used to work at Blizzard, [it] doesn’t mean that we’re all millionaires, although that sure would have been great.

GFW: So you’re not getting a royalty from every World of WarCraft subscription?

BR: [Laughs] Yeah, unfortunately, no, I don’t get a check from every [copy of] Diablo, WarCraft, or StarCraft that sells. It got to the point where — just to illustrate the lengths that the board went to — I had to basically liquidate 401(k)s to pay people’s salaries. I felt responsible for these guys and gals that worked at Flagship, and when we couldn’t get a deal to drop in enough time, we had to make a really difficult, and unfortunate, business decision. Honestly, [it was] probably too late. We really should have looked at it a month earlier and said, hey, we still don’t have a deal done, [and] the company’s starting to run out of funds — we should do this now. From a personal standpoint. But I don’t really think that any of us thought of it from a personal standpoint, like, “What can I do to protect myself?” I was thinking more like: “We’ve gotta keep the team together. We’ve gotta keep the games moving forward. We feel like we’re really close.” So unfortunately, when that wasn’t going to happen, we did have to make that really hard and painful decision. I’d always maintained that the day we left Blizzard North was the hardest professional day I’d ever had. That was easily trumped when we had to sit there and tell everybody that we had to let them go.

GFW: I don’t know how much time you’ve spent reading message boards, and obviously, people don’t understand the intricacies of the business process here and what you guys have gone through. But how does it make you feel to know that there are people who are saying or might be thinking, “Well, gee, these guys laid off all of their workers, and they’re still raking it in…”

BR: It’s pretty disappointing. I understand that, unfortunately, the Internet seems to be a haven for people who like to just get out there and throw out the most vitriolic and aggressive stance they can. But there’re no secret piles of money that the company’s somehow magically making. I haven’t been paid in almost two months, and I’ve been putting money out to try and get people taken care of. That’s the flip side. When people think, “Oh, wow, these guys are starting their own company. They’re gonna sell it. They’re multibillionaires!” They don’t really see the other side of it, that when that doesn’t happen, you continue to invest your lifeblood into it because that’s why you started it in the first place. When we started Flagship and the first nine of us were there working at Tyler [Thompson]’s house, we had to pay the guys minimum wage so they could legally be employees. None of us were sitting on tons of cash. We were burning through savings to get the company started up. The unfortunate ending on the other side is not that we made a good-but-not-great amount of money, so we let everybody go and kept that good amount of money. I think that we, again, were probably thinking more with our hearts than our heads, and any money that came into the company at all was turned around into chasing Hellgate — trying to make it better, doing the patches. We didn’t get a lot of support financially. We poured pretty much every penny the company had into doing that.

GFW: What would have it taken, do you think, to have been able to do that? Would it have taken money from EA? Is that who you mean?

BR: No, I think that, well, part of the challenge was that when we originally came up with the concept of doing the game, the whole idea of continuing content was pretty amorphous. How that was going to happen, who pays for that — we all kind of assumed that would come out of the revenue. The subscription money we did get, we all poured directly into keeping the game online, keeping it up and running. But the development demands far outstripped the revenues. There just wasn’t a good contemplation early on of how that would work. It wasn’t like: This is the budget that comes in every month; we’ll do whatever we can do with that. We just said [that] development will get done out of the revenues, and whoever pays for development, they get paid back out of the revenues. And there wasn’t really enough revenues coming in to cover the expected and required development costs. I will say that for a good amount of time, we did get some funding from Hanbitsoft. But I throw that out with the caveat that this [is] the “old Hanbitsoft.” There was definitely a change of command there over the last couple of months, once T3 made their investments. Things definitely dramatically changed, not only, unfortunately, in our relationship with them, but just in their attitudes toward our company and what they demanded would happen.

GFW: Why don’t we go over that a little bit — the timeline of when these other companies got involved, and how it went down from your side of things.

BR: Sure. I think the thing that I’ll start with is that we’ve been really happy with how supportive Namco and EA have been through all of this. When it became apparent that Flagship wasn’t going to be able to be a continuing concern, when we were going to have to shut things down, Namco stepped up immediately. Zack Karlsson contacted me from over there and said they wanted to keep the game going and asked how they could work to make that happen. EA’s been incredibly supportive with that as well. They’ve hired some of our guys, as did Namco, so they can continue to keep the operations going, which I was really happy about. Making sure that our players could keep playing the game. The first thing we did was we turned off billing, because we didn’t want anybody to get charged when we knew we weren’t going to be able to give them any more content. So it was pretty difficult, with a lot of things happening amazingly fast. There was a lot of confusion for players early on, like: “Am I going to get billed? I want to cancel my account because I don’t want to get billed, but I can’t get into my account manager because we’ve [Flagship] locked everything up.” So we basically froze everybody at the status they were at, whether they were a subscriber or not, in terms of the content they could access. But we also made sure that people weren’t getting recurring charges. We didn’t allow people to make new subscriptions. They could still make accounts to play the game for free, but they couldn’t subscribe. That was a really big concern of ours; we didn’t want to be misrepresenting what people would be getting. Again, to their credit, the Namco and EA guys were immediately on it to make this work out.

GFW: What would have happened if somebody who got a boxed copy at that time, or even now, and saw the stuff in the shrink-wrapped box about getting a subscription…

BR: People can still go online and play for free, like it says on the box. The only thing they can’t do right now is actually make a subscription account. I know that, right now, Namco is looking at how they want to handle that moving forward. Obviously, we’ve given them the pertinent information for any of the guys that they would need to do whatever it is they want to do. I can’t speak for them, but I think that as much as anybody else, they were surprised that this was all happening, so they’ve really had to do a lot of on-their-feet thinking and moving really quickly to take the next step, so players can still get on and play for free. What they end up doing on the subscription side I’m not really sure. They just need time to figure that out and see what they want to do.

GFW: Back to the involvement of these other companies…

BR: Sure. The other major component of that, on the Asia side, is Hanbitsoft. It’s been really kind of discouraging to read some of the press that’s coming out of Korea. We worked with Hanbitsoft for a long time. Back in the Blizzard days, we launched StarCraft and Diablo with them. Together, both companies had a huge amount of success. When we started Flagship Studios, there really wasn’t any doubt we wanted to work with Hanbit. That was our known, comfortable, go-to company, because I’d known them for a long time and had a very good relationship with them. The real challenges started when T3 came in as an investor, and pretty much everything changed overnight. Obviously, when companies are dealing with each other, there’s a lot of NDAs, especially with publicly traded companies involved. So we didn’t really have any kind of heads-up that that was happening. We literally read about the investment from T3 online.

GFW: So T3 made the deal with whom?

BR: They made their investment in Hanbitsoft, and as part of that investment, they took over a lot of the management there. So when we were in Asia on a business trip and talking with different companies about investments, we took the opportunity to go by Hanbitsoft’s office and meet the new people. It was very evident, immediately, that this was the new management of the company. The first day [we were there], we probably spent about four or five hours talking with them and getting to know them, and they sounded excited about working with us. The thing that really upsets me now is reading where Hanbit’s saying that they made numerous offers to us, and that we rejected these offers — almost kind of implying that we were greedy and lazy or something. The second day we were there, they did present us with an offer…

GFW: And this would be for what? For them to actually buy the games? Buy the IP? Buy you…?

BR: Unlike Hanbit, I’m hesitant to violate my NDA and disclose information, so I can’t get into all the details with you. The new Hanbitsoft hasn’t had much of a problem disclosing confidential information to the press, which was pretty shocking to see. I take a poor view of business partners, former or current, breaking contracts in that way. So I’m always very sensitive to that and don’t want to do that. Basically, they presented an offer on how we could work together. We couldn’t pull the trigger on a deal just like that, though. I had to go back, talk to the rest of the board of directors, our investment bank, [and] the employees — those types of things.

The timeline to do so that was presented was very short. And basically, the offer wasn’t competitive with two other offers we had on the table. We really wanted to work something out, so we came back to Hanbitsoft and were very honest with them and said the deal wasn’t competitive. But as originally intended, the loan we had received from Hanbitsoft, to which Mythos was the collateral, was designed to be a bridge to finding a studio investment. And that was regardless of whether it was with Hanbitsoft or another company. Now, granted, that loan was with the old Hanbit. That was the deal we worked out, and the new guys said we should do this deal with them. And I said that I appreciated the fact that they’ve made an offer, but at the same time, my fiduciary duty to the shareholders is to find the best deal for the company — and also to find the best deal for the team.

I think Hanbit was in a difficult situation from that standpoint, because they were approaching us as a publisher who wanted to cut a deal with us, but they were also a shareholder in the company. I tried to explain to David Kim, who’s the CEO there now, that it almost feels like a conflict of interest. A) I don’t have the power to do this deal; there are other people involved. And B) we can’t just say we’ll do the deal with you because it’s you. I’ve got to try to find the best deal. I’ve got to do right by you as a shareholder in Flagship, just like I have to do all the other shareholders in Flagship. That, I think, made it exceptionally challenging. Unfortunately, when we came back to them and said their offer wasn’t going to be competitive, but that we had some other ideas and laid out a plan of how we could work with them to reach a deal with a different investor that would have benefited them greatly as a shareholder, they were…wholly uninterested. At that point in time, they informed us that their deal was non-negotiable — which they had actually never told us, verbally or in writing. And they pulled their deal off the table and pretty much refused to talk to us about anything else, other than another deal that they put on the table a week later that was untenable. It didn’t even make any sense.

GFW: Was it worse?

BR: Markedly, and it was one sentence.

GFW: Deal or no deal…

BR: Yeah. That may be how they were used to doing business. I’m not sure. But it was nothing that we could do. We went to them a couple of times with different proposals. Each time they basically refused to talk to us about anything involving that. Again, it was really discouraging to see that after the relationship started to fall apart.

GFW: So they were basically saying…we’re going to be your investor, or nobody is?

BR: Well, we’re not going to help you get anybody else to be the investor. They didn’t really have the ability to block somebody else from investing, but they certainly held some keys in regard to us being able to do a couple of deals that, again, would have been incredibly beneficial to them.

GFW: So why would they do that? Again, just in your opinion…

BR: I don’t know. I honest to god wish I knew. I don’t want to believe that their offer was disingenuous, and it was just designed to be something that we wouldn’t be able to accept. The end result, regardless of why it was done, is that because we did make the loan with them, they currently, to a degree, control Mythos, because that was the collateral for the bridge loan.

GFW: OK, so they can now say, and I’m just putting this in laymen’s terms so we can all understand it, is: “You owe us money. You don’t have it. You offered Mythos as collateral, so now we’re taking that collateral.”

BR: Right. That’s the simplified version. They haven’t taken that final step, actually. But that is where it’s at. We don’t have the money to pay back the loan. I think right now, which is pretty evident by some of the things they’ve been doing publicly, they’re trying to figure out what to do with Mythos. They have it free and clear, and they’re looking to start up, apparently, some U.S.-based studio to do something. [Read more about T3’s new studio.]

GFW: Who has the Hellgate IP right now?

BR: Right now, Comerica does. It’s basically held by the bank. If Flagship could come up with the money to pay back the loan, it’s ours again. But we don’t have that money. We’ve been working with Comerica to provide them with anything and everything they’ve requested to be able to properly represent the IP, represent what’s being held in escrow, and working with them to try to identify people that might be interested in that. Even if this means that we can’t work on it anymore, which is pretty painful. You spend four years working on a game and then to not even be able to do anything with it — it’s pretty rough.

GFW: Does that only affect any further stuff that would be done with Hellgate, or does that include the game as it exists now?

BR: Both.

GFW: OK, because right now, isn’t Namco involved…

BR: Well, Namco and EA are continuing to operate the game. But, for example, they can’t do any development on it. They can’t make new content.

GFW: So Comerica’s control is the IP…

BR: IP, code, tech, and tools. So to be honest, if I personally had the money, I’d buy it back out. The technology and the toolset that we built is a really powerful platform for creating titles. That was really the goal of what we were going to be doing at Flagship. We were going to be using the tech and tools — using the platform — [and] creating games based off of that as our core moving forward.

GFW: It has got to be painful to have been the creator of something, even just the tech and the code, let alone the game itself, and have that be owned by somebody else…

BR: Yeah. It really is. It was a decision that we made because we needed to get more money into the company. Comerica’s been very good to work with. They’ve done a lot of movie funding, but funding game development is a new area they wanted to move into. We worked something out with them that worked pretty well for a while, but then, eventually, we weren’t going to be able to meet the rest of the commitments. But we continue to work with them, even through this part of the process, really closely. I think that’s another big difference now. I’ve talked with Comerica pretty much constantly. I haven’t heard from Hanbitsoft in two months. So I’m not really sure what they’re going to be doing. I know most of what I know reading the Internet.

GFW: Sorry.

BR: [Laughs] Well, I know some things. I know that they haven’t had much luck in getting anybody from Flagship. I know none of the principals or the directors have any interest in working with them. I know the Mythos team doesn’t want to work on that. I think they’d love to be able to work on Mythos, but they pretty specifically wouldn’t want to work for T3.

GFW: So this new S.F. studio — they’re not talking with you guys about that?

BR: I know that they did interview former Flagship employees, but as far as I know, of everyone I talked to, nobody accepted a position at this point. Certainly — and definitely — nobody at any kind of high level. And nobody from the Seattle team, which was the core of the Mythos team.

GFW: They own the game as it exists right now, in the state that you guys left it?

BR: Yeah. But I think part of it is — the challenge they face is — it’s like if somebody says, “Hey, I made you a loan against your Ferrari, [and] now the loan’s due, so I want the Ferrari.” And I say, “Great, here’s a box of parts, because I didn’t actually finish building the car yet.” So they have it, but it’s not done, and they don’t have any of the engineers that were there that know how to build the game or use the tools or use the tech or anything. So yes, you have it, but you have it where it is, which isn’t done yet. It’s a lot different from a movie. With a film you can say, “Here’s all the footage. Get some competent guys with an Avid system, and you could piece something together. Go shoot some more scenes. Release the film.” Totally different situation here. There isn’t just a quick way you can slap something together. So I think that they’re facing a big challenge: How to actually get a shippable title out of this without that team being there anymore. Unfortunately, it isn’t something we didn’t kind of warn them about. We said, “We want to know what you guys will do.” We had transition service agreements that we have done everything we can to fulfill. Flagship at this point is unable to actually provide those transition services. I don’t have programmers anymore, or artists to work on the title, but we provided them with all the personal contact information with anyone they wanted. After that the onus is on them as far as whether or not to bring those people in.

GFW: Have you thought about how you would feel if they get some team together and actually somehow cobble it into a game? Are you going to have mixed feelings — like you’re glad that somebody was finally able to put this baby out — or do you wish that it just got killed with you guys?

BR: I think what I would really want to see is that there was some way where Travis [Baldree] and his guys were able to finish their game. It’s pretty different from, for example, how I feel about the Diablo III stuff. I’m excited to see Diablo III, because it’s a whole new thing. They’ve got a whole new direction on it. They have a few of the guys that worked at Blizzard North still around, but there’s a whole new team on it, and it’s like, OK, it’s their license, and they’re trying to really move the bar and do something different with the Diablo license. Yeah, I’m excited when I see what they’re coming up with.
GFW: Have you followed the little minicontroversy about the art direction?

BR: Yeah, it’s not surprising. Only from the standpoint, as we touched on earlier, that the Internet is a place where people like to rail on everything. But it’s the art direction they chose to go with. It’s a whole different group of guys that worked on it when we were there. So it makes sense [that] they’d probably think about giving you some better visibility, make it easier to play, [and] get a broader audience.

GFW: What was your own gut reaction to the art direction?

BR: I just thought it was different. I think the thing I always liked about the Blizzard North and Blizzard HQ constructs is the fact that they were two very distinct groups. At Irvine, we had a way that we approached things — game development, art style, from color to character shapes, everything — that was very distinct from the guys at Blizzard North. I think that it made it pretty compelling when you bought the Diablo titles. You got something that was markedly different from what you got out of a WarCraft or StarCraft. I think now, because everything’s down there, you’re seeing the Irvine take on the Diablo universe. So it’s just the direction they’re going with the people they have and the mindset there. I always liked the fact that Diablo was very dark and Gothic and gritty and edgy, but I don’t think there’s anything particularly wrong with the direction they’ve gone. They just chose to go a different way.

I think the core Diablo fans are saying, “We really like the dark, edgy, gritty look of that game!” We had people impaled on spikes, for god’s sake. And now it’s kind of bright and airy and doesn’t quite feel the same. But I dunno. I look at it, and it’s got high production quality, and it looks like it’s going to be really fun to play. I think that wall of zombies is the coolest concept for a spell maybe ever. It’s not any different in terms of gameplay mechanics, but it’s so cleverly thought-out. I’m gonna raise a wall of undead! Oh my god, why didn’t we ever think of that! It’s genius! So I look forward to that. Again, it’s a take on something, even if it’s different. With Mythos, it’s a thing where?it’s mostly done, and you want the guys who were working on it, pouring their vision into it, their heart and soul into it, to be the ones who complete it. Short of somebody else being involved with the project, I don’t really see that happening.

GFW: It has got to kill you, I think, because you took a lot of hits in the press and from the public about Hellgate, but Mythos was different. You had made this kind of critical turnaround, at least as far as the beta was going, and then to have the rug pulled out from under you…

BR: It really felt like Flagship was on that verge of turning a corner. Hellgate came out, and it wasn’t as good as it should have been. There’s a myriad of reasons for that. Some of them were just bad timing in the PC market. The PC market was lousy last year. Some of it was the fact that we were an independent studio. We didn’t have unlimited money, and we had to ship when we had to ship. Part of it was because we overreached, and that was a design problem that was totally our fault. We tried to do too much. We tried to be a standalone game and a free-play game and an MMO and an RPG and a shooter. We were trying to be something for everybody and ended up really not pleasing many people at all…

GFW: So if you knew then what you know now, what would you have done differently all along? Maybe both on the development and the business side.BR: Less. It’s actually a pretty easy answer. I would have done less. Now, I think that some people will immediately think: “What else would you guys cut out? There wasn’t enough!” But I don’t mean less in terms of content but in terms of breadth — so that we could have had deeper content. Taking the time that we spent on doing a Vista version and supporting the Games for Windows program and doing a single-player game; there were a lot of things that we did where we could have put that time into better content generation. It would have been a double win, because there would have been fewer things to go wrong, so we could spend more time on things that did go right. I don’t think we should have launched in, whatever it was, the 17 languages that we did. I mean, literally, when you’re sitting there and you have to spend another day and a half because you have to get rid of these bugs in the Slavic-language version, and you’re like, wait, why did we do that? No offense to our Polish gamers, but why did we launch in Polish? Because we’ve got too many bugs in the Polish-language version, so we have to burn cycles on that, burn QA testing on that, [and] burn a build on that. All that adds up.

I think that part of the problem was that when we were looking at how long it was going to take us to even go through the bug phase, we based it off of our past experiences [at Blizzard]. And we were doing so much more at Flagship. Not only so much more from a development standpoint, but we also had to spin up from zero. Not only were we developing a game, we had to do the online-services side. Anybody who went through the first painful week or so of our billing process will attest to the fact that we didn’t get everything tested. We did right by everybody, eventually. Nobody got overcharged or got incorrect credit card billings or had to pay fees or any of that stuff. But still, we didn’t have the time or the bandwidth to test it all. I think it was because we just tried to do too much. On the business side, we should have picked a model. And we tried to hybrid. Now, I like to try to give us a little credit for trying to be innovative and do something different…

GFW: When you say hybrid, you mean…

BR: Free- and subscription-based. I think we should have picked one or the other. We should have said, “Hey, you buy the box, and then it’s free online play, and we’re going to [disappear] for a year, except for bug fixes, and crank out a new expansion.” Or we should have said: “You know what? There’s no single-player version. It’s subscription only. That’s how we’ve geared the game. That’s how it’s gonna work,” and done that from the beginning. We wanted to get people who’d never subscribed to a game before to play it by themselves, then go online and play it with their friends, and then they see all this new content and want to subscribe. But I think that was a model that caused a lot of confusion and caused a lot of division amongst our community, too. I think the thing with Mythos that you saw in a lot of the gameplay elements, the business model, and the way we were working with the community was based on what we learned that we did wrong with Hellgate.

I think that’s the really sad part. It really felt like we were turning the corner. OK, we made mistakes. The Hellgate game came out, and it wasn’t great. But, you know, we also had a lot of players who enjoyed the game. And it’s not like the game didn’t sell at all. But it should have been a lot better. We really take responsibility for not being better. But we can just sit around saying that really sucked, or we can do something about it, and so we were working really hard. It was twofold: First, to make the changes in Hellgate that people wanted, to make it a better game, to continue to make it a better product, and try to grow it over time, and then learning from all that in what we were doing with Mythos. And so the projected future of the company was great. We knew Mythos was going to be great, so we’d build off that and see what we could do with it. So yeah, it is pretty tough when you just can’t economically make that work out.

GFW: At what point did you guys feel like maybe you shouldn’t have done the hybrid model? Was it before or after you launched Hellgate?BR: Before we launched. GFW: So you already knew…

BR: We knew before we launched. There was enough feedback from people where we realized, yeah, we probably made a mistake. But at that point…the train had left the station. We didn’t have enough initial content in there to [switch directions]. We might have been able to back off and go to a free-to-play-only model, but we didn’t have anything in place to roll right into doing an expansion. Everything from the development side to the business side was set to this model that we’d put together. We hoped that it was going to actually work, and we told ourselves that maybe it’ll work better than we think it’s going to work, right? But there was just a lot of confusion.

People were saying there’s going to be the haves and the have-nots. There was a lot of backlash against the model. It’s always tough to gauge percentages, though, because the people who post online are the people who are angry regardless of whatever, so then you’d assume that everybody hates the game, or everybody doesn’t like your magazine, or whatever it is. We definitely had people that were never happy with what we did. But we also had a lot of subscribers that were really happy with the work that we were doing, who felt the game was getting a lot better. We could even see it [on our message boards]. We’d put a post up announcing what we were doing in the next update, and there would be X number of people who would say, “There’s no way we’re going to play this game; it’s a total piece of crap,” but then over time those posts became fewer, and we started to get the supporters saying, “I dunno. I’ve been playing for the last four months. These guys are working their asses off, and they’re doing a lot of good work on it.” And that really was the case.

We never really much left crunch mode, for the core Hellgate guys. Once the game shipped, we said, OK, what can we do? Part of that was getting it ready for the other markets — getting ready to launch in Asian markets, trying to put in content or mechanics that they wanted specifically. A lot of it was us listening to our different advocates in the community. We set up this advocate program where character classes and gameplay were going to be the key. We were spending a lot of time on the boards and really doing everything that we were able to do, from an extremely underfunded standpoint, unfortunately, as far as trying to make the game better. I think we could have done more a lot faster if, again, we had the funding that was designed specifically for that ongoing content. There was some that was coming in, but it didn’t come close to matching what we needed to meet all the requests of not only the fans but our publishers. Obviously, if the revenues were bigger… But it kind of became this negative perfect storm of us trying to chase making the game better and really digging ourselves into a bigger and bigger hole. That’s why we did things like take out loans against our IP and pouring our own money into it, so we could turn the corner. And we ran out of gas before we got around the corner.

GFW: In general, about Flagship and listening to all these stories, it sounds like such a…almost like a small-business nightmare in a way. It makes me wonder a couple of things. One is, and if this is totally off-base just tell me, but I wonder if you guys as a group almost ended up being…the success that you had with Blizzard almost ended up being a negative in terms of maybe making you more naïve or more susceptible to making not the greatest business decisions. Under Blizzard, there was so much support and so much money. But when you went out on your own — which is everybody’s dream, to start their own business — maybe you were not in the greatest position, not having that incredible infrastructure that Blizzard has…

BR: Yeah, I think that’s a part of it. We knew it wasn’t there. Obviously, you know what your budget is, and you know when the money comes in, and you look at what’s getting spent. It could have been a lot better in a lot of ways. Certainly on the day-to-day management, on the money side, on just trying to work toward…I think maybe a big one is just the fact that we knew how to develop based on what we’d done at Blizzard for the past 10 years. That development style can be extremely effective, but it also is dependent on at some point being able to say, hey, we need three more months or six more months to continue to iterate and polish. When we got to that stage, we didn’t have that. There wasn’t that additional, “Great, we’ll give you another X million dollars to get you through the next amount of time.” It was like, yeah, well, how are you guys going to pay for that? And we said, yeah, we can’t, so I guess we’re coming out. And that’s a big challenge.At Blizzard there was always the freedom, where if you could make your case, to whoever it was — Cendant, Davidson and Associates, Vivendi — whoever it was at the time: “This is why we need this much more time, [and] this is the benefit you’re going to get out of it.” And they would say, yeah, that makes a lot of sense — take the next six months or whatever it would take. And that’s great when you’ve got the financial backing that allows you to do that, but when you’re an independent studio, you don’t. Even when you realize, wow, we need more time, if you don’t have the budget for it, and you can’t get the money for it, you just can’t do it. So you’ve got to ship the game.

A lot of it, too, is the fact that we set a date; we all agreed that we’d be able to hit that date; hitting that date was based on our past experience with Blizzard in terms of how long it took us to fix bugs and complexity and things like that. The marketing money got spent to do that. Once marketing starts happening, if you change the date, you’ve flushed that support. We said we’ve got to ship. As we started down that path, working on the bugs and things, there was so much more there, and it was so much more complex than we’d ever imagined, certainly far more than our experience had taught us. I think that’s another area where maybe, indirectly, the Blizzard experience hurt us, where we based our expectations off, well, this is about how long things took there. Then we go there and realized not only do we have all the game stuff to debug, but we have all the online stuff to debug because this is our first title we’re shipping with that, too. And we’ve got all these other things, different platforms to support. We’re supporting XP and Vista. We’re doing all these different languages. It all came together. We just couldn’t get everything…

GFW: Kind of going back to what you said about less…

BR: Yeah, yeah. We would do a lot less. We’d support less areas, and in the areas we’d focus on, we’d do a hell of a lot better job focusing on them. It would have allowed us to put a lot better focus on those areas.

GFW: So what would you say to the players now who are still into Hellgate, or who still want to believe, or are still hoping for more? There’s still a fan base out there. You probably have people who are frustrated or hate you but still love it.

BR: Yeah, I think that’s accurate. There are people who love the game and have been there supporting it since the beginning and have kinda gone through the struggles and the continued work on the title. It was really for those people, first and foremost, that we worked with Namco to keep the game going. We didn’t want Flagship’s closing make the game go away. So we were really happy when we talked it through with Namco and they said, “Yeah, let’s figure out how we can keep this going.” So that’s been really good. I have no idea what will happen in terms of future development. I really don’t know. That’s going to depend on whoever ends up with the Hellgate IP and their level of interest.

GFW: So the state the game is in right now is where it’s locked, until the point at which somebody else may have the IP or not…

BR: And may or may not do something with it. So it really depends. Even if somebody picked up the IP, that’s no guarantee that there would be more development on Hellgate: London. They may pick it up and do other things with it. Or they may pick it up and not really do anything with the IP because they like the technology and the tools. It’s really open. I think that there could be more done with it, but it would be somebody who looks at that and makes a strategic decision. But it wouldn’t be anything that would happen fast. And again, as far as I know — and I hope I’m not misrepresenting because of something I’m not informed of over the past week — nobody yet has a claim to it. That was one of the things I was concerned about in the Gamasutra article, where [T3] said they’re starting a studio to continue Mythos and Hellgate development. That’s a little cart-before-the-horse. They don’t really have any ability to work on Hellgate. They actually don’t have the legal right to work on Hellgate. Maybe that’s something they anticipate getting, but that’s a little presumptuous to throw out there, that that’s what you’re going to be doing.

GFW: They can with Mythos, right?

BR: They could, if they elect to. And they take that final step to enable themselves to. That’s a more accurate representation of the possibilities. Again, not saying either one is impossible, just that nobody is currently in a position to be doing that with Hellgate. I’d love it if somebody could do that and honestly put in the time and effort, but again, I think it’s going to be the same challenges in terms of working on the Mythos property. The guys are gone. They’re either starting up their own new ventures, or they’re hiring on with different companies, or they’re moving on to different industries, or they’re taking their first vacation in four years. It was one thing when everybody was still there, where it was a short time frame after we had to let people go. I think there was a period of maybe a couple [or] three weeks where everyone was still hanging on, waiting to see if something was going to happen. We were still fervidly working on some kind of deal to do something. But I think at this point, it’s impossible to expect people to wait.

GFW: So if we read some press release in however many weeks’ or months’ time that says, “Great news: Mythos is back in development!” this is not going to be the same guys who were working on the game in the first place?

BR: I would be surprised. I mean, it’s not impossible. I think that if there was a way that the original Mythos team could get the IP all to themselves, they would gleefully work on it. But I know that they don’t have any interest in working on it under the current arrangement.

GFW: What about you personally and the guys you are still in touch with from Flagship? In theory, if someone came in with a bottomless pot of gold and said you can do whatever you want with this money…

BR: I’d marry him, first of all. You can do that now in California! Though I would hope it was a woman…

GFW: Sure, Bill, it can be a woman with a bottomless pot of gold…

BR: This is a beautiful story.

GFW: But, seriously, would you take the IP back and say, “Now I’m going to do it. Now I’ve got the resources!” I just mean from an emotional and mental standpoint, more than anything else. Do you feel done, after what you’ve been through, or would you want it back?

BR: I think it would be rough from that emotional standpoint. I think that’s a thing that the general world never sees. They just assume, “These guys make games. They have this business. They did it. It didn’t work out. They move on.” It’s amazingly difficult from an emotional standpoint. You don’t start a company, two companies, and pour five years into doing something and not become emotionally attached. It’s impossible. For me, personally, it’s been incredibly difficult, because this is the first company I’ve ever started, you know, and been a