Where the fuck is the hellgate london thread?

Paul downloaded the demo yesterday. So hopefully today or tomorrow I'll install and check it out. My most favorite game is Diablo/Hellfire/Diablo 2... so I'm anxious about seeing what all they did with this.

My machine is about 3 years old. The prettiest game it can run is Half-Life 2, so I haven't bought a modern game in months. Stuff like this doesn't interest me.

Prry - that's two games and an add-on. Very bad grammer, young lady! Either pick one, or just say 'My favourite series is...'.

I was in the beta. It's pretty terrible.

1. Tilesets are bland and hardly differentiated and don't even change over the course of the game.
2. Skills are worthless
3. Partying is a pain in the ass
4. Ingame advertisements
5. Look and runs like shit on even the latest computers.
6. Retarded story that doesn't even allow you to take it seriously because the quest NPC's all act like morons.
7. A retarded RTS minigame at the end of the second act that has no real reason to exist and probably cost the development team a months worth of development.

I could go on, but ultimately, it's a very disappointing followup to a 7 year old game.

punkonjunk1024 wrote:Seriously, what the fuck? I can't believe someone hasn't made a thread shitting bricks about it. I'll look like a total ass if it's just on page two.

I thought about making a thread a couple times, but I've been too busy playing the game. Did the whole pre-order beta thing, and I've been having a blast ever since. It's a helluva lot of fun... there are a couple technical issues, but that applies to pretty much every PC release since the internet was invented.

... Eek etc. This looks like a game I'm going to have to download a demo for just to see if the barebones game itself will run at the lowest possible graphic setting.

It runs OK, I'm just above the min reqs and it works good anyhow on medium settings.

Alexmax, I disagree. It's totally unstable right now, but other than that, it's awesome.

I'd consider getting it -- if the gaming PC my uncle just gave me didn't have a video card that keeps filling the screen with mosaics whenever it encounters something 3d. It generally runs games, just with a checkerboard pattern appearing over orcs, mechs, and the terrain itself. Right now, I'm praying that at least Diablo 2 will run on it, once I dig it out of the rest of my PC stuff. How does this game compare to that, or Titan Quest?

Also, I was really tempted to respond to the answer posed by the thread title with "...in London". I don't know why, but I was.

Hmmm... what's your IGN, punk? Maybe we could run a couple quests some time. Assuming you play on Shulgoth, that is.

My Blademaster hit 29 a few days ago, but I don't like the build, so I have to remake him... I have a 17 summoner I'm currently playing right now. Asian-looking female that runs around dual-wielding tentacle pistols. I savor the irony constantly.

Whoa DDX. I'd love to, but I'm at a big ol' level 9 with my templar, and 2 with my marksman. I might be a bit of a wet blanket though, with the whole being nub. Were you a beta participator? I wish to god I was... I'd love to take up that founder's offer.

Yeah, I was a beta participant... I've considered taking the founder's offer, but as of yet I have not. As fun as it is, I'm not so sure I'm going to be playing for fifteen months, so I have no real reason to do it.

Anyhow, I'll be playing on my summoner, Lylian, or my own pissant level 2 Marksman, Notbob. Give me a shout some time.

punkonjunk1024 wrote:Alexmax, I disagree. It's totally unstable right now, but other than that, it's awesome.

Reviewers disagree. An average of 73 for a supposedly AAA title is disappointing. And the highest review on the metacritic page is from a magazine who paid out the ass for a "WORLD FIRST EXCLUSIVE REVIEW"

You could get a full third of the gameplay experience by playing the demo. (since it only has two of the six classes) Every single level looks the same, and the only varied tilesets you run into are from specific story locations.

Also I have no idea where you people are thinking these good graphics are coming from.

Come on, this looks like something you would scan out of Game Informer and blow up by 25%. And that's on high settings. Low settings?

You might as well be playing "Unreal Tournament 99: The RPG" at 15 frames a second

Also, who in their right mind would pay $150 for the founders club. Or ten bucks a month? Why does Hellgate even have a subscription in the first place? Diablo 2, Mythos, and especially Guild Wars all had tons more stuff to do, and online play is 100% free in all three cases.

And I'm not alone in my disappointment:

I'm really burned out on this game after only 12 hours of play over 3 days. At the end of the day you just get a slightly bigger gun/sword and have to backpedal slightly less/click slightly less. Every class has some triggerable abilities which you can use before commencing to backpedal/click, but at the end of it, you are still doing the exact same thing. It's also a total crap shoot for certain classes/specs with no way of changing anything detrimental.

I talked to some people and basically the studio is run like a joke, no one is in charge of anything like design or balance (I'm serious), it's all thrown together, and their solution to things being a piece of shit is "add more cool stuff."

Hellgate updates:

Broken loot tables confirmed, drops go to shit once you get past the character levels tested in beta. (15-20)

When you do get drops, you get broken items.

Subscribers are being triple billed on their credit cards.

If you post about being triple billed on your credit card on the hellgate forums you will be banned.

With the new Hellgate build, characters are now being corrupted and there is no way to contact customer support or a GM. You are simply not able to log in and get a network error every time.

People are trying to cancel their founder's subscriptions but can't.

On the official forums, Hellgate fanboys are now replying to every thread reporting bugs or crashes with "You are doing it wrong" or "Your PC sucks" even when it's a known issue

I wonder if they realize we DO NOT FUCKING CARE ABOUT Guy Fawkes, Halloween, Christmas, any god damn Holiday. If they want to bring down the server every single day I'm totally fine with that, as long as the updates are actually fixing something.

I mean fuck, the last two times they've taken down the server have resulted in:
- More worthless items to pick up
- Harder to read guild chat
- Closing chat windows with every zone, as if people using the chat wasn't already an issue.
- Party members going invisible

I want to believe that these guys are working hard to fix the issues at hand but what shit like this it makes me think they're so god damn dense to believer that Guy Fawkes drops are going to make people ignore the big problems at hand.

A game that was pushed to launch without being fully tested.

Drones were broken at launch, gimping an entire class. This was known about during testing and the game was launched anyways.

Loot tables that are incomplete beyond the point of testing.

A subscription system that doesn't work the first few days after release.

Hurridly releasing patches to fix what they broke in the last patch.

I know I said this yesterday, but I didn't realize how right I was.

This is Star Wars Galaxies all over again.

Just an update guys as you all know I had been quadruple billed for a bi-annual subscription when I didn't even sign up for one and I just put in my credit card info into the site because I might want a sub but anyways I got ahold of support and they said they're working on it so after that I went ahead and created a new account so they couldn't keep on billing me but UH-OH I was wrong! I'm now being 4 times in one account and 3 in a nother and I called customer support again but they hung up on me cause I was really really mad at them and yelled at them why were they stealing my money and i just want to play this game because its so much fun but it really bugs me when all my gear disappears and anyway I want a refund now.

I'm going to let it slide this time because I am patient and I know they will fix it soon so thats why I'm going to sign up for a founders offer cause I want to support them and help them out and I know that they're not going to just collapse under all the pressure from the launch and come out strong with the amazing game this is so don't bad mouth it ok?

This game is a disappointment on par with Daikatana. Fortuniately, Bill Roper and whoever joined him from Blizzard North will never have the free reign to make a disappointment like this again. They'll churn out maybe an expansion, and then Flagship will get absorbed into EA and Bill Roper will be shoehorned in to provide his valuable gaming expertise on the next edition of Need for Speed.

AlexMax wrote: A bunch of stuff.

I think my favorite part of that rant was when you quoted a bunch of forum posts.

Some random forum guy wrote:
I talked to some people and basically the studio is run like a joke, no one is in charge of anything like design or balance (I'm serious), it's all thrown together, and their solution to things being a piece of shit is "add more cool stuff."

That's the internet version of "my brother's friend once knew a guy who had a cousin whose best friend's sister-in-law's aunt totally gave Elvis a blow job. For real!"

DarkDragoonX wrote:I think my favorite part of that rant was when you quoted a bunch of forum posts.

That's the internet version of "my brother's friend once knew a guy who had a cousin whose best friend's sister-in-law's aunt totally gave Elvis a blow job. For real!"

Except it's very beleivable. None of the skills have synergy, and instead of concentrating on fixing bugs they're concentrating on Guy Fawlks day. So even if it's a bald faced lie, nobody would be surprised.

I just don't understand the complaints about skills, though. The skills don't have any synergy? As a summoner, I can put points into summoning my carnagor in tree A, an unlock an ability that allows him to taunt every creature in a massive radius, bringing them into a huge pile. Points placed in Tree B will allow one to summon a huge amount of force elementals, which attack in melee range. Then you can get Elemental Nova, allowing all of your elementals to do a large AoE attack.

The basic strategy with those skills is to bring all the mobs to your carnagor, watch all your elementals pile on them, then use elemental nova to explode everything. That's pretty much the definition of synergy. Furthermore, besides just skills, the "feed" system for stat requirements is quite a clever idea. Stats, skills, weapons and equipment all play off of each other and create a deceptively deep character development system.

As for Guy Fawkes day... that's almost certainly something they had set up well ahead of time, and all they had to do was press the "deploy event" button to launch it. I find it hard to believe that they intend to just sit and ignore all the bugs in the game.

In the end the bugs seem to be the biggest complaint. And it's a legitimate one. The game is buggy as hell right now, but then, there are a lot of good games that were buggy as hell on release. Should the game have been delayed another month? Definitely. But the core gameplay is addictive and fun. Once these bugs are taken care of, there won't be much left to complain about.

You, personally, may not like the style of gameplay, or the way skills are handled. That's your prerogative. I will say, that, I agree Hellgate isn't a top-tier title, even without bugs... but it IS a solid, fun game, and a game I find worth my time even in it's current state.

You, personally, may not like the style of gameplay, or the way skills are handled. That's your prerogative. I will say, that, I agree Hellgate isn't a top-tier title, even without bugs... but it IS a solid, fun game, and a game I find worth my time even in it's current state.

I wanted to like the game, I really did. And there actually are kernels of "good game" here and there. But ultimately the game has some huge flaws and retarded decisions made that go beyond simple 'bugs' and it will take months for them to clean it up, if ever. It's not worth 49 bucks, and it's almost certainly not worth ten bucks a month in the state it's in today, and I think that people who are even considering the founders offers probably have a brain tumor.

I'll probably reconsider the game in about a year or two. Meanwhile, I'm in the Mythos closed beta and somehow it managed to be a ton more fun as a free game than Hellgate did as a paid one. It's a shame that Mythos is probably going to die when EA clamps down on Flagship for falling below expectations.

This review sums up the game quite nicely.

http://www.somethingawful.com/d/news/hellgate-london-subscription.php

Hey, mythos looks sweet too, I wanted to try it but didn't get around to it.

I like the game so far, and it doesn't sound like you gave it much of a chance. I mean, come on, the post you made was quotes... of other people. What problems have you had? I was billed a single time for my subscription. Just the ten bucks I spent, my friend.

I really, really, really hate it when people use other people's oppinions to fight their own battles. You and I both know that there are many games with serious problems that we love anyhow.
Lets look at D2, for example. I'm sure you've played it and know the serious failings of the game. It's still enjoyable and I played the hell out of it.

Who says they have no one for balancing? I'm doing PvM right now, and it seems decent so far. As for PVP, I know nothing about it but I haven't heard any major complaints - looks like they weren't too far off.

working too much on guy fawkes day? Wow. That's terrible, having the event staff work on an event and the debugging staff working on debugging. We should get those damn event guys more familiar with what the debugging staff is doing, and get them on that!

I'm sorry, but I got this game, and it was all shitty, memory leaks and aids. I go to the forum and bitch - some dev is like "thank you so much for your input, but please post your Dxdiag.txt and we can use this much better. But we're working on it, expect a patch soon"
So I'm like wow, a dev was so there helping, which is something totally different than most online games, free or p2p.
So then I'm like gaaaaay, and then I get on the next day, and what the fuck - a patch already? Fucking memory leak problem isn't gone, but it's better.

The forum has been nothing but nice and there is clearly a team working to repair all the problems. Shit happens. Try and tell me you don't have absolute disasters at your job once in a while.

EDIT

Oh yeah, and your a total faggot for citing it's lack of graphical superiority. Are you serious? Super nintendo is still fun, so is half life. If graphics weren't the total emphasis, that's OK with me.

punkonjunk1024 wrote:I really, really, really hate it when people use other people's oppinions to fight their own battles. You and I both know that there are many games with serious problems that we love anyhow. Lets look at D2, for example. I'm sure you've played it and know the serious failings of the game. It's still enjoyable and I played the hell out of it.

This isn't about pulling in other arguments to fight my battles. This is pulling in anecdotal evidence from people other than myself. I jumped off the failure cascade near the end of beta, do you expect me to try and have a personalized rebuttle for every single one of your points? That would involve purchasing the game, and honestly I wouldn't wish this game on my worst enemy, much less myself.

Who says they have no one for balancing? I'm doing PvM right now, and it seems decent so far. As for PVP, I know nothing about it but I haven't heard any major complaints - looks like they weren't too far off.

Neither you nor DDX have passed the beta level cap. Once you do, you'll start to change your tune, first the drops become retardedly bad and then the game starts becoming impossibly hard.

working too much on guy fawkes day? Wow. That's terrible, having the event staff work on an event and the debugging staff working on debugging. We should get those damn event guys more familiar with what the debugging staff is doing, and get them on that!

The fact that they didn't anticipate how badly the game was broken and hire more "debuggers" as you call them ahead of time is proof enough of their incompitance. However, you do give me an idea, since there is a chance that the event staff could do a better job at fixing the bugs than the actual debuggers could. Of course, it might be the case that the whole codebase stinks from the bottom up and is simply putting bandaids on the side of the titanic. And this isn't even taking into account some of the other retarded game design decisions, like the incomprehensible and terrible story, the obnoxious and obtuse interface, and other shit that a five year old could have pointed out as "wrong".

Oh yeah, and your a total faggot for citing it's lack of graphical superiority. Are you serious? Super nintendo is still fun, so is half life. If graphics weren't the total emphasis, that's OK with me.

Nobody should have to put up with an engine that spits out 5 seconds per frame and vicious minute-long texture loading spasm's for graphics as terrible as Hellgate. In the same release period, I've played The Witcher, NWN2: Mask of the Betrayer, Call of Duty 4 and Crysis, and all four of these games have both looked better (on low settings, mind you), and performed better than Hellgate. Having modular randomly generated levels is no excuse, since NWN2 subscribes to a similar method of generating maps from prefabricated 'parts'. But in any case, Hellgate looks about as nice as a randomly generated Unreal Tournament 2004 map would look (with Unreal Tournament 99 quality models) at a fraction of the framerate and performance. You can't scream "graphics aren't everything" when the very engine it's running on is buckling under the pressure. I could forgive Hellgate for looking like shit if it at least ran well to compensate for looking like shit.

And I hope you don't like your progress too much, a recent patch for the asian release of hellgate resulted in a global character wipe.

http://www.1up.com/do/reviewPage?cId=3164383

Ouch

That 1UP review is the most accurate one.

Flagship studios is going to go the way of Origin, in that the 'celebrities' will end up being sacked or leaving out of embarassment and it will exist only for meager content updates and support. Hope you enjoy your half-assed $200 Diablo clone.

Oh, and the Metacritic only gets lower. It's 71 now.

200 dollar D2 clone? Nah. Mythos is closer to a D2 clone.
not even 200 dollars.

I don't want to restart a bunch of heated arguements (OK, well I do, but I know I'll win so it's not as fun... well, I always know I'll win, but this one is just too easy, so it's not as funer...er.) but HGL has taken about 4000 strides in the right direction. All my memory issues are resolved. It still looks like turds on my computer, but it looks awesome on my friends computer. It makes WoW suck it's dick, but that's not much of a good comparison.

It also works alright on my EeePC. So eat that shit.