Bill Roper Talks...

In the second and final part of our interview, Bill Roper leaves behind the topic of Champions Online and talks frankly about his time in the games industry and what he's learnt.

What do you feel you actually learned from the whole Hellgate experience? In any positive ways, what sort of positive things have you brought from the game into Champions?

I was concerned after we had to close down Flagship that I was going to be damaged goods. What I found, really, is that while you learn a lot from your successes, you learn even more from the things that don't work. Not a week goes by that some game mechanic question will come up, or some business model idea while come up, and I can not only look through what has worked in the past with Blizzard, but at what did and didn't work with Hellgate. We've done interface things, like to get missions across, which I think we did well on Hellgate.


I did like the wheel interface that popped up when you right-clicked on an item, that let you choose whether to sell it, or ditch it, or equip it.

There are some things that we did there that were good. (Laughs) Being able to differentiate what worked and what didn't work, and grab those elements that did... Even things that were really simple, like with quest text, and highlighting the salient parts for people that wanted to skim through because we know not everybody reads everything. Some players want that immersion and that storyline but a lot will just glance through, so making it easier to grasp the important points when you are skimming was such a simple thing but it worked really well. Also, a lot of what we handled regarding randomisation came up when we're looking at what to do with the randomised missions in Champions. I think the important part was taking even the negative aspects of what happened with Hellgate and Flagship, and then turning those into positives. Ensuring that those were lessons learned, and that it becomes something that – at least from a personal standpoint – I won't do again! (Laughs)


At the moment the IP and everything are out of your hands, and the only ones actually working on it are HanbitSoft, who've now released their first patch. How do you feel about that?

I didn't know they'd put the patch out. When closing Flagship, we were able to keep the company open for a good six or seven months longer than we probably should have been able to. We invested our personal money back into the company and tried to get deals going, and did a lot of other business arrangements. The downside to that was when we had to close everything down, we pretty much lost everything at the same time. I know that HanbitSoft swooped in and picked up the IP.


I know a lot of Western gamers are annoyed that they're not getting supported – they still like the product and want the support – and this patch has highlighted, again, that they're feeling a bit left out. What're your thoughts on this?

Putting on my business hat and taking my personal emotions out of it for a minute, they're a Korean company, and they're going to try and play to their playerbase, which is Korean and Asian players. They didn't really have any of the distribution rights in the US or Europe, so I believe they switched over to a free model in Asia and are going to try to create content to bolster that. So I'm sure they're just looking at it as though they wouldn't be getting any money out of Western players anyway, so why would they support it? It's a shame, because we did have a good fanbase who really loved the game, and I'd love it if the game was still there to play. But my guess is that HanbitSoft is just looking at where they have the best footing and can make the most money, and they're just focusing on those territories.


So as far as you know, having been on the inside, it's really just not going to appear again in Western territories? I've seen that the game is still on shop shelves here.

At this point, I don't know what Namco and EA will do in terms of the Western market. As it's still on the shelves, it's fortunate that there's still the single-player component. That's the upside of us trying to do too much – which was a huge negative when we were trying to make the game! We had the single player component, and a multiplayer component, and a subscription component, and Games for Windows Live, and Vista, and so on. We really overreached, trying to do everything that we could. It's probably best for my sanity that I'm not really connected anymore, just from the standpoint that it was really difficult for a lot of us when everything shut down, and personally it was the first time that I had gone out and done anything that entrepreneurial. I was very personally and emotionally invested in the company and in the game, so when everything ended up shutting down, that was a difficult time for me. I'm proud that we managed to start a company – actually, not just one, but two: Flagship and Ping0. We launched a game, we launched a platform, we did the game development. We just couldn't turn that corner and get a deal done to either get more games or get the company bought, but it certainly wasn't from lack of trying. It sounds a little clichéd, but it was just business. There were bigger fish in the water than us, and they had better footing to get what they wanted out of an endgame than we did.