Well, not really. But it's the first thing I've felt worth posting here, since several posts about my Quixotic (and misguided) quest for the Flagship Studios Community Manager job. Just to follow up on that first, Goddamn am I glad I didn't get that job. It would be fun to play HGL every day, but I'd have gone insane months ago at the nearly-daily "answer the same questions on 10 fansite forums a day" grind, and if that and the pain in the ass dealings with major gmaing sites and media hadn't finished me off, the long hours and travel would have. Ivan Sulic, the guy who got the job, routinely sends emails to the fansite list at 8 or 9 or 10pm on weekends, he (and the rest of the company's PR apparatus) was recently in Germany for a week, and he's now in Japan for the Toyko Game Show. Yeah, some of the travel would be fun and I'd enjoy parts of the job, but the time drain would be unacceptable. I'd hardly ever see Malaya, and I certainly wouldn't have time for writing, working out, practicing martial arts, and spending time on various other important things I've yet to mention on this blog.
I'm much happier with my HGL connection being just a fansite, one that hasn't required that much of my time (and hopefully won't until the beta madness begins early next year). It's nothing like the fun it was co-running diaboii.net back in the crazy 1000 emails a day chaos after that game released, and I'm not making a dime from this site, but with lesser responsibilities come far lesser worries.
Speaking of worries, Ivan and Flagship have another one.
Info leaks, and the asshole fansite webmasters who
draw attention to them! I hate that Flux guy! Oh wait.
Anyway, if you're no following the issue, Flagship has thus far announced two of the characters in their upcoming title,
Hellgate: London. The Templar and the Cabalist. It's pretty clear from their release schedule and the amount of the game that's been completed with the beta supposedly starting in just a few months that there are only going to be three characters in the game (with two more in some future expansion, I suspect). And when you consider that their first game was Diablo, and notice that the Templar is basically a warrior, and the Cabalist is basically a mage, you're left with a rogue-type char for the third. A character who can do melee and cast some useful spells, but is primarily designed as a ranged attacker. They
said as much, and months ago.
As for rogues... Well, you can see already that our classes tend to be a mixture of several minor sub-types to create one compelling character. For instance, the Templar is a combination of monk, paladin, fighter, spellsword and barbarian classes, whereas the Cabalist is a mixture of wizard, sorcerer, summoner, necromancer, and psychic. It's not hard to imagine, thus, that another class could conceivably feature rogue-like attributes and skills in addition to many other things.
--Ivan Sulic, April 24, 2006
That's probably why they didn't hire me for the job... I could never drop such subtle hints!
Anyway, speculation on the 3rd char class has focused on a ranged attacker with some stealth/traps abilities since we learned about the Cabalist early this year, and scratched "mage with summoning and transformation abilities" off our lists. Everyone following HGL is certainly curious to see their take on the character, and to learn their backstory and see what the male and female versions look like, but there's pretty wide agreement on the basic character template, simply by process of elimination. (What will be interesting is the expansion, to see how Flagship can define 1 or 2 more chars without giving them abilities that overlap those of the first 3 hybrid type chars.)
The real questions, at times, has been speculation over what they'll call such a character. And now we know, thanks to this bit of description over one of the comic books they're releasing to promote the game:
Templar Commander Jessica Sumerisle, Cabalist Crowe Jane, and Demon Hunter Saul Petrus have reluctantly teamed together in the hunt to decipher this arcane symbol.
You knew they werne't going to be the 500th RPG to have a "rogue," not when they already called it that in
Diablo 1, and class titles like "assassin" or "marksman" or "gunner" or "sniper" seem both lame and limiting. "Hunter" was another possibililty that's been bandied about, but it didn't seem real appropriate for a character who basical mows down hundreds of demons in open combat. That's hunting like mowing the lawn is grass hunting. Flagship's apparent solution, as linked to above... "demon hunter!" Because that's so very different! See he's a hunter, who hunts... wait for it... demons! (HGL is set in London, 20 years after a demon apocalpyse, when monsters flowed through "hellgates" and overran the earth. Calling a character a "demon hunter" in this setting is kind of like calling the swordsman class in an orc-fighting game "Orc Slasher.")
Happily, the drama isn't just that the character class was (accidentally; the official news on Dark Horse comics does not include those class titles) leaked by a PR release to some comic book site, since I don't think that's very big news. It's just the character name, and not a very evocative one at that. We still don't know anything about the character's look, skills, back history, fighting abilities, etc. If anything, it adds to game interest, since we now know something about the 3rd character, and can spend our time speculating about what his/her skills and abilities might be.
That's not the drama. Not for a company that apparently had their entire source code stolen some months ago. No, the drama is on the periphery, where I've posted about the name leakage, and (most of) the other HGL fansites have chosen not to. They're honoring Flagship's wishes and frantically deleting threads in their own forums when any fans try to post or discuss the news. I'm certainly not unsympathetic to FSS' plight, and I've delayed info releases in the past when they've asked, but in this case I'm sorry, but the genie is
so out of the bottle. The news was posted on a comic book site and linked to by much-viewed threads in the forum of every major and minor HGL fansite. Despite the noble efforts of Flagship and people like myself, there are only about 500 people who give a shit about HGL at this point, and all of them saw the info yesterday morning when it was reported. Fifty of those people run fansites, and apparently 49 of them are so new to this and so loyal to FSS and so indifferent to their obligation to provide news to the fans that they're more than happy to self censor. I'm not.
I can kind of understand the other fansite webmasters' POV; I remember how in awe I was of Blizzard back in the early D2 days, and how any post by a Blizzard employee was cause for celebration. An email from them? Rapture! If they'd one day asked me to remove half the 500 images in our screenshot gallery because they didn't like the contrast ratio, I'd not only have done it, I'd have apologized for posting the screenshots in the first place, before begging for the chance to spend my weekend fixing the problem with Photoshop. That never kept me from wanting to post news when it came in though, and with the HGL site I've really made a point of that.
On the HGL site I'm running, I post news about anything good and HGLish, no matter where I find it. This despite the fact that a number of the other HGL fansites apparently view my/our site (Elly and Paul made the site and do a great deal of the backbone) as the enemy, and never post news links to us, even when we have exclusive content that every HGL fan would want to see. Gameplay movies, in depth reports from first hand play at E3, etc. Even as they rudely snub me, I still link to them when they happen across something good, and if you think Elly and Rush agree with that attitude, after our/their near-decade of being regularly raped by practically every other D2, War3, WoW, and GW fansite on the internet, you must live in a very happy, sun-filled world.
Adding more fun to the equation, two of the admins of a rival HGL site emailed me this morning to say that they already knew about the comic book class name reveal, and that they're not posting about it and that Ivan would want me not to post about it either. Which is probably true, but there are a lot of things Ivan and the rest of Flagship want, and while their desires are usually going to match up with mine and my responsibilities as a webmaster/news disseminator... usual does not equal always.
I'm not getting into a flame war over this issue, but I have to quote a few choice morsels.
...Simply put, the name of the class and its related info are all under non-disclosure agreement (NDA). It doesn't matter that you think it's "silly". It's still under a NDA. I'm sure I don't have to explain how contracts and NDAs work.
...I'd ask that you show Flagship the same courtesy as all the other fansites by stop pretending to be some kind of journalist for the New York Times.
...Please show some decency, and fulfill Flagship's request for reticence and remove the offending information and the related posts and advise your visitors to do the same.
I'm snipping a lot from his message, and I really don't mean to make fun, since the guy sent me a very polite message. But man! Delusions of... something. Equality, since Ivan gives him an email or ICQ every now and then?
I'm certainly sympathetic to Flagship's goals, and I hope the game is a big success both since I want to play it and since I'd like to have something to continue my fansite about. I am now, however, an unpaid extension of their PR wing. Well, I am, but I'm not a total hand puppet, damnit! At least not until Bill Roper gets a manicure. "
I am not an animal! I am a human being!" With dignity! And something superficially resembling self respect!
As I told the other fansite guy, I'm running an HGL fansite to provide information to the fans of the game. (Hence my linking to all good HGL stuff, even if it appears on other HGL fansites -- a practice most definitely
not adhered to by the emailer.) I am not, however, on Flagship's payroll, and I do consider myself a journalist, albeit one of a slightly
yellow-tinged hue.
I also found it amusing that he brought up NDAs, and even said he didn't need to explain how they worked to me. Apparently someone does need to explain them to him, since I know damn well I haven't signed anything in regards to reporting or not reporting HGL info, and I'm quite sure he hasn't either.
Of course the risk of all this "information wants to be free" grandstanding is that Flagship might get pissed and blackball my HGL site. That would be unfortunate, since at this early stage we're still dependent on Flagship itself for game info, a situation that will end the second any sort of public beta begins. True, I could just read other HGL sites for news and then report it myself, but that would cut into our coverage in at least one area. Ivan regularly sends out .docs of his many forum posts, which I whittle down to the highlights and post as news items. No one else does this, probably because they 1) don't want to link to other site's forums, and 2) it's work. I think it's great info for the fans though, and I think people will see that our news and coverage is better and know that if anything HGL worth seeing happens, they can count on my site to link to it. I could duplicate the posts by surfing the other forums, but having them all in one .doc is a great time-saver.
What'll happen as this drama unfolds remains to be seen, but it should be interesting. I should also note that our policy at the D2 site was initially to link to other fansites when they had something good. We gradually grew out of this thanks to other sites 1) never linking to us, and 2) constantly stealing our news and content. Despite, or perhaps because of this, (and our superior content/news/forums/etc), we soon became the leading D2 fansite, and the largest single game site on the entire Internet. In other words, my current policy at HGL is 1) repeating a past mistake, 2) contradicting direct personal experience, and 3) open to regretful revision. I hope not, though.
Labels: Hellgate: London
