Checking back in with: Hellgate London
By jimbo_n 10 Comments
I was a huge fan of this game the months after its release and played it both online and offline for hundred of hours. So after the total closure of the Multiplayer and the demise of Flagship I thought it was time to confirm the situation with this game. I´m going to start by copying a blogpost from my old blog concerning the game to get you up to speed with the game. Some of the stuff I wrote feels kinda ironic now that the game has shut down:
Posted Jan 2, 2008
Ever since "Hellgate: London" launched, Flagship has been hard at work to bring out new patches and fixes to make the very unstable game easier to play. People like me who kinda expected the world from this game was kind of dissappointed on how many technical issues that were still in the game when it launched. Still, I have been playing the game on and off since it was released and I´m still playing it. So I´m living through all the changes that Flagship Studios makes to the game and I gotta say I´m very impressed. I have already noticed alot of improvements on the game over the last month and today they released their biggest patch yet addressing tons of the memory issues that made the game so unstable. I have to applaud Flagship for REALLY putting in an effort this first month and admitting that their game was kind of broken when they launched it. They have been working like mad to fix this and they continue to show their appriciation for the support and feedback they get from us players. On top of stability issues the game had serious issues with the game UI and the way that the online portion were handled. This have ALSO been adressed now and its now easy to find a group to quest with and its way easier to chat with players, get into a guild and important stuff like that.I´m going to copy and paste some of the patchnotes from the latest patch that just went live!:
Memory Usage
- Memory manager rewritten for better performance and stability.
- Fixed a UI-related memory leak.
- Fixed a clothing and armor texture-related memory issue.
User Interface
- New Looking For Group interface that allows players to more easily find each other for creating specific groups.
- Reorganized the De-modificator, Augmentrex, and Nanoforge interfaces to appear in the left-hand panel area.
- Added an auto-transparency feature to the chat window.
Thats just some of the fixes thats in the latest patch. And Flagship continues to stress the point that they KEEP ON working to make the game even better. I have no doubts anymore. Give Flagship a couple of months or maybe half a year and Hellgate will actually be as good as it could have been from the beginning, and then, theres no stopping this game anymore. I´m so glad this game is climbing up from the hole it was released in since I have been enjoying it alot despite of all the bugs and obstacles. This can actually turn out to be the "new" Diablo that it was meant to be. Good times! If they keep up this hard work I might have to go back and rethink my score of this game and raise it up to where it belongs without the glitches. Something I have never done before. Because, usually developers dosent put so much work into completely rewriting stuff in their game-engines to make them work better, they just blame people computers and goes off to grab another cup of coffee.
So I urge anyone who put this game down because it felt incomplete to pick it up again and have some faith in Flagship! I promise you the game is in MUCH better shape already.
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Alright. So today I decided to start the game and check for myself and indeed, the servers are gone. 1 US, 1 EU and the test realm is still listed in the realmlist tho you cannot connect to them. Single player still works fine and I might end up creating a new Single Player character because man, Hellgate London is a really good game. Its really a big shame that things went the way they did with this awesome Hack n Slash.
Anyone out there with a decent enough PC that likes Diablo should really check this game out if you havent already. Show flagship some respect and pick up a copy while you still can find one. Or do it because this game is kinda historical now.
Hellgate London is so much more than a game by now. Its the game that the masterminds behind Diablo and Diablo 2 made after leaving Blizzard to set up their own studio. Its also the game that would be their downfall and the game that sent Bill Roper away to Cryptic Studios. It is a work of love for the genre and a designvision that actually made its way out on the shelves.
I feel alot of respect for the people behind Hellgate and I still think its a fantastic game.
I just felt I needed to bring some more attention to this whole Flagship thing before I jump in and make a Single Player character.
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