I'll be the jerk here then ..
Maybe he shouldnt actually talk , because so far (starting the flagship era) that's all he's been doing ... talking , brassing air .

Ok i get it , he is beloved because of his time with blizzard , he we were fooled into hellgate because of his awesome past .
But that was it ... the past , and it might be the same kind of future again with cryptic and elsewhere ... but right now i'm judging his flagship offering .

I can only cringe when he claims they were trying to do too much . Sorry but the only i saw them really try hard like maniacs was the subscription system , the bloody awesome CG intro , and the whole "by the guys who offered you diablo" kind of PR .

Piss poor engine , in not only graphics , requirements and performance , but ridden with bugs like in the old good days of daggerfall and vampire Bloodlines (wich at least was awesome despite such technical issues ) . And i'm not talking about just crashing (wich happened quite a lot though) , or graphical blitches , but game threatening galores , like a whole party being invisible to each other , or one member ported in another instance for no reason , and not working class skills .

For a cooperative game and the "new diablo with a twist of fps action" , the global online systeme and experience , partly because of previously mentioned technical issues , was lame .

ah the damn subscription , i refused to pay for it despite my habits of playing p2p mmos in the past , and it was the right call , as it wasnt worth a dimme!

And the classes...
The game is as shallow as it can . In Diablo II even if the game was plagued with imbalances (not that hellgate is better in that area anyway) , there were a multitude of very different characters you could build. Many people even had multiple characters of the same class, all spec'd differently and each character would get playtime. In hellgate the skills are uninspired to the point that they are beneath the level of even Diablo 1, which was released more than a decade ago! Why does a game that was just released have even less character depth than a game released almost a decade ago and that they trying to copy ?

There's no skill that fundamentally changes the way your character plays. It may change the range of their attack, or allow you to hit multiple monsters, but there's nothing there that really distinguishes subclasses from one another.

And the famous dungeon ... dude when you do random generated it's supposedly to add some variety in level design and experience a bit of something else each new game ... not to just sloppy reverse the position of the doors and rooms of some crapp london metro station .

Anyway i've much to say yet , said too much already , i'll just stop there ..
Bill roper can blame it on someone else , their publisher , providence , bad luck , not enough coffee and tea in the morning , or whatever , they just sucked and delivery a poor , pompeous and unambitious game .
It doesnt even match any free mmo , and yet it tried to be a real product ....

I guess at least hellgate was rightly named , for it truly was a door to hell