bill-roper posts

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.'"

In a bit of a surprise, the official Champions Online web site has posted up word that Bill Roper, the Chief Creative Officer at the MMO game's developer Cryptic Studios, has departed the company. The post contains a lengthy statement from Roper but he was non-specific about his reasons for leaving Cryptic, saying only, "Over the past few months my entrepreneurial spirit has become restless, and I've made the difficult decision to move on and look for new opportunities."

Roper gained fame as one of the leaders of Blizzard Entertainment when the developer released products like the WarCraft RTS series, StarCraft and particularly the Diablo series of games. In 2003 he and several other high profile Blizzard team members left the company to form Flagship Studios where he was the CEO. However its first game, Hellgate London, proved to have a disastrous launch that resulted in Flagship shutting down in 2008. Roper joined Cryptic Studios later that year as its Design Director and lead Champions Online's development through its final year before launching in September 2009. In March of 2010 Roper was promoted to Chief Creative Officer of Cryptic.

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.

It's one of the biggest flame outs in recent game development history. Flagship Studios, formed a few years ago by the prime developers behind the Diablo series at Blizzard, created the highly anticipated action-RPG game Hellgate London. However mediocre reviews, tons of bugs at launch and poor sales after its October 2007 release served to sink the developer. Flagship closed its doors a few weeks ago.

While we have heard from other Flagship founders what happened to the studio, the highest profile team member, Bill Roper, has kept silent until a new and extensive interview just appeared at 1Up.com. Roper admits, "OK, we made mistakes. The Hellgate game came out, and it wasn't great." He also stated that the mix of free play with a monthly fee with more content was also a mistake. However he also stated they were trying to improve the game in the months following its release. Obviously things didn't go as planned and while Roper stated they were in talks with a number of people to buy Flagship and their IPs (including their in-development free MMO Mythos) they ran out of time. Roper still wants to continue to make games for a living but no future plans were revealed.

Despite earlier reports that Flagship Studios would remain optional after the massive layoff comprising most of its staff, ex-COO Max Schaefer has told Gamecyte that the studio has only remained open to "take care of the final affairs."

A Blizzard Entertainment veteran, Schaefer admits that closing down a company was a new experience for him, as it was for most of Flagship's executives. The doors have remained opened so that Flagship CEO Bill Roper can "take care of the debts and the employees in an orderly fashion."

Sitting in on the interview was free-to-play-MMO Mythos lead designer Travis Baldree, who lent a bit more insight into the build up to the studio's premature demise. Baldree says that he, along with the other executives, knew that closing was a possibility, "but we were in very advanced negotiations with a couple of people for deals that would have kept Flagship open and would have kept everything running." For a time, the future seemed brighter.

Unfortunately, none of those deals came to fruition, and the closure became inevitable. "We all were up all night, every night, not getting any sleep, working every day trying to get it to work out for everyone, and in the end it just didn't," says Baldree.

Just as before, Baldree, Schaefer and others are looking ahead to the future, and the second chance it offers. The Mythos team has reformed as Runic Games and continues to do what they love most regardless of setbacks and layoffs: create games.