Phil Shenk Dev Diary @ IGN IGN has posted a developer diary penned by Flagship Studios' Creative Director Phil Shenk. The dev diary covers a variety of topics including the points of view in which Hellgate London will be played (first and third person) and the design of the Templar player character. Here's a snippet from the dev diary. <blockquote>Getting the third-person character in the game was kind of an obsession for me since we started this project. Personally, I like to see the character I'm playing on the screen, and I also knew that melee combat would only really come together with a third-person view. I knew that to sell the idea, it had to be done right, and for this to happen, a lot of pieces had to come together at the same time. The showing at E3 represented a convenient milestone for this, and honestly, it was past due. The whole process of getting this first character up and running was over a year in the making! The design of the Templar class was a challenge from the beginning. It's one of those things where I had a good idea in my head what he should feel like, but I was having trouble coming up with the specifics. I knew that the Templar were supposed to feel like modern-day (or near-future) knights. But they couldn't feel archaic; they had to feel bad-assed to a modern audience. We knew that there was the potential risk that the design could be either too fantasy-looking or too generically sci-fi. The whole design process was a delicate balancing act between these two extremes.</blockquote> Attached to the dev diary are some very good looking concept graphics of the aforementioned Templar. Be sure to give it a read. Source: RPG Codex
