Hellgate Guru

GamerPro has published their annual report on MMOs, choosing to concentrate on three games; Tabula Rasa, Hellgate London and Fury. While they give Hellgate London a “D” grade and don’t have much nice things to say about it, they give a couple of lines that I found interesting.

Basically, Hellgate seems like it’s still trying to recover from its launch. This would explain the slow clip at which content is being delivered to subscribers, and the game’s puzzling lack of essential MMO features (i.e. an auction house and a robust PvP system.) Unfortunately the developers aren’t very forthcoming regarding plans for the game down the line. Indeed, the fact that Hellgate isn’t an MMORPG by the strictest definition of the term is a valid point, but that doesn’t excuse the game’s shortcomings. It’s as if the designers pretend that nothing’s happened since Diablo 2 launched. Hellgate exists in a void and the only people who aren’t crying foul are the purists. But even these people have to admit that content-wise, Hellgate has a long way to go before it can approach the quality of its spiritual predecessor.

Is it silly to have faith in Hellgate? Probably not. While Flagship may have damaged the cred attached to its legacy the company still has enough juice to continue building the game. In the meantime Flagship needs to do something to stoke the good faith of its community. At this point there really isn’t much reason to be a subscriber.

This is the outlook that I’ve had on Hellgate so far and in my opinion FSS has taken the right steps to bring the Faith back.

Enjoy