Hellgate: London is an official failure. Why?
Flagship Studios is in its final death throes, and the post mortems and blame games are in full force. Recently some major players in the utter failure that is Hellgate: London finally spoke out. Of course, the interviews and statements were full of the usual weak excuses: players were not patient enough with us, evil internet people unfairly slammed the game, we were misunderstood, blah blah blah. The Electronic Arts mouthpiece was specially bad since he completely ignored the main reason the game failed: its completely idiotic subscription model.
First we have the words of EA’s David Demartini:
Why Hellgate: London failed, according to EA’s David DeMartini
Particularly absurd:
“We thought it would have been slightly higher quality than it turned out to be, and I think the problem with the game was that by the time it got really good, we were four to six months post-release. That was too late; we’d lost the fanbase.”
Sorry, but no. Hellgate: London is still on the shelves. Legions of fans were following it just waiting (and hoping) for you to dump the idiotic subscription model. But you didn’t. So the fans stayed away. And now you are out of business instead. Great plan!
A little more honest, but still filled with a lot of weak excuses, is an interview with Flagship head honco Bill Roper: Bill Roper speaks out at last. At least he is willing to address the core problem, but not until page 6 of an 8 page interview:
This is a crock. They easily could have changed. They could have dumped the subscription model completely, taken their plans and work for the first few “subscription only” updates, and bundled them into the first mini-expansion. Or heck, sales would have been so much higher without the brain dead subscription idea that you probably would have sold well enough to not even need to worry about an expansion in the first year (like Guild Wars).
It irritates me when game developers shovel out BS like this, because all it does is perpetuate the same mistakes and excuses. He also at one point blamed PC gaming in general for 2007 being a “terrible year.” Recent statistics have shown that to be false once online sales (via Steam and other distribution networks) are factored in.
It really is a shame because I love action RPGs. I really dislike the fact that gaming media barely challenges such weak excuses. But I guess that’s why I am finally making an effort to blog and write articles. If you all keep reading, maybe we can make an impact.
[...] post by Muckbeast [...]
[...] has been a link to an image in my Hellgate London post. Apparently, my link to a picture of the the Hellgate Templar named Avalon generated 50+ unique visitors per day on my old blog. The visitors arrive from various foreign [...]
I know this is way late, but I was one of those guys who got Flagshipped; as an evil player I rue the 5 gallons of Bluebell Cookies and/or Cream this thing cost me.
The subscription thing was very low on things that mattered with Hellgate – the thing was just an awful game flat out. They’d have to pay most people to get them to play it; have you had a chance to try it yet?
These are absolutely true facts about it:
You know how in most RPGs the scenery and monsters you fight change? Like the boars you see early on will appear later recolored with a green mohawk? Hellgate doesn’t do that. The grey zombie you fight in the first zone, appears, abundantly, throughout the game right up to the end. Scenery works similarly.
A memory leak, that’s worse the higher the setting, limited play to about an hour before crashing. In some spots, the game would grind down to .25 fps. They hired A Guy for awhile, who managed to improve these somewhat in later patches.
Game is rated M for no reason. There aren’t any dismembered body parts or much blood at all – the most graphic thing in the game is sometimes a zombie will lose its torso and attack you by bumping you with his hip. If you’re not going to appeal to the crowd that wants Diablo esque carnage, why limit your market?
Skills are lame. Lasers look like pee, not DoDonpachi-like murderdeathkill waves. They even went out of their way to make skills less interesting than they needed to be, for example: Blademasters have a skill called Crosscutter that throws a sword. It’s cute, and you’d think they’d encourage this as a subclass. But there’s a two-second timer on it. In this genre, a limit like that asks for the skill to drop a meteor on the screen. A one second timer killed Immolation Arrow in Diablo 2, after all.
MMO style busywork quests. Why they put so much effort into them, and why did they make them mandatory – people want their characters to be as cool as possible, so they are more mandatory than most World of Warcraft quests.
The only color in the game is grey. Except for the character art, which is often adorable and is easily the best thing about the game.
All that leads to my conclusion: If they made a game people wanted to play with a viable budget they would have lived.
On the upside, I really liked the idea of premium stuff. Not in the sense of gated areas – that’s a suicidal decision. But in armor and weapon art it could be cool. $15 for three months, get an extra 10% drops on top of your loot table picked from the Super Pretty Princess only table. A shield with a scary face on it, an exploding frog launcher, etc..
To make a fuller complement of nerd rage I should also add:
There’s six classes, but fewer unique skills than base Diablo II.
The feed system made item hunting pointless – why upgrade your armor when you can’t wear the upgrades?
Tooltip on weapons didn’t display damage. You had to open the advanced view and do complicated voodoo math (read: multiplication) to figure out the damage a weapon did.
Can you explain the “feed system” ?
I never heard of that.
Of course~
You’re familiar with Diablo’s attribute and requirement system, right? You get five points per level to distribute in Str Dex Vit Energy, and you have to meet a requirement to equip it, yadda yadda?
It’s like that with one change; the attributes act kind of like a gauge, everything adds to what’s required of you. For example:
If you have a sword that requires 15 strength, and a helmet that requires 5 strength and a shoulder piece that requires 40 strength, you would need 60 strength to equip them at the same time.
In a sense this _seems_ interesting. And it’s logical; you can only carry so weight at once, right? Like everything else, they bungled it as well.
Instead of requirements just being a part of a base item, the random, magical modifiers added to it as well. +Armor would require strength, +Stats stamina, +mana willpower, etc. The specific way it was budgeted had these effects:
* People didn’t want to upgrade to higher level armor generally. The innate Armor they gave cost more than a +Armor mod, and were generally of negligible benefit.
* Since +Stats added to your feed gauge pool, they were highly desirable. If +All Stats wasn’t on a armor piece, it was junk. Stamina-heavy builds were most powerful, but underpowered and unfun until proper stuff could be acquired.
* Equipment with an unwanted mod or two were doubly punished – not only did you get something that was useless to you, you had to use up space for something you _could_ want.
* And it was possible to hit the cap and be unable to improve. Often.
Later, about a month before they went bankrupt, they rebudgeted things to be less… poopy. Still, point hoarding continued as the norm of course.
I always thought the assignable attributes were a terrible system for this genre, and was enthused when Blizzard revealed it wasn’t going to be in Diablo 3. The player misery and balance issues are obvious, non?
I forgot to mention this game had pee-stained mattresses in it; it is important you know this. Important for everyone:
http://i111.photobucket.com/albums/n151/malignityomega/LetsPlayHell/screenshot_05000038.jpg
Thanks for the explanation. That sounds like a terrible system.
any newer games like HGL or diablo?
Not really. There’s Diablo 3, but that’s 2010 at the earliest.
Have you played The Witcher? Its not like Diablo, but it is a nice RPG.
Old news, but… We have a new trainwreck you might be interested in: All Points Bulletin. A useful post in a useful thread on the subject.
I was really very pumped for this game, but they never talked about PvE, and when the marketing guys don’t mention something, you KNOW that it does not exist. Their implementation for PvP sounded awful too: fetch quests.
The impression I’ve gotten from it, is that it is an outrageously awesome character+car designer, with a mediocre shooting game (with 2 maps and no NPC guys to fight) tacked on. One poster said Hellgate looks like a varied gaming experience with lots of content compared to this one.
So it isn’t GTA online, like it should have tried to be, but some cops and robbers PvP game where you can’t fight other people until the game tells you you’re allowed to.
Really I have no idea why they went with the cop/criminal faction system, when just letting gangs and alliances determine factions would have been simpler while at the same time making what gang you join a huge part of the game. Another case where a simpler design is better and more powerful one, isn’t it?
The dying process is amusing to see all over again. It never gets old, no matter how many times I see it. Developer killing themselves with the same exact decisions. Developers saying everything is fine in an attempt to hold on to what they have, maybe sell off the IP to someone who wants to spend 20 million to complete and rebrand it. Posters that actually believe in the “miracle patch” – the awesome patch that will somehow erase the bad vibe everyone already got from the internet and save the game.
In Flagship news, Mythos is in some kind of intermittent english beta phase. They really seem to be moving too slow on these – I know they’d love to move faster but man. When Travis was the lead, it seemed like they had a new Act ready about every six to eight months or so. (Heck, the man is already working on releasing his second post-FS Diablo clone.) With Diablo 3 around the corner, they feel several years too late..
[...] a moral failure on the part of the management or not, is unfortunate for future online games. After Hellgate London, players might justifiably have gotten more nervous about buying ‘lifetime subscriptions’. And [...]
The game seemed like a sweet idea though.maybe PS3 should re-awesome it.