Game Over: Flagship Studios Close

[RK47]

Oh nice, finally to be rid of that diablo with subs idea they tried so hard to justify but never delivering anything better than D2 and Battle.Net

I wouldn't miss them at all.

 

[Binary]

Good riddance. Oh and next time try to make proper engines

 

[MetalCraze]

Next time? No thanks.

 

[ricolikesrice]

...

meh, HG:L had quite some potential. a hellgate:london done right could be a great game.

but ultimatevly there was simply an at least 10:1 ratio of "bad game design vs good game design" from story to quest to area design, hell through the whole fucking game.

i still believe at least a part of the FSS team was high on hard drugs when designing certain (most?) aspects of the game (most prominent beeing the utter crap story....)
cause there s no logical explaination for many of them.

its like the whole "unofficial diablo 3 from the makers of 2" hype went so high through their heads they spent their work celebrating themselves all the time instead of actually working (and if i remember right roper&co were quite active "cruisin´around with asian hoe s in a HGL jeep ..... )

i d have prefered if they got a healthy dose of reality from HG:Ls bad reviews and might have patched the game into something much better over the course of 1-2 years ... but then again never giving up the shitty subscription model and continued work on that piece of crap called mythos (so bad even "free" is too much of a price for it...) asked for it.

laughing at all the morons who spent 150 bucks on a founders offer though.

 

[Raapys]

And when the servers go down people wont even be able to play multiplayer or the subscriber-only content at all. It's ridiculous.

That said, I wonder what would happen should a company like Valve go bankrupt. There'd be millions of gamers who suddenly didn't have access to their (Steam ) games anymore.

 

[Texas Red]

Re: ...

laughing at all the moron who spent 150 bucks on a founders offer though.

fixed

 

[ricolikesrice]

...

more like 2000-5000 and though that sounds little in comparision to 10 million wow subscribers..... thats up to 3/4 million $ or € for absolutely zero effort, conjured out of thin air so to say.

only beaten by CoD4 where 1 million fucking retards were idiotic enough to pay 5 (or was it even 10?) $ for a bunch of multiplayer maps i.e. 5-10 million $ gain for what costed between 5 $ (asian student working 4 weeks) and 5000$ (paid level designer working 4 weeks).

its amazing how much money can be made with so little effort if you have the power of hype behind you. the stupidity of the masses is beyond any limits.

EDIT: even more amazing is how you can still go bankrupt despite making such a ton of money from hype & stupidity.

 

[Amasius]

One developer of shitty ARPGs less? Cool.

 

[aboyd]

Well, Andrew I don't want to tell you how to do your job at VE3D, but normally you check the quotes before making them appear as fact. I didn't say this at all, and I have never spoken to you or recall ever speaking to you about anything ever. I'm sorry, but this news article is just not from me.

Teh plot thickens.

I'm not so sure. The article doesn't allege that the community manager said those things to Andrew, but that he said those things to an insider, who in turn betrayed the community manager and spilled the beans to Andrew.

So I think the community manager might be parsing things veeeerrryy carefully here. "I didn't say those things" might mean "I didn't use that exact quote" or "I didn't say those things to you" or something like that. It reeks of typical PR -- say something that could possibly be true in one sense, but is totally misleading in general. I'd put money down that the things mentioned in the article are in fact true -- people were let go, the lenders ARE stepping in to claim ownership, etc.

but then again never giving up the shitty subscription model and continued work on that piece of crap called mythos (so bad even "free" is too much of a price for it...) asked for it.

Wow, really? I kinda like Mythos. I love FATE -- it's the best Diablo clone out there, I think. I know other people love other Diablo clones more, but this is the one I latched onto and enjoy. By extension, Mythos was pretty interesting. Somebody here @ the Codex gave me a beta tester account. I took it for a quick spin, approved, and handed it over to my kid, who enjoys it a lot.

Oh well. It appears that it doesn't matter now.

(To partially confirm that Flagship appears to have died, I and others apparently cannot get into the Mythos servers anymore. I hope that's just a temporary mistake. Perhaps someone who was laid off felt pissy and shut down the server on the way out, and it'll be back online in a bit....)

 

[Zakhal]

Update: A Goon by the name of GLC who claims to be a former Ping0 employee (thanks Hellgate Guru) has said the following on the SA Forums:

Former Ping0 employee checking in here. I feel bad for some of the talented guys on the staff who busted rear end to try and get a game out on a ridiculous schedule, but I think we all kind of saw this coming after the game came out and basically bombed. Flagship bit off way more than they could chew and made a lot of development and structural mistakes in how they went about things. They had a lot of big dreamers on staff, but not enough nitty-gritty people who knew how to get poo poo done. It sucks, but that's life I guess. I didn't always agree with the decisions of the leadership, but it doesn't surprise me at all to hear that three of them (probably Roper and the Schaeffers) dug into their own pockets to pay people. Nothing about them, Max Schaeffer in particular, ever made me think they were less than standup guys.

I think it's less that they aimed too high than that they tried to aim that high and do it quickly, and they didn't do anything the easy way. They had their own server architecture, their own client, their own chat, their own graphics engine, their own everything basically. Plus they wanted a game that could support thousands of concurrent connections with no downtime, had an engaging single-player campaign, and could support an ongoing, persistent world. It was like picking everything that's hard to do in a game, and then putting it on a brand-new company (two of them, really) with people who hadn't worked together before.

Plus you had Ping0 doing the back-end and multiplayer, working off a forked codebase, and trying to make sure that what they were designing was open enough that it could be marketed to other companies. And then Mythos, with a team working out of Seattle under Travis Baldtree (who is a loving genius, by the way), which had to fit into things somehow even though it wasn't as much of a priority. It was just a really chaotic situation all around. Hopefully the talented guys I met there will bounce back quickly, it's a lovely time to be unemployed in the bay area.

 

[Binary]

Next time? No thanks.

I'm sure the ropers will be around...

Maybe they will be hired by Bethesda and do Hellgate: New Reno

 

[Severian Silk]

Haha, remember there was a 150 dollar or so Superduper collectors edition which contained a lifetime subscription for the Hellgate online service. Tough luck for those who bought it, I guess

Tough luck indeed.

 

[Major_Blackhart]

Did they drop any phat lewt?

I know, jokes been done to death. But still, I want that Invictus Armor!

 

[Shoelip]

Eh, it seems allot more tasteful when it's not about Gary Gygax.

 

[Xor]

Well, Hellgate pretty much completely sucked, so this doesn't really surprise me.

 

[Raapys]

They just can't make up their minds over there.

Flagship Studios today denied recent stories that is has closed, saying that it is still in business - though it did have to lay off most of its employees.

http://www.shacknews.com/onearticle.x/53693

 

[aboyd]

Oh. So it's merely a sad Interplay-type story, where everyone is gone except one slightly deranged owner. And he still walks the halls of the building muttering about how he still has the license, damnit, and someday they'll be great again.

Got it.