The Hellgate London official page has been updated today with a new Tutorial for levelling up a Guardian.
Howdy folks! Stonehenge has been out for a few weeks now, and we’ve received lots of great feedback from all of you. We’re definitely working to include more of what you liked into our upcoming update, changing stuff you didn’t love, and adding completely new things as well. As for any announcements regarding the next update… stay tuned. ^_^
In other HGL news, Brennan has made a fun little video to help some of you newcomers to the game. In the video, Bmax gives some tips and strategies on using the Guardian class up to level 10. We know there are a lot of you veterans out there who know this stuff already, but we get lots of questions from new players, so hopefully this will be really useful to them. Check it out on my YouTube channel below. It should also be showing up on the front page movie player later today for easier access, as will a higher-res version for download.
Expect a new one sometime next week where we’ll look at the Blademaster class up to level 10. Also, if there are specific video tutorials you’d like to see, just let us know!
To add to the news, there is also a hilarious video of a prank call made about ordering Hellgate the day before it was out.
Scapes has just posted up a new set of patch notes for 1.1b which has gone up on the test server.
It’s a small update but includes the following:
Monsters
Moloch has learned a host of new skills, including the ability to summon minions.
General
The ignore list limit has been increased to 128 accounts, from 32.
To add some incentive for more people to play on the test server there is now a new policy that applies to it, as published by Tyler Thompson:
Test Center is a crucial part of the Hellgate: London’s future. The players who use Test Center, report bugs and give us feedback are some of the most influential players in our community.
So, I’m asking those of you who want to help to have a character on Test Center that you regularly play. To help with this, we are making some changes to how we run Test Center:
1. No more planned character wipes.
We will no longer wipe the characters on Test Center in order to copy characters over from Shulgoth. Copying these characters has had a negative impact on the population size in Test Center instead of a positive one.
I can’t absolutely guarantee against any character wipes in Test Center – after all, this is where we try things out before they go live and things can go wrong. I can say that we won’t wipe the characters there on purpose, and I’ll look at getting a database backup working for that shard.
Personally, I am only going to work on my characters in Test Center – hopefully, that will be some assurance to you about my desire to prevent character wipes there. I don’t like losing my character progression any more that you do.
2. Double Exp on Test Center – That’s right: Double experience gain on Test Center.
3. A free Skill Retrainer every time that you log in – If you have room in your inventory, we will make sure that you have a Skill Retrainer when you log in with that character. This should help testers to try out various skill combinations.
4. Test Center Rewards – Occasionally, we will be looking at who is playing in Test Center and who is posting constructive feedback about what is going on there. These people will have their accounts marked as being “good testers.” We are going to cook up a couple little rewards for these people – which will be visible on Shulgoth as well as Test Center. It might be a few weeks until the rewards come, but we are working on it.
After a very fast-paced January in which the forums were restructured, the Stonehenge Chronicles content update was launched, and a popular follow-up patch was released, we are looking forward to hosting the second Hellgate: London Developer Chat Event. This chat will occur via IRC this Friday, February 8th, at 4:00 PM PST (7:00 PM EST, 12:00 AM GMT) and will be held on the following server and channel.
Everyone can participate in this event. There are a few methods to connect to the IRC server. One is via an IRC client such as mIRC or ChatZilla. Alternatively, ForTheGamers has a Java chat client you can use directly in a browser by clicking this link. Some instant message clients also support connections to IRC.
For those who are new to IRC, the connecting is really simple. With mIRC, under the connection settings, enter “irc.ForTheGamers.org” (without the quotes) as the server and, once connected, type “/join #FlagshipStudios” (again, no quotes) in the text bar. This will instruct your client to join the proper channel. Other clients will operate similarly.
Once in and the question bot has been unlocked, you can ask a question by typing “/msg DevBot QUESTION” with QUESTION being your question. We’ll also have another channel set up where you can all just chat amongst yourselves.
Updates will be posted before the event if there are any changes. We had an impressive turn-out at the first event, looking forward to the second!
In the mean time you can visit our own Hellgate Guru chat which is also hosted by ForTheGamers, however our channel is #Hellgatelondon. So use the same instructions just join that channel instead.
Sumea.com.au interviewed FSS’s David Glenn. It’s a pretty good read:
A snippet follows:
Sumea: Why did you get into game development?
David Glenn: Well, it looked more fun than architecture. Yeah, my background… got a degree in architecture. And, started in the industry in the early 90’s but it was a really slow time for architecture, and ended up doing work… kinda teaching myself 3D modelling, texturing… mostly modelling at that point. Texturing didn’t exist really. But then, I got a job doing architectural rending for a firm called Michael Seckman Assoc. Long history with Autodesk, but anyway; he ended up getting a contract with Maxis working on Sim City because they needed buildings created. So we were capable of doing that so we did about a year and a half’s worth of work for them creating 3D buildings for Sim City. They ended up scrapping all that and going back to 2D because technology didn’t keep up, but in that time I got a lot of experience in the game industry. So I decided to make the transition, and ended up getting a job at Blizzard, working on Diablo 2. So I started there right as that development had started, they had just launched Diablo, and this was in January of 97 I believe. And then essentially, went to Blizzard, they were still using really old software, Strata on Macintoshes to create 3D art. And within a couple of weeks I convinced them to switch to 3D studio, at the time, which is now 3dsMax. And we were still doing 2D for Diablo 2, but we pre-rendered 3D assets and then cut them out in Photoshop and put them in the game engine. So the game engine asset was 2D but the original source asset was 3D so we could model up realistic lighting, shadows, and things like this. So we made the transition to Max and we’ve been using it ever since.
The weekly MMO report that is published by G4TV this week decided to have a go at both Flagship Studios, specifically Hellgate London.
However they take the less than mature stance of not mentioning anything on the game, but instead advertising a blog titled “Flagshipped” which is known for it’s less than favourable, but humorous depiction of Hellgate London.
G4TV blatantly gives Hellgate London names like “supersuck” as well as to immaturely suggest that “bitching” about a game that “fails” is just as right as praising games that did well. Rather than being mature and suggesting to gamers to instead concentrate their efforts on helping improve the so called “failed” games, they instead try to justify blatant harassment of games that do not do so well. All in all, their report does nothing more than advertise the blog.
While on the subject of the blog, looking over a lot of their older posts it seems like the owners don’t just want to make fun of Hellgate but try to find positives in patches and ingame features and comment on things that they agree with as well as things they would rather see leave the game. They have a number of good arguments for their reasoning as well, and tend to publish news that while slightly biased in the negative, just gives it’s readers another view to compare to that of “fan” sites.
What troubles me though is the direction that the site seems to have taken in it’s latest few posts where it blatantly just attacks Flagship and calls Hellgate London names rather than concentrating on the issue at hand (in this case the site moderation) and instead just futher criticises the game with no apparent want of fixing for it. I personally don’t know if this is just an attempt to get it’s ratings up due to the nature of the people who post on the blog and their constant need to only bash the game. Is it the new added pressure of being the “anti-fan” site of Hellgate causing them to try to take a completely negative view? Are they trying to cash in on the new found fame as the “anti-fan” site of the game and taking the most negative view they can?
Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy a good satire and comedy as much as the next person, but when major gaming sites start to advertise blatant harassment of a game as the right thing to do, do you jump on the bandwagon and take a turn for the worst or do you stick to your morals and continue on the goal you were trying to originally achieve?
What are your opinions on G4’s inclusion of such a report as well as the apparent change of heart on the reporting style of Flagshipped?
Not signing off with enjoy like usual, but Discuss!
Although it seems a bit late for a review of Hellgate London, Gaming Excellence has just published up their play experience. Hopefully this means that they actually had some time to play the game and experience all of it.
It’s your typical sort of review, and in the end they give Hellgate London a 7 out of 10.
Technically speaking, Hellgate: London is hit or miss. Things look quite good, and the variation in enemies is decent (until they start pulling the different-colors-different-names stunt for the enemy models). There are problems, however, like a framerate that fluctuates wildly and randomly and a couple odd issues that don’t hamper gameplay too heavily, but still are present. There are also some server issues that meant I was dropping out at least once ever couple hours, which doesn’t lose too much progress, but will eliminate any work since your last visit to a station, which could mean a couple finished quests or so.
All in all, Hellgate: London isn’t the next revolution in Diablo-style gameplay. While it does some important parts well, notably the item management and upgradeability, other parts like the skill sets and character customization fall short. The technical issues have gotten better since the last patch, but they’re still present, and can hamper the experience, especially the framerate. It all adds up to a game that doesn’t live up to expectations. It’s not a bad game; it’s just severely flawed, and ends up just being decidedly average.
Their reasoning for the score is:
Pros: Great equipment use; addictive gameplay; good graphics.
Cons: Technical issues; uninteresting skill trees; too-similar classes; lack of use of the setting.
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
