Nabeel interviews Flagship Studios

Actually that's an exaggeration, it wasn't all of Flagship Studios, just a couple of guys in the team ... and I didn't interview them, just asked a question. But I'll start at the beginning.

Basically I've recently gotten back onto irc again, just a few channels in which I used to hang out years ago. A few days back on one of the networks I got an invite to the #hellgateguru channel, which is the irc channel for the site Hellgate Guru, which in turn is a fan site of the upcoming game Hellgate: London. They were due to have a chat session with Ivan Sulic, community manager at Flagship. I knew about the game and had read up quite a bit but I don't really have that much interest in it, but any kind of dev chat has my attention, so I joined the channel to wait for the chat session. The idea was that once Ivan arrived, the channel would be muted, ie. noone could say anything except for those select few who were voiced (in this case the moderators and Ivan), and questions that we wanted answered could be passed onto the moderators who would choose out out of those amongst themselves. I didn't have any real interest in the game, and I knew that the fans in the channel would end up asking the usual mundane questions about the game concerning stuff they would find out anyway once it came out, but were things they just had to know now. But this was an opportunity to interact with a game dev so I forwarded a few questions, more regarding the development side of things than the actual game, basically stuff which had little chance of getting chosen. As it happened, they did choose one of them, the most boring one admittedly but it was cool anyway. The chat log is here, but here is the relevant part:

<QBot> Question #2 [nabeel] What other games are you drawing inspiration from, other than Diablo and Deus Ex? Do you think Hellgate: London combines its basic gameplay ingredients (RPG, FPS, MMO) succesfully enough to make a unique new kind of single game genre?
<Ivan-Flagship> Other than Diablo, we draw inspiration from EVERYTHING. First-person shooters of all types, horror games, popular fiction... But honestly, it's all about our past. And our past is all about Diablo. The game is an action-RPG. Mechanically, it's Diablo with lots more stuff. Thematically, it's medieval sci-fi, if that makes any sense.
<Ivan-Flagship> Done
<Ivan-Flagship> Oh
<Ivan-Flagship> Not done
<SolInvictus> Ooh, do elaborate.
<Ivan-Flagship> Whether it's successful or not will be determined by whether you buy it or not. We sure think it's successful.
<Ivan-Flagship> Okay
<Ivan-Flagship> Now I'm done.

Not quite the answer I was hoping for, but Ivan isn't really part of the development team really, he's the in the PR side of things so I couldn't really expect him to give a definite subjective opinion about the game.