Massively

Man, am I the only person in the US who likes this game? Likes it enough that I bought a lifetime subscription?

It is the best game for a quickie. 15 minutes of killing and loot gaining and I can port back into town if I want.

I have to disagree about the crafting system, it was revolutionary. Breaking down items you don't want into separate pieces? Awesome. Using them to make something great? Nice. Don't want to make something? Use the parts to upgrade instead. Hands down this game has my favorite crafting system of all time!

That having been said, the guy is spot on with not caring about the characters or the storyline. The story actually used to be good, back in beta, but they took out the interesting stuff, who knows why.

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It got boring so amazingly quick it was cronic. Normally it takes until level 40 or so for things to get dull and plodding. Hellgate got that way after about level 10. It was a good idea but just felt terribly unfinished.

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I pulled myself to finish normal...

Then my subconscious refuses to let me touch it ever again. Sorry, it's just too much of the same dark corners of the same looking maps, and only god knows how much I hate playing tetris with my stash.

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I continue to be both amazed and dismayed that people seem to have two settings when it comes to review. Either a game is utterly amazing and the Best Thing Ever, or it's utter crap unworthy of anything other than insult and derision whenever it's mentioned. This just isn't the case. Hellgate may not be an utterly fantastic wonderful game, but it is a bunch of fun.

Hop in, blast and hack up some zombies and demons for a while, hop back out again. No endless hours grinding mobs for reputation. No endlessly running the same instance over and over hoping the Drop of Uber Leetness falls for you. (Unless you want to do that!) Go, kill, loot the bodies.

The crafting system is nice. You don't spend tons of time making 100 useless items to get to a high enough level to make something decent. Just gather materials as you go, check out the crafting vendors and when you see something you like, or want to upgrade, drop in the mats and go. Easy, simple, clean and fast.

Inventory management? that's been the standard for these sorts of games for ages. And given that most of the stuff you can break down, simple to take care of.

Flagship set out to take a game that is immensely popular now, many many years after it's release, Diablo 2, and update it with a 3d engine and a fantasy/sci fi storyline. Something you can play as you want, commit to it as much as you like and still get fun out of it. You're not tied into playing 20 hours or more a week for a couple months to get anywhere. They may have had a rough start because the game wasn't ready, but they've succeeded for my money, and the game's only gotten better since I picked it up.

So hop down off the high horse, lower your head so you're not looking down your nose, grab an automatic rifle and start blasting some zombies. You might just find that the game is fun for what it is.

And really, isn't that what gaming is about? Fun?

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Here's the key mistakes they made with the game:

1) Too much hype. Should've just shut up, do your work, and talk a whole hell of a lot less. Hype is good if you can deliver, but bad when you fail, as the outrage and lashback is brutal.

2) Subscription. They should've went with microtransactions. And not releasing subscription content for single player, bad move.

3) GUI. It's not customizable, can't move stuff around, and can't even scale it. One of the worst UI's I've experienced in a long time.

4) Bugs. Don't release a buggy game. That is a killer. Was in the Beta, and bugs that had been reported about for months still weren't fixed in release. Just a piss poor job of QA.

5) Removing themselves from Diablo. They should have done a lot more to remove themselves from Diablo. They should've made it more clear, to the point that it says it on the damn box, that this game is not in the style of Diablo. Go play Titan Quest or Mythos for that.

6) Box cover art. What the hell were they thinking with the normal version? Amongst the worst game boxes ever. Horrible. Hope someone got fired over that choice. Should've went with the CE box cover for the game.

7) Unfinished game. Things they talked about weren't in the game at launch. This goes back to the hype, but never talk about shit if you can't be sure it's going to be in the game.

8) Vary the game. The great thing about Blizzard games is that you can feel your progression. Diablo as you progressed, the zones changed. Diablo II, same thing. Just by a screenshot, you can tell where you are in the game. WoW, zones are varied so that you can also tell where in the game you are by a screenshot. HGL... hell if I know where you are most of the time. Some station, some tunnel, some outdoor ruins. They should've made the visuals change as you level up to give the concept of progression and vary what we get to see.

9) BUGS! This game was so freakin' buggy at launch. It was horrible. One of the buggiest games ever. How did they even launch this game in the state it was in? They needed that miracle patch that Funcom pulled out for AoC.
Yes I know I mentioned it twice, that's how bad it was.

10) It's not an MMO. Even mentioning the word MMO in this game was a death nail in it's coffin. They should have never mentioned the word MMO, ever. It was an Action RPG. Plain and simple. Load up the game, kills things, level up, get phat lewt. That's all Diablo was.

The game is getting better, it's better than it was, but there are still a lot of problems with it, the biggest one glaring out is the GUI that just is frozen in suckiness. They need to fix it, and at least make it scalable.

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I just bought it- it's 20 bucks at Best Buy. I played the demo through and loved it, and I'm really enjoying the game. It's about as close as I can get to Diablo 3 right now, and I honestly don't get why there's so much hate on this game. Although, coming in after patches is a lot different then being there at launch. Still, fun game.

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I have no issues with HG:L. It is what it is. The problem is that people keep comparing it to it's cousin Diablo, or to MMOs, of which it is neither.

As Bradon said, it's a good game that you can jump into and play for a while. It's not a "hours and hours" kind of thing. I agree that having to go BACK into the underground areas time after time is rather yawn inducing, but I think Flagship should get some credit for making a Guild Wars - esque multiplayer title (hub based, free persistant multiplayer) that, while not spectacular, is pretty good in my opinion.

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The London Underground theme seems like a thinly-veiled excuse to limit variety. As mentioned, Guild Wars more or less shares the same kind of node-based geography, but in GW there are real, inspired differences from area to area.

The dialogue criticism in the source article is dead-on. Why, oh why must I click through sentences one by one?

Honestly, the game's movies sold me. They're still on GameSpot and elsewhere, so go see them if you haven't. They are incredible, and they advertise at a game that, sadly, HG:L is a mere shadow of.

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Hellgate: London had so much potential. The novels and comic book showed off a lot of possible story/themes from an apocalyptic London. Too bad they got the unpaid intern to write all of the dialogue and quest text.

The other thing that was completely FUBARed was selling the rights away to different companies for different regions. If you thought the US version of the game sucked, try owning the SEA version - whose multiplayer has receievd next to no patching, nil support and all complaints go into a black hole of "Not my responsibility. Shoulda done your research."

http://www.flagshipped.com

I'm just treating the money I paid as a charitable donation to my friendly local games store.

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