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Due to financial circumstances Flagship Studios has come under hardships and had to layoff almost its entire staff. Ping0, an online services subsidiary was also affected. The fallout is a huge confusing mess, and Flagship used the rights to its intellectual property as collateral on loans for operating expenses. Now that Flagship is more or less collapsing HanbitSoft is stepping in trying to reign in both intellectual properties, Hellgate: London and Mythos, due to Flagship Studios defaulting on their original agreement.

In the latest war of words taking place on the Korean gaming site ThisIsGame, translation by Hellgate Guru. HanbitSoft is making it known that they are preparing for a legal battle. A lawsuit against Bill Roper and the founding directors of Flagship Studios is already underway. HanbitSoft will also be visiting Comerica bank next week in order to secure to the Global intellectual property rights to Hellgate: London. HanbitSoft also stated, "Flagship not only lacked effort, but were only looking for personal gain. Firing all of the Flagship employees in order to protect the personal interests of its founding members only shows how selfish and irresponsible they are." HanbitSoft owns a 9.5% stake in Flagship Studios and went on record to state they tried to bailout Flagship Studios numerous times.

In a translation provided by Hellgate Guru, Kim Ki-young of HanbitSoft states: "If we can take intellectual property rights of relevant products from Flagship Studios, we have confidence to develop the games ourselves based on T3 Entertainment's advanced technology' and 'we believe we can service fresh and interesting games to online gamers by getting intellectual property rights and development. This crisis could be an opportunity for us."

Frequent displeasure remains constantly expressed in our Hellgate:London post threads. If you are still looking for an admittance of failures from someone at Flagship Studios, Max Schaefer, operations chief and co-founder recently acknowledged mistakes were made and lessons learned. The main one being the grandiosity in the overall vision for the game and an early launch that more or less turned Hellgate:London into a recovery process. Still there is a fanbase, and it was well received in South Korea. The developers are working hard, and hopefully with enough patches it will prove to be a better experience for those willing to give it a second chance. Have you?

DeafeningTheDaisies did a great job with a game not particularly known for machinima, Hellgate: London. Deafening has an entire series planned out, with most of the first episode almost done. While there isn't a plot in this video, it's certainly heavy on the scare factor!

The biggest problem with For the Living is the aspect ratio, which jumps back and forth between text and gameplay. However, that's easy to fix. We look forward to seeing the full series!

If you have machinima or movie suggestions from any MMO, please send them to machinima AT massively DOT com, along with any information you might have about them.

Hell is about to get even hotter, as Flagship Studios prepares to unleash fresh content for Hellgate: London. Our sister blog Big Download has some posted new screenshots of the upcoming Abyss Chronicles for HG:L, as well as info on the 2.0 and 2.1 updates to the title. Patch 2.0 will be Hellgate: London's second major content update, and brings with it a host of new features and changes to the game. The build is likely to go live on the Test Server in the next week, but until then, here's Big Download's breakdown of the 2.0 changes:

• A new quest line that covers the spread of the Abyss through Parliament Square and the survivors' efforts to fight back

• A major rebalancing of the Blademaster class

• A complete PvP overhaul, including achievements, rankings, rewards, and a new CTF team gametype

• Changes to the Shared Stash, such as a separate pane for each difficulty

• Addition of two new trinket slots for players to add rings and such to their characters

• An attribute respec NPC that allows players to remove points from an attribute for a fee-per-point

• Three new skills for each class

• A consignment house (read: auction house) where players can sell stuff to other players without direct trading

Beyond rolling out The Abyss Chronicles with 2.0, the next area Flagship Studios is focusing on is PvP through Patch 2.1. The patch will 'open up an entirely new side to Hellgate: London' by introducing five cohesive elements of PvP in a single update: ranking, matchmaking, rewards, achievements, and Capture the Flag. The end result is what Flagship describes as 'a robust PvP experience.'

Flagship Studios announced some changes to Hellgate: London in the form of Patch 1.3b, which should resolve issues with the ill-fated Patch 1.3a. Indeed, the month of May has turned out to be HellPatch: London for Flagship and HG: L fans, with the patches even being patched. Some players who logged into the Test Server recently found that their characters were gone and, fearing the worst, assumed (incorrectly) that a character wipe had taken place. This was not the case at all; a Test Center database crash was the culprit, and a restore from backup solved the issue. Now that the updated patch has been rolled out, nightly restarts of the live servers have ceased, as of May 20th. The reboots were a precaution to prevent server instability while issues were being resolved.

A notable change in Patch 1.3b is that HG: L now blocks non-subscribers from party portaling into subscriber-only areas. Although this change will likely disappoint the gamers who play for free, a quest NPC previously available only to paying players is now available to non-subs. Whether or not this balances the scales for the non-subs remains to be seen, but portaling into restricted areas would seem to be an exploit. The other changes and fixes in Patch 1.3b are numerous, and affect non-subscribers and subscribers alike. The complete breakdown is found after the jump:

Do you want to communicate with a representative of Flagship Studios with all of your Hellgate: London or Mythos related questions? Are you tired of not getting a response on the forums? Well, the unlikely place of YouTube may be the answer for you.

We were surprised to find that Scapes, Hellgate: London's Community Manager was answering both HGL and Mythos questions in the comments of their YouTube videos.

For example, if you go to take a look at the new Patch 1.2 trailer, you will find comments about the new Single Player patch as well as the difference between Video development and Game development.

So if you have a burning question for Flagship Studios, go sign into your YouTube account and leave a comment. You may just get a response straight from the source. Or you could wait until the next time they do an IRC developer chat.

If you are interested in chatting with the developers of Hellgate: London and you are available at 7pm EST today, then fire up your favorite IRC client and get ready to talk to Flagship Studios. Their last developer chat was pretty candid, so if you are still playing HGL or have renewed interest since the release of Stonehenge, participating in this chat may be fun and informative.

Here are the details:

Server: irc.ForTheGamers.org
Channel: #FlagshipStudios

For questions during the event, type /msg DevBot yourquestionhere where "yourquestionhere" is your actual question. There will also be a separate channel just for chatting with other attendees.

I use Trillian for IRC, but mIRC is another good one. For The Gamers is also providing a web-based client for the chat. Full details on how to connect if you are having issues are provided here.

Maybe I'll see you there, preschooler permitting.

The two most notable changes on Patch 0.6 are:

• The invisible group member bug has been fixed.
• The bug that unequips engineer pet weapons is improved, but not fixed.

There's no official word as to when Patch 0.6 will be live, but they say that Patch 0.7 will be hitting the test servers next week and therefore, we can assume that Patch 0.6 will go live before then.

Patch 0.7 will include:

• Memory usage improvements
• UI tweaks
• Subscriber items and quests for Diablo 2 fans

The official patch notes for 0.6 are after the jump.