Hellgate:London

Hellgate:London (HGL) http://www.hellgatelondon.com/

I don’t know if any other game release in recent times sparked more vitriol than Hellgate London. Electronic Arts had done a huge marketing campaign for the game. Bill Roper was the original developer for Diablo, a game that defined action RPG’s. It was supposed to be Diablo in 3D. It was set in London, an evocative environment. It promised a robust multi-player environment. Many people were really looking forward to the game. Unfortunately, the game was released and fell flat on its face. Bug-ridden, a poorly implemented subscription mode (folks were charged multiple times for the same month and it wasn’t clear what subbing actually got you at release), repetitive environments, all lead to an outcry that was pretty deafening. http://www.flagshipped.com/ is a website devoted to how Flagship Studios ripped off players with the release of the game.

So where is HGL now? Patch 1.0 was the first major content release for the game. This patch featured the promised subscriber content with the addition of Stonehenge, an area for subscribers only. Stonehenge also included the Wild, an environment devoted to group play. 1.0 included the Dueling Arena, a PvP only area. There was also a significant re-balancing of the Evoker and Guardian classes. After 1.0, there were still some major bugs in the game however.

Patch 1.1 was basically a bug fix patch.

Patch 1.2 however introduced a major new feature, mail. What this meant is that the game takes on a core MMO characteristic, with mule characters and being able to help out your entire stable of characters while just playing one character. This is huge in character optimization. Note that there are very few no-trade items which is very helpful. Marksman also got re-balanced in 1.2 much to the chagrin of mini-maxing MM’s.

Patch 1.3 extended the character optimization theme with the addition of shared stash for subscribers. This is a (small) space in your bank where you can leave stuff that your other characters can share. This is cool, but really the mail is better because you can send as much stuff as you want through the mail, noting that each message can only have one item. 1.3 also added end game content in adding Ranks and Expertise to the game. Ranks are accumulated after your character reaches level 50. Ranks give you an expertise skill point, which lets you add passive skills to your character. Very cool and something to look forward to for me, as I don’t have a level 50 character yet. My main concern with Expertise is that the base classes aren’t yet really solid to me so they are adding more skills to something that isn’t working perfectly already. But time will tell. They also added a gambling merchant for subscribers only.
2.0 is coming by the end of May and when it goes live, I’ll update this.

Note that all through this process they have continually improved the chat interface in the game, leading to a much greater sense of community. Overall, the changes have very positively impacted the game. Because the game crashed so much at launch, you couldn’t really get into what they were trying to do. The multiplayer game is a lot more fun and more accessible. The subscriber model seems to be working for them and finally subscribers get some substantive benefits instead of meaningless holiday junk that took up precious inventory space. Speaking of inventory space, being able to have mules to hold all that stuff that you may want for a yet to be created character is awesome. HGL is so much about the loot that any improvements which enhance the loot experience have a huge impact on the game experience.

Some issues are still outstanding however. Unfortunately, the base environments haven’t changed throughout this patch/improvement process, and I’m not sure they ever will. Also, while re-spec tokens drop off of one of the end game bosses in Stonehenge, re-specs are still not easily available to characters. Offsetting that is class discussions on the HGL forums. Each class has a stickied post that describes in great detail all of the skills of the class, a massive help in figuring out what to choose. Also, a fan site, hellgate.ingame.de/charplanner/?lang=en, hosts a skill calculator so you can plan out your build for your character. I personally am still undecided when it comes to re-specs. HGL is not really a game that you expect to take only a few characters through. The fun of HGL is to try a whole lot of different stuff with a lot of different characters. They give you 24 characters to play with, and there are only six classes so that leaves four ways to implement each class. On the other hand, if you don’t use the forum skill descriptions to help choose what you want, you will almost certainly end up with a character you weren’t expecting. Also, because the initial environments are so repetitive, you really aren’t much motivated to keep leveling characters through levels 1-15. Flagship knows the re-specing issue is a hot one among players and I think we’ll continue to see changes in this area. Lastly, the game is still laggy and buggy. Folks are losing Hard Core Elite (HCE) characters to network errors. The mail system worked great after 1.2 and became a buggy mess under 1.3. So there is still much work for Flagship to do.

I hope you have found this post to be informative, please leave comments and feedback, thanks much!

Intro!

Hi, welcome to Love Game Patches, a blog about extended content for videogames. As games become more complex and the internet more ubiquitous, more and more games get significant free content additions after release. The company builds a committed player base for its games as well as consumer goodwill. The players get a (hopefully) improved game at no additional cost. Other game review sites focus on the glitz and glamour of previews and initial releases, but I don’t know of any major site that cares specifically about a game six months after its release, so I decided to create a blog about it. Just to be clear though, pure bug fixes and expansions that cost money won’t be discussed here. This blog is for free content added to a game after release. I also won’t be discussing free content releases for World of Warcraft because there are plenty of web pages that do that (www.wowinsider.com is really good at this).

In discussing the games, I’ll either be discussing my experiences with the games or summarizing player sentiment from various forums if I haven’t played them. This way, you can get a feel for the impact of the patches from a player point of view. The first games up will be Hellgate:London, SimCity Societies, and Forza 2.
So without further adieu, the first post starts now!