Some troubling news has arrived from inside Flagship Studios, the company created from ex-Blizzard employees mostly known for creating the Diablo games and the developers of Hellgate: London and Mythos. It seems that the employees are leaving the company in droves, and the company could be in trouble. A personal blog post of one of the "lead" programmers revealed this (but has been deleted since). The blog post reveals a lot of the current status "from the inside".
Before Flagship Studios, there was Blizzard North. Originally known as Condor, the Redwood-based studio was acquired in 1997 by Blizzard Entertainment. At the time, Blizzard North was hard at work on the development of the game that would be the cornerstone of everything that came after: Diablo.
IGN : Remember Hellgate: London? The dark fantasy action role-playing game came out in 2007 for PC, a year before developer Flagship Studios went bankrupt. Since then, various free-to-play and online revivals have come and gone. Now, 17 years after the release of Hellgate: London, it’s back.
I remember some friends and I all bought Hellgate: London day one because it was made by some original Diablo devs. We had fun playing it, good memories.
PC Invasion: Hellgate: London is back on Steam, but it's not what you expect it to be. It's a single-player game in the vein of Asian MMOs.
Jez. So frickin sorry to see this. I had (and still have) great hopes for Bill Roper & Co, to make more great games, like Diablo...
Damn it I hope Mythos will be ok, I'm dieing to play ti already!
Sad to hear someone who genuinely cares about not only the hard work put into major release but the people he worked with not succeed as some had hoped. Hopefully things will turn around and will motivate him and rest of the staff to create new content that will bring more people back. Shining example would be anarchy online, despite an absolute joke at launch is still kicking to this day. We need all the studios we can get to keep innovation and bring new mechanics to standard forms of gameplay which have churned out so many mediocre games so far this gen.
How demoralizing for the guy. Everyone at FSS, save this guy is working on Mythos now?
Hope they will be OK!