One of the more interesting articles that spurred a lot of discussion last week was this Gamespot article on Hellgate that purported that the game might become an MMO once you hit a certain point in the game. Money quote:

Roper explained that the cool thing about Hellgate: London is that you can play it as a single-player game, but there will also be an option to turn it into a subscription-based multiplayer game if you want to play with others and enjoy lots of new content.

I’m not surprised. Most Blizzard executives were genuinely peeved that Starcraft ended up being the most popular game in the world, while their earnings in the PC Baangs over there were far below those of NCSoft, since Starcraft lacked the ongoing fees that Lineage had. This is, in my opinion, probably a major factor in them deciding to make World of Warcraft, and it’s probably a huge factor in the Hellgate team looking to capitalize on their online aspects.

Still, the community was somewhat surprised at this sudden revelation. F13 sums up the gut punch quite eloquently:

It’s like when you take that hot chick from the bar up to your room, then she asks you if you can “talk business”.

Well, as it turns out, they haven’t decided yet what they’re going to do.

Yeah, we haven’t made a final decision. Seriously, the directors debate about this quite a bit. Basically, we want to do ongoing content. We don’t want it to be like Diablo where we had a patch and an expansion and that’s that. We really want to do ongoing content. So the directors have to just figure out how the hell we’re going to pay for that. Could be anything. Really….

Could be the bonus dvd does it or subscription or real money transactions or auctions or micro purchases or lots of smaller expansions. Could seriously be anything. Which is why they still debate some. So… Until the reach a decision, whatever that is, and then print it across the web in a release, it’s all going to be speculation and misunderstandings and odd quotes.

So apparently, they’re going to just slap in something, be it a subscription service, micropayments or something. This is, to say the least, an impressive amount of tech that they have to build before their supposed ship date (which was, in theory, this Christmas or perhaps even sooner), as well as a significant amount of architecture for billing and customer support. By comparison, most real MMO teams have 3+ server programmers working 2-3 years at least to get all the kinks worked out. And this is assuming they know what they’re building at the start of the process.

There are also huge ramifications on design. Are you really going to have micropayments? Then you need to readdress the balance of all the items and content in the game to ensure that there’s a brisk micropayment economy without making players feel like they’re being shaken for loose change. Will there be raid content, as some rumors insist upon? Balancing powers and classes for raids adds an enormous amount of design effort to a game.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m a whore for Diablo-style RPGs, and Hellgate will probably be in my hands within a week of it’s release. I just don’t think it’s release is going to be in the next year if they truly decide to get ambitious with adding MMO functionality when they haven’t even nailed down what it is yet.