Selling time-limited microfeatures has the same function as a “optional” subscription while being better press.

Bloody hellgate. “Give us 10 dollars a month to carry and use a horadric cube you used to get for free in Diablo 2.”

With the per-character drop system, I always wondered why they didn’t implement premium drop tables and present them as that instead of the “s” word. Then again I felt that way about every insane decision.

“Bad design is bad.”

http://hanbitgame-espresso.blogspot.com/

“Mr.Roper, we’re not going to lie. This thing is going to go down in flames. And when it does, we’re going to need to fire someone. We’d like that someone to be YOU.”

The “Hellgate 2″ rumor is an in-quotes wink wink nudge nudge sort of thing. Rearrange the deck chairs on the titanic, then release it as a “new game” to be able to distribute it outside Korea.

The only thing they really could do at this point is revamp everything fundamentally and try to successfully rebrand it. Hanbitsoft probably should have let the bank keep it, but I guess they’re stubborn and wanted to break even on their investment.

The ways Hellgate disappoints is both grandiose and subtle. Here’s something I remembered from my Let’s Play years ago:

Now, the game has two systems to throttle ranged fire. Most games use a “reloading” time out after X shots, but Hellgate isn’t most games.

First, there’s the inaccuracy system. You have a reticle that grows larger and larger rapidly as you hold down the button, making it less likely for a shot to land. The weapons that use this system encourage you to shoot things point blank if you can survive, since they’ll kill things much more quickly there than at range.

Second, there’s a “power” system, which goes from 100% to a number less than 100% quickly. This throttles the damage directly. Beam weapons tend to use this one.

Finally some of the ranged weapons just let you shoot, throttling be damned, but they fire once every three seconds which is kind of boring.

So in the Let’s Play I made extreme use of a weapon called an “Eruptor”. It creates a field of fire on the ground and doesn’t take crap from anyone – it’s kind of cool actually.

The Eruptor uses the power system.

I eventually realized the fields of fire it created would be overwritten. Overwritten by wimpier fields if the button was held for more than a second. Since the fields lingered for several seconds, this meant the optimal way to use this thing that could cover the screen in fire was to squirt a little bit of fire every two or three seconds.

Pouring streams of sprinkly death fire into a guy was kind of fun, but they designed playing that way to be playing badly.

The one design flaw/hurdle I can’t figure out how to fix was how they had the guns act like spells. Diablo II had javelins that could explode into bolts of lightning – how do you make a skill that turns a Hydra Gun that shoots five streams of poison into something, visually, viscerally, even more cool?

No doubt BryanM. I am pretty fanatical about reading as much as I can about the trials and tribulations other companies face when dealing with non-subscription business models. Despite my own 13 years experience with various non-subscription business models, I still try to learn as much as I can from other people’s successes and failures. It amazes me that companies with 0 experience in the area don’t feel the same need.

“It’s wacky that every startup feels compelled to make a massive blockbuster as their first game.”

And it is illustrative that companies like Blizzard did the opposite. They made small games first – including RPM Racing for the Super NES, Battle Chess I and II for the PC, and the relatively famous (now) The Lost Vikings also for the SNES.

Re: Hellgate 2. Wow. Seriously?

Massively had a really good article, based on a presentation the biggest Korean developer of free games gave. Among the many many things brought up, a couple big ones stood out to me:

* An ingame, tradable $ currency is mandatory. This essentially squeezes value out of the people who’ll never pay you directly. Essentially, it’s RMT where the real actual economy dictates prices, and not the developer. Gets some of that Forum Gold money.

* Gating areas between the morlocks and non-morlocks is an extremely bad idea. The people who buy an area feel lonely and nag their friends to come, their friends feel angry at being nagged and milked, just causes bad feelings all around in a game. Bad feelings are bad.

D&D Online’s revamp seems to get a lot of this right.

It’s just… man, people have already spent years and years on this, not reading their advice is like intentionally walking off a cliff.

re: Mr. Roper

We all had Psyduck level headaches when he was hired. “Why?!” we wondered. “Fall guy” was the general consensus.

In one interview he claimed he read the forums, but he hadn’t logged on for six months. This was when the forums required a log in. So he either had a sekrit account or is a lying liar who lies.

re: Travis and Runic Games

Travis was a class act and was the polar opposite of the Flagship experience. It’s an abomination what happened to Mythos, and I hope Torchlight comes close to being as good.

Mythos could have came first and been profitable, and Hellgate could have been an actual finished game. It’s wacky that every startup feels compelled to make a massive blockbuster as their first game.

re: Hellgate

Garbled second hand translations of this has brought us some rumors:

* Some employees of Redbana have been caught stealing credit cards from a backdoor in their billing system.

* They plan on moving the development to Korea to keep a closer eye on things.

* Thoughts are going around about making a “Hellgate 2″ to get around the distribution rights Namco has in some places in the world. The zombie can still come back and eat us all as we sleep.