You, our active and dedicated Hellgaters, have been remarkably patient. This morning, I received an update on Patch 0.7 saying that a new issue had been discovered. The Global chat was showing up in the Guild and Party chat panes, a bug that would render partying and guild play rather difficult. In order to deliver a sound product free of known defects, Patch 0.7 has been delayed by a day.
While you wait for the patch, why not try Patch 1.0 ? Yes, as an extra early Christmas present, Flagship Studios has released a preview of the first big content update ! Just log on to the Test Center to get a taste of the “Stonehenge Chronicles”:
We just couldn’t help ourselves. All this holiday cheer got to our heads, so we put something special in your Test Center stocking… It’s just a little something we call the Stonehenge Chronicles. We’re hoping you’ll all check it out and have a good one on us.
Are we getting Patch 1.0 before the end of the year ? The 24th would be nice.
Saying that people were looking towards this announcement would be an understatement. Finally, the 0.6 single player patch has been released ! Lots of fixes inside
And to introduce the new patch, an updated version of the Hellgate: London launcher has been released. Just click on the “Updates available” button and this all-new launcher will install itself. Here is what it looks like (main menu, patch menu, patch menu while downloading SP 0.6):
Just in time for Patch 1.0, with its 300MB which would have been quite a hassle to download through the previous system !
The official Hellgate London has posted up an interview with HGG member Doffy, who was one of the winners of the Halloween competition. This is the first of three interviews with the three winners.
What inspired you to create your submission?
For the first part of the video: The thought of people continuing to try and trick or treat in Hellgate:London’s setting was amusing to me.
For the second part: The gods of sarcasm.
What did you use to create it?
Software: Fraps, and Sony Vegas 6.0
Otherware: Clay Gootgeld and his beautiful voices.
How long did it take to complete your submission?
Two nights of capturing/voice acting/editing. Not to mention the 3 years of preproduction.
Have you ever won grand prize in a contest before?
RL? Yes. A few paintball tournaments. Non-RL? HG:L Halloween contest
There are many other funny questions in the interview, so head over to the website and check them out!
The Korean publisher for Hellgate London has today published a whole set of screenshots and concept art of the upcoming Stonehenge area, as well as some new items. While the text is in Korean, there are a lot of pictures to look at. There was also a video that was shown at the presentation, but that is not for the public for now.
The new areas look amazing, and will hopefully get implemented in the game soon!
Flagship Studios programmer Cellwind has dropped some status updates about the release for the upcoming patches 0.7 and patch 1.0 on the official forum in a thread that addresses the issue of the game’s out-of-memory issues and his progress on dealing with it.
Here are some of the things he’s mentioned regarding the upcoming patches:
DK_Lond: Sorry for the lack of communication. We would have released 0.7 patch this last week, but we thought there was a problem with the server code which turned out to be nothing. At first we turned off the new allocators, but that didn’t fix it. After what looked like a 5x increase in memory usage per user, it turned out that our stress test code wasn’t simulating any users logging out. It should be out Monday or Tuesday.
…
Vaevictus: Thanks for being patient. I’m pretty sure we had planned on having the 1.0 patch out by now.
0.7 and 1.0 patch are right on top of eachother at this point. We have 4 different branches going at the same time and they are all competing for test time and TestCenter usage. We’ve got the single player patch, 0.7 patch, 1.0 patch and the latest branch.
As far as I know, we should have 0.7 out early next week and have 1.0 on TestCenter about the same time. When 1.0 gets released depends on what issues we find and how long it takes to fix them. If there are no problems for a few days then I imagine it would get released the following week.
…
mjollnerus: I think it’s a case of fear of the unknown. FMOD releases a new build like every 2 weeks, so the fear is that taking a new build to fix known issues could introduce greater unknown issues. The majority of our test effort has been directed at patch 1.0, so it was thought best to put the new FMOD drop there where it would get the most testing. As Summer says, we’re skipping the version numbers from 0.7 to 1.0 patch, so there won’t be a 0.8 and 0.9 patch. There should only be a week between the 0.7 and 1.0 patch.
Kudos to Cellwind and his team at Flagship for all the hard work! Thanks for the heads up Atrial.
The Game Informer magazine has reviewed Hellgate London in it’s current issue. Thanks to HGG member ty1134 we have a scan of the review.
They talk of the games positives such as the gameplay, items, randomly generated levels, however also mention the negatives such as the repeated quests and areas as well as HGL being more of a good Co-Op game rather than an MMO. They do say that what the game does well, it does very well, but it’s bad points is that it doesn’t venture too far out of its scope.
All in all, Game Informer gives Hellgate London 8.5/10 and gives the following points:
Concept: Apply Diablo style leveling and loot grinding to a 3D rendered post apocalyptic vision of Earth
Graphics: Quite nice, especially the variety with which you can customise your avatar’s appearance via equipment
Sound: Voiceover are good, but the effects grate after a while and the music annoyingly only plays about 15 percent of the time
Playability: The action is fast, interface smooth, and loads short
Entertainment: You won’t find better level and loot grinding anywhere, but that’s about all this offers
Replay Value: High
It then goes on to say that you can play the game free, and if you fall in love with it, it’s well worth the $10 per month to become a subscriber.
PC Powerplay, an Australian gaming magazine has published a review of Hellgate London in their most current issue. While we do not have scans, we actually don’t publish scans on this website anymore, so don’t expect to see them. However HGG member Darksabre posted a summary of the article that I will now shamelessly copy and paste here!
The two-page review features six screenshots, a boxout of classes and a few pictures regarding the skill tree, inventory and world map.
Quotes from the article:
POSITIVES:
“If you like action RPG’s you should buy this game. If you like FPS games, you should buy this game. If you like RPG/FPS games, you should probably start cancelling your social committments for the next six months”
“Killing baddies is the heart of the game, and it’s both visuall appealing and fun in a classic Quake kind of way: the difficulty is pitched just right”
“Hellgate is a wonderfully deep, wonderfully balanced Diablo 2 ripoff”
NEGATIVES:
“The side quests are uniformly awful, presented 1997 style, as poorly written text over poorly written dialogue, and the central plot isn’t much better”
“But Hellgate wants 28 different kinds of magical pants, and couldn’t stretch back stories for any of them, so its greenhorn dungarees for you, hero”
“It bothers me that Hellgate pretends. It bothers me that it thinks its an update, not a rehash of the dungeon crawl formula It bothers me that it could have been so much more. But it is what it is: a good game which doesnt bother with the bits it thinks we don’t care about”
No mention is given to online modes, subscription or ongoing updates or patches.
7/10
+ Insanely replayable
+ Easy to learn, hard to master
+ Great monster designs
- Unexciting Story
- Recycled RPG cliches
- Little sense of immersion
MMOSite is having a best of 2007 vote for their annual Reader’s Choice Award, and Kaiser over at the official Hellgate London website points us to the entries that their company has.
Popular gaming website MMOsite is currently running its annual Reader’s Choice Awards. As the title implies, the winners are decided by you, the players.
Hellgate: London has been nominated for several categories, including Best New Game and Best Graphics. Actually, our other game Mythos has been nominated as well, for Most Anticipated game of 2007.
If you want to put in your vote for our games, just head on over to this link and click on any of the categories. Thanks!
Good news to all of you playing on the Asian servers! IAH Games are patching you up with both the old 0.5 and the new 0.6 patch on December 11th.
Dear Gamers,
Please be informed of the scheduled routine maintenance tomorrow, 11 December 2007, Tuesday, from 0800hrs to 1300hrs (GMT+8).
During this period, the HGL Game service will be taken down for standard maintenance and patch deployment of 0.5 and 0.6.
We have completed our round of comprehensive testing on the Patches and we will continue to monitor the servers closely. We need your help in informing us of any issues you may come across while enjoying HGL.
For your reference, attached are Patch 0.5 & 0.6 notes from Flagship’s Hellgate: London website.
If you still haven’t heard about the developer chat on IRC with Flagship Studios, you missed your chance to participate in it. However never fear as all the questions were compiled together and published for all to see on the official Hellgate London website!
Earlier today, Flagship Studios had its first developer chat since the game’s launch via IRC with more than 250 Hellgate: London fans present for the majority of the event. Bill Roper, Erich Schaefer, Dave Glenn, Phil Shenk, and others fielded questions across a range of topics including game balancing, patches, and future content. While the chat was to last for less than an hour originally, the staggering attendance kept the event going for 80 minutes during which 36 questions were answered.
Even after the chat event ended, a few of the participating developers lingered in #flagshipstudios to answer a few more questions and mingle with the Hellgaters. More than 300 questions were asked over the course of the event. With how wildly popular this developer chat was, you can bet we’ll be doing more of them in the near future!
Hellgate Guru was founded in mid-2005 and has ever since been one of the most popular fan sites and forums devoted to Hellgate: London, catering to a wide range of interests, as well as having a dedicated team of staff members who keep the website full of constant updates, news and generate activity and hype around the game. More
