It’s been a while since a major online game has been completely packed up and taken away from the public. Auto Assault? It wasn’t really a major game, it was one of NCSoft’s many “side” games. The Sims Online? I’ll bet very few other than me knew the game even existed. Whether you experienced Hellgate: London for yourself or not, though, you knew it was out there. You weren’t sure exactly what kind of game it was, and that’s quite possibly largely in part to the fact that it couldn’t decide on a specific genre. I’m writing about it now, since the general opinion was that this game was an “MMOG” at the very least. Hellgate: London won’t leave any innovative gameplay features in its legacy, but it’ll serve as yet another example of how to not make an online game.
I. Release Date – Ooh, scary!
Hellgate: London was released just in time for Halloween last year. No, the game wasn’t ready, but it was Halloween! It fit the “gloomy feel” of the game, and so it had to be released on that date. I did buy this game as soon as it was released, and so I’ll note some of its most redeeming features at the time of release(remember, it was Halloween, so it had to be scary!):
- An awful patching process that didn’t really patch anything. When it launched, the patching process was absolute shit. I remember disconnecting a couple of times, and the patch would start over from 0%. Come on! This wouldn’t have been so bad if the client itself didn’t crash for no damn reason at all. Side note: I did try to play the game again recently. When I went to patch it, it asked me to manually download a multiplayer patch. I didn’t see a reason to, but did it anyway. I eventually gave up once I realized the game couldn’t decide on whether it wanted to be patched or not.
- An amazing introduction cinematic. Once you got to play the game, in-between crashes, you realized where they spent most of their budget. It wasn’t on developing the actual game, it was on creating that cinematic. Everything about that cinematic was great, but I sort of wished there had been more things in the game itself than an intro.
- A lot of crashes to the desktop for no reason whatsoever. Sometimes the patching process would halt randomly if you tabbed out, or failed to please the game client in some other way.
- OFFICIAL FORUMS!
I realize most of the times the deadline isn’t set by the development companies, but by the publisher, or the person putting all their money into the project. Either way, publishers and developers alike need to realize that if something isn’t ready, it’s sometimes better to spend a little bit more on it to ensure that the game has a healthy lifespan, than to release it two weeks early so that it will be shut down a year later.
II. You worked on Diablo, we get it.
The game itself wasn’t as hyped as the people that were working on it. The first thing I ever learned about the game a couple of years back was not that it had guns, or that it took place in a post-apocalyptic world. The first thing I even saw on their website was “We made/worked on Diablo. You should buy our game.” I’m paraphrasing, of course. Still, if the best thing you can come up with to hype your game is “we made a great game in the past” you’re not showing a lot of promise for the game you’re currently trying to hype.
Hellgate: London had the following things in common with Diablo:
- Zombies
- Items
- Wirt’s Leg. Real original, guys.
Other than that, they were two completely different beasts, and should’ve been treated as such. This is another thing game companies need to stop doing. I’ll even say this got Mythic into some trouble when hyping WAR, since a lot of players ended up thinking it would be DAoC2. I, as a gamer, don’t really care about your game development resume. Even the often-hated-for-no-reason SOE has released really good games, despite their bloodied past. Likewise, if you made a really good game in the past, you could end up making a terrible game now.
Just stop. Work on your game, hype its features, do what you want. Just make sure you’re always focusing on your current job, not on your past. Imagine you have a child, and it grows up to be a success. If you then have another child, would you ignore or skip certain parenting aspects just because you made “a really good one” before?
III. We have guns, swords, and everything you didn’t ask for.
Hellgate: London stuck to its vision from the beginning. They didn’t want you to be able to “respec” your mastery trees in the game, just like you couldn’t do it in Diablo. I, for one, was behind this one hundred percent. The problem in this particular case, was that you didn’t need any damn points in anything. You could go the whole game without spending a single point into anything. This was especially true for Hunter classes. Your survival depended on how well you could aim in FPS mode and how powerful your gun was. That was it. You had points to spend on things, but they weren’t any useful in helping you shoot things down better or faster. It’s cool that you wanted us to think carefully about what to specialize in, but when nothing was useful, it didn’t matter if you offered the option to “respec” or not.
This game had everything: rocket launchers, sniper rifles, automatic weapons, and…swords?! I didn’t get this bit. It makes sense in steampunk-type games: not every soldier wants to spend an eternity reloading a rifle manually after each shot, and as such some will favour melee weapons. In this setting, it didn’t make much sense, though. You had automatic weapons. There’s absolutely no incentive or benefit to using a sword, or a shield against zombies when you could be gunning down or blowing up the masses with little effort. I guess templars felt the need to be “stylish” and using rocket launchers was beneath them. The game doesn’t give you the impression that a catastrophe has occurred and everyone is doing their best to survive when you have assholes running around hunting zombies with a longsword for sport.
Another thing a lot of people were pissed off about was the lack of a LAN option for the game. I’m sure they’re even more pissed off now that the servers are shutting down and they’re going to be stuck with a single-player game they can’t return to the store. It seems Flagship wasn’t really interested in letting players play their games with friends unless it was on their server. They had reasons for this, and they were posted all over the official forums for time to time, but damn if I remember them. I don’t even remember what I had for breakfast.
IV. Parting is such sweet sorrow.
Rumors are going around that the game will live on. People still aren’t sure of the game’s fate in the US or EU, but for Asia, at least there has been an announcement that they will try to keep the game alive. You can read about it here. The servers for US, and EU, currently hosted by NAMCO BANDAI Games America Inc. will issue their final breath on Jan 31st, 2009 at midnight.
Though we should never celebrate people losing their jobs, or someone’s dream shattering before them, we should at least try to learn from it. Game development companies need to learn to take the right steps in hyping their product, preparing it for release, and take feedback from their communities. At the same time, publishers should realize that if something isn’t ready, it isn’t ready. Waiting a couple of months without income can net you a lot more in the long run.
OK, your using HGL to prove, rightfully so, that MMO’s need to show up on launch day without all the bugs and issues. I understand, and even though I like HGL, I do agree also.
But if your going to talk about a game, have a clue first. True, marksman can survive without ever spending skill points. But you will kill things more and more slowly as you go. Making any other class out damage you (and the marksman only advantage is that high damage). Evokers are great at AOE as well as single target later in the game. Summoners area bit slower, but had a great mechanic for being able to summon many creatures to help you. Templars admittedly had fewer viable paths for good advancement, but they were FAR from useless.
…
As far as items go, if anything, they were too strong (especially marksman). Sure you could kill anything without them, JUST LIKE ANY ACTION RPG (Diablo/Titan Quest/Sacred). But it takes a hell of a lot longer.
…
Auto patch, download second patch from website, auto patch again. Done. It’s strange (and stupid), yes, but holy shit, are you so pampered by the new MMO’s that you cant even download a patch manually? Seriously, you gave up on that? Don’t review a game if you’re unwilling to do that much.
…
Reason for no LAN: Play on their servers, you might subscribe. In a free-to-play game like this, the non-subscribers support the subscribers. That’s the way this model works in quite a few other games. Unfortunately, in HGL there was not enough reason to subscribe. 2.0, the major subscriber patch never came out.
…
I don’t understand why you don’t see more of Diablo in HGL. The style and pace are similar to Diablo. Its closer to Diablo than any other online game. Just cause the game is first person (and over the shoulder third person) does not make it a polar opposite of Diablo. But I do agree the developers pedigree has little to do with how good their next game with be for the most part. Look at Blizzard and Valve though.
…
Another thing you completely neglect to mention. Mythos. The game was very far along, and unfortunately, the death of HGL caused the death of Mythos. In this they were doing things right, taking their time. Maybe too much, considering the entire re-mapping of the game world.
…
Yes HGL game had quite a few problems (some lasting to the end) and your more than welcome to judge them in an opinion based article, but don’t just make shit up. Its made of bullshit like this that helped the game die out. People read your non-sense, take it for the truth and hate on the game themselves for these perceived (and untruthful) faults.
…
Normally I like this blog, but it seems like its turning into a written version of Zero Punctuation. You guys hate everything. And if you can’t properly put to words why you hate said game, you exaggerate and sometimes completely make shit up.
@Qix:
I made a Marksman, and a Blademaster, and I got them pretty far up through the little “progression” they had. You know, going through all those quests hubs, that guy’s mind, some hellish portal reminiscent to Tristram. Anyway, my point is that I played the game for several months. Completely overlooking the awful patching system and crashes, it was a decent game. MOST, if not ALL the classes had little advancement options through mastery paths when the game launched. I didn’t make this up, it was one of the major complaints from players. That and the lack of a “respec,” which I never understood, since you didn’t need to put points into anything for the first half of the game.
……
Well, I didn’t mention items. Some items were ridiculous though, especially with the right mods.
……
I’m not reviewing the game in its current state, and I admitted that. I only added that side note to show that things in HG:L haven’t changed much. I’m not pampered, but it’s become common acceptance that games automatically patch themselves. Even as early back as Diablo II. If you had the CD version, it would download a manual patcher, but it would do so automatically, not telling you to visit an url to do it yourself. The game shouldn’t lose points here, since it never claimed to be cutting-edge, but it doesn’t gain any, either.
…….
Both Diablo and HG:L are dungeon crawler games. They fall into that same category. You hunt dozens of mobs, or do “farming runs” through certain portals to try to get rare items. That’s all well and good, but I can’t forgive a game for being shitty because it reminds me of an awesome game I played in the past. Other than zombies, items, and wirt’s leg, they had nothing in common. The lore was different, the classes were different. Oh! I just remembered the UI was similar, too.
…….
The death of Mythos made me sad. Learning that Flagship Studios had lost all of its developer base, as I mention in my article, is no reason for celebration. They had good ideas, but they didn’t know how to execute them properly.
……
I still don’t see where I made anything up. The templar and blademaster used swords, right? I mention that. The hunter classes didn’t need a single skill point in anything for most of the game, right? These are things you can’t really debate if you played the game at launch. You should know they were there. They may have been fixed after the 3 or so months that it took me to finally quit(sad thing, I paid for 6 months of subscription), but these things weren’t there at launch, when they should’ve been. Making a Halloween release date just because your game has zombies is officially the dumbest business move ever made by any company. Seriously.
…….
Your response is coherent, and it’s the only reason I even bothered responding. I’ve seen some of your posts here, and am glad that you take the time to read what we write. My ultimate point was that companies should see what this game did wrong when I played it(right after it released), and learn from the mistakes Flaghship, and its business partners made. Do we also want to argue that Flagship, with all the to-do things on their list, hosted a broken Guy Fawkes event for HG:L?
Ahh, the Guy Fawkes event, I see that I just played the game a lot later than you did. Maybe things improved a lot later than I knew. But to me (and my later experience), it seemed like you really skewed the facts. Like the ‘marksmen dont need to use their skill points’ thing. I agree its true. But Its just as true for almost any range character in any action RPG, and almost every class in the newer crop of MMO’s (where solo play is the best route). Its true for almost every class in WoW. It is technically true, but you would kill things so much slower than anybody else that you’re going to be far behind.
…
Back to that Halloween event, I agree, why do that with all the major problems. Same goes for moving resources to Mythos. If all the people that were working on Mythos were actually helping with HGL, then 2.0 would have come out, and all the fixes that eventually did come, they would have been out faster. Very likely to raise their subscription numbers. I think Flagship, just hoped to get Mythos out the door before the floor fell out from under them. Too bad they changed the game with the overworld, it slowed things down ALOT.
…
I guess one of the biggest things that pisses me off, is that developers and publishers are now going to view this kind of game a a failure. Not because of the horrible launch, and lack of fixes. Oh well. Because I really liked HGL, despite the problems just cause it was something different than a fantasy MMO. I also liked the fps mmo idea, it was something different.
…
Thanks for not taking my comments as a personal attack. As you said, its kind of nice to see a coherent response.
I’ll chime in with Qix, the whole article (I’ll hesitate to actually call it a review) was very negatively biased.
Far as I’m concerned, the problem with Hellgate was two-fold. First, the ridiculous mis-management at Flagship. Second, turning around at the eleventh hour and marketing the Diablo-esque action RPG as an MMOG. Was EA behind it? Flagship? Don’t know, don’t really care, but it was a blatant lie. When the launcher gives me a choice of Single Player or Multiplayer game… that isn’t an MMOG. Period.
As for its resemblance to Diablo, the two big things that always attracted my friends to the Diablo games were 1) randomly generated maps and 2) tons of mobs with random loot. Hellgate has both these. Why anyone ever gave two shits about Diablo’s random maps I’ll never know… any given dungeon always looked exactly the same, and I’m only there to click my mouse button 25,000 times to kill hordes of mobs. Does anyone actually care that this time the door is on the left when last time it was on the right? Doubtful. Hellgate suffers from the exact same issue. Perhaps by bringing us down into the world in first- or third-person camera rather than Diablo’s overhead perspective, it brings to light that yes, the map is randomly generated each time, but who cares? It’s repetitive.
This game would have been much better off if EA/Flagship had never made the cash-grab and tried to pass it off as an MMOG. Not to mention the lifetime sub… Just put the game out as an online action RPG and generate profits from microtransactions buying new content releases. Hell, with RPG combat rather than true FPS combat systems, Hellgate probably would have done well, if not better, on consoles.
My biggest personal peeve with HG:L is that the things that they boned up were so obvious and easy compared to the things they got right. The basic combat and graphics engines is really good, and scales down to mid level PCs nicely as well. Not one team in ten could have created and engine from scratch that performed that well. The basic idea behind the game, DOOM meets Diablo in post apocolyptic London is also quite sound. The world that you get to glimpse in that cinematic is compelling, I’d really like to go there one day and shoot stuff up.
Then you have the things they boned.
-Skill trees that were just boring for the most part. I always felt like I was picking between multiple mediocre abilities. Did anyone really test that stuff and say “hell yeah?”
-A clunky crafting system that also completely kills the hunt for rare drops. Why get excited about finding a new gun that does X+2 damage instead of X damage when the next time you hit town you were just going to make one anyway?
-The most horrifically bad quest text I’ve ever seen in a game. It was like they got some 14 year old Monty Python fan to write the quest dialogue for their dark post apocolyptic world. What on earth were they thinking?
-And finally the lame ass attempt to get folks to pay MMO prices to play their action RPG. What made them think that consumers would go for that? Did they really think the extra’s available at launch with a sub were worth the cash? “Just keep paying guys, I promise we’ll have something cool for you in three months” is about the lamest BS I’ve seen come out of a developer in a long long time.
Skill trees can be very hard to get right. I can see giving them a pass there. But the other three fall very firmly into WTF?! as far as I’m concerned.
Yeebo, your first paragraph is exactly what I love about HGL. Im just afraid that people will use HGL as a reason to not make a similar style game, a mix of FPS and Action RPG (my 2 favorite genre’s not that MMO’s are getting to easy/grindtastic).
Good riddance to bad rubbish. The thing I hated most about HG:L and Flagship Studios was their constant yammering about Diablo. For several years they had tons of viral marketers visiting every Diablo 3 message board or discussion (this was before D3 had been announced) claiming that HG:L technically WAS Diablo 3, and that we should all jump on their bandwagon. If you didn’t you might as well jump off a cliff for being such an idiot. The developers echoed this in interviews, and came across as arrogant, in my opinion (“we made Diablo and all the fans of Diablo belong to us, nyah, nyah, nyah”). Luckily, all the true Diablo fans stuck it out and rose up to let out a collective “NO!” Seriously, this game is Hellgate: London, not Diablo 3. They weren’t fooling anybody. Now that the real Diablo 3 has been announced, they’ve gotta be feeling awfully stupid. Especially when you consider that Diablo 3 is going to be 500 times better than the trash that was HG:L. I’m sorry if this sounds harsh, but you had to have been there so to speak to see what I mean. They deserve this failure for putting everyone who wanted to talk about the next Diablo game through so much grief.
I was hoping that HG:L was going to turn into something like HG:Canada or something! You know I really thought that HG:L was going to go far! I am really upset that the game might-not continue! :.( ……TEAR!……