12 Sept 07 Check out this cool interview with Hellgate: London CEO Bill Roper, who chats to a gamer about issues surrounding randomisation in gaming!

Newsweek blogger N'Gai Croal chatted to Flagship Studios CEO, Bill Roper in a two part interview outlining the making of the Hellgate: London game, and ended up having a really interesting discussion about issues of randomisation in gaming. Here's a snippet:

Above: The Cabalist in a screen shot from the upcoming game, Hellgate: London.

Bill Roper: "I think that randomization is actually really underused. There's definitely a reason for that. It's hard. And the challenge is to do it, but make it look easy, to have it where people don't look at it and go, 'Oh, you can kind of tell they tried to do randomization and it looks the same.' It's a lot of work. You have to have it in mind when you start. But I think that you see it in bits and pieces in a lot of games."

The Female Templar from the upcoming game, in an exclusive screen shot.

"Even like you know, World of Warcraft has randomized, things that drop, and you're like 'Oh, I found it,' but they tend to be in smaller portions. With Hellgate London, we've tried to apply the randomization process in every single element of the game. To when levels are generated. To what monsters are spawned. To what items drop."

Read the full interview here for more info, and for the second part in the series, click here.