Flagship opens up Hellgate

Flagship Studios, the developer founded by former Blizzard staffers including Bill Roper, has revealed that its first title will be a post-apocalyptic PC role-playing game called Hellgate: London. What do you suppose they're implying?

Featured for the first time in the pages of the US edition of PC Gamer magazine this May, Hellgate: London will be an RPG with third- and first-person views - but don't worry, Diablo fans, combat is stat-focused rather than twitch-kill.

The game is set in a smouldering London where demons are starting to transform the Earth into their home, having more or less vanquished humankind five years previously. They obviously did a half-arsed job, however, as you're about to turn up throw a spanner in the works.

Hellgate: London will be structured as you might expect from this lot, with various character classes, lots of levelling up, branching missions with loads of sub-quests to consider, and lots of futuristic weaponry that can be augmented by collecting artefacts and storing them in a limited number of slots.

The action will take place above and below the ground, and there will be co-operative multiplayer options as well as support for 16-32 players, although it's not explicitly clear whether there'll be competitive modes as well as co-op.

You can find more specific details from the PC Gamer piece halfway down this page at Blizzplanet.

As you may recall, Namco signed Flagship's output exclusively as part of its push to be taken seriously as a PC developer - a desire reinforced by its signing the Warhammer licence earlier this month. We expect to hear a lot more about its PC endeavours at E3, so stay tuned.

Interestingly, Flagship is also considering expanding the Hellgate premise to take in other cities around the world, which could mean more games and expansions bearing the name further down the line. More on Hellgate when Flagship keys us in.