It's been a very interesting year for Bill Roper. A year or so ago he was the co-founder and CEO of Flagship Studios which had just released its first game, the highly anticipated action-RPG Hellgate London. That game, as many of you may already know, was a mess when it was released. Full of bugs and online issues, the game got mediocre to poor reviews and poor sales.

This past summer Flagship Studios shut down its doors and while the final fate of Hellgate London itself is still a bit up in the air, Roper seems to have landed on his feet. As revealed today via a chat with our sister site Game Daily, Roper has found a new job at Cryptic Studios where he is now the lead designer for their upcoming super hero MMO Champions Online.

Roper states in the interview that he went to Cryptic just to get in the beta test for Champions Online but as he says, "I went to a friend of a friend, and we just started talking about things and as the discussion evolved, we found we had some similar ideas." Roper says he's learned some lessons from Hellgate London that could be applied to his new job, saying "It can be a problem with a game that you try and go too broad, and I think we did that with Hellgate. With Champions Online, we'll focus on making something that's not wider but is much deeper." Champions Online is scheduled to launch this spring.