Last August Bill Roper, formerly of Blizzard North and then infamously part of the failed Flagship Studios, announced he was leaving his last regular game development gig at Cryptic Studios. In a new interview at Gamasutra, Roper goes into detail about what happened at Flagship where he and the rest of the team launched the online action-RPG Hellgate London and then watched as the game fell victim to launch bugs and poor reviews that caused Flagship to shut down completely less than a year after the game was released.

Roper states in the interview that in his opinion, "The biggest failure with Hellgate is we just tried to do too much." That included having a game with a single player component, a free online component and a subscription-based online component in one game. He also says, "I mean, I think when Hellgate: London came out... we knew it needed another four to six months." However the game's publishers, Namco Bandai and Electronic Arts, were unwilling to give Flagship that extra time, according to Roper.

And what is Roper doing now that he has left Cryptic Studios? He states, "I've been talking with a lot of different companies. I've been doing different game designs and talking with everything from publishers to investors." However he added that's its been hard to get investors to fund his ideas, saying, " .. they were all like, 'Wow, that's a really awesome idea. I would totally play that game. You'll never get funding right now.'"