Hey everyone, incase you haven’t noticed yet, we’ve made a number of improvements to the front page of the website which should make it much easier to read now and provide a layout that seems more professional and modern. It also means that all of our sites across our network now share a common theme.
To go with the change, there is also a new background design, as well as a whole set of new smileys you can use on our forums.
Are you tired of having to pester Flagship Studios for small tidbits of news about the game?
Are you bored of not having any recent exclusives?
Are you eager to hear about some new and exciting information about Mythos?
If you answered yes to any of the above questions, you’ve come to the right place!
That’s right! We here at Mythos Guru have gone out of our way to do the job for you. You won’t have to wait in line to get one measly question answered. You won’t have to leave your kids alone in the car, baking under the hot sun, as you dash to your news press to find the latest goss on the game only to find a police officer waiting for you with a warrant and a pair of silver handcuffs when you return. You won’t have to sit there doodling words and pictures on your wall hoping they will be the new exclusives for Mythos.
All you simply have to do is feast your eyes upon our wonderous interview with the amazing Max (Note: Max may or may not actually be amazing, but the interview is indeed wonderful!). Not only do you get exclusive new information at Mythos Guru about the game’s upcoming new modes of transportation, brand new ways to live and die, new ways to dress and express, as well as the secret race that was going to be put in until Max was abducted!!!
You will see the answers to these questions and more by read not one, two, or even five, but twenty four whole questions that will make you wish that you could hibernate until open beta!
This interview was conducted by Kotaku with Ivan Sulic and Guy Somberg to discuss the state of the game and the general workings of the company.
We first heard back from Flagship’s marketing communications manager, web manager and writer Ivan Sulic, who said while he couldn’t speak about Somberg’s emotions, he guessed they were “like anyone who spent a lot of time and effort on something that wasn’t received as well as hoped… And then a few of our friends and coworkers left. It’s a bummer”.
Bummers aside, though, Sulic said that nobody’s been taken off or left the Hellgate team except for systems programmer Peter Hu, who’s been able to work on some other projects now that the game is well underway. Said Sulic, “Everything else is pretty much business as usual”.
Said Sulic, “We’ve actually had very few people leave. Flagship is still fully staffed and working on both Hellgate and Mythos… I think we have about 100 employees now”.
Some people have moved on from Flagship, said Sulic, due to simply moving up on their career paths or being tired of windy San Francisco, but said those departures don’t constitute cause for alarm. “People finish a game, want to work on something else, and then leave to do just that. It’s pretty typical in this industry. I don’t know the exact number, but we couldn’t have had more than five or six departures. Still, if those five or six dudes are people you work with everyday, it can’t feel great”.
And Somberg himself joined the conversation. “Ivan said it quite well”, he said. “Things here at Flagship are running business as usual. We’ve just put a build of Chronicle 2 onto our test centre, which has represented a lot of hard work from everybody at the company, myself included”.
GameBanshee has updated their Hellgate London section of the website with an item database, a skill database, quest database, many high resolution screenshots as well as exclusive screenshots from the Abyss Chronicles and an interview about it with Tyler Thompson.
And, to help you track down weapons and armor that meet specific criteria, we’ve also set up an advanced search page. Should you ever find yourself looking for a one-handed weapon with over 1000 ignite attack strength, a piece of armor that increases your critical chance and your accuracy at the same time, or maybe a Focus item that adds a rank to all Evoker skills, we hope you’ll find this page to be invaluable.
GB: What can we expect from The Abyss Chronicles? What were your primary goals when developing this particular update?
Tyler: Our Chronicles are designed to be much more than a patch and the Abyss Chronicle is much more significant in scope than our first Chronicle. We’ve added a long laundry list of new features with this update, but the four big goals were making a new set of levels with new boss fights and some really cool rewards, three new skills for each character class, the Blademaster rebalance and the Consignment Shop. The new levels should give Subscribers a lot of new content to run around in. The new skills really enhance the current character classes and allow for some completely new play styles – including the Summoner transforming into a demon who focuses on melee and summons freaky melee fighters. The Blademaster needed some love. He will be doing much more damage and have more viable skills with this update.
GB: Are you introducing any new unique items with The Abyss Chronicles update? If so, will these items only be obtainable in the new zones or will they also have a chance to drop in the original and Stonehenge zones?
Tyler: We have a large set of new items in the Abyss Chronicles. There are new armor lines for each faction which look pretty cool and have some interesting plus and minus choices for the player like Cabalist armor that adds to power but removes health. There are also some new weapons for every class – like a massive mace which has spinning blades when you swing it. With the exception of the new focus items designed for a melee Summoner, all of these items can only be found in the Abyss areas. All of them have unique versions which mostly are set to drop off of specific bosses.
GB: Also included in Patch 2.1 is a (much needed) rebalance to the attribute feed system on items. What can we expect from these changes? Will feeds still be dependent on which enchantments are present on an item (ie. critical bonuses requiring accuracy), or will they be calculated in another manner?
Tyler: Patch 2.1 will include a careful rebalancing of the feed system. We have a few ideas about how to approach the problem. One thought has been to make the enhancement’s feed requirements match your faction’s more common attributes. We are still talking about a few other ideas as well. To help players until Patch 2.1 comes out, The Abyss Chronicles has an NPC that will charge you palladium to redistribute your attributes.
GB: What’s next after The Abyss Chronicles and Patch 2.1? Can you give us a rundown of features and changes you’d like to implement into the game with future content updates?
Tyler: We’ve got a few different directions that we can go with Hellgate: London after Patch 2.1. I can’t really commit today on which path we will take – there are some high-level debates about this going on right now.
Well, not really. But they are on the official Korean website, which means that we can officially post them now!
I can’t embed them as they are in Windows Media Player, but if you go to the link you can either open them from there or download them.
The first video on the list is the Patch 2 trailer, but now in a much higher resolution and the second is the 1.3 trailer, also in a much higher resolution (1280 by 720 for both) than before (however it has Korean subtitles now).
EDIT: Just to add, the video is titled China Joy 2008, which means it’s being shown at the large China Joy game’s even in China. So guess the marketing for the game is starting with Patch 2 over there in time for the launch which I would think is some time soon.
Yay exams… That’s right I have exams in three weeks so I’ve been studying that’s why this news is late. Sorry.
But yes, patch 2 has hit the Test Center and Scapes has provided us with a large set of patch notes available on both the official and our own forums.
The Abyss Chronicles (Patch 2) is heading to Test Center today!
This is the largest addition to Hellgate: London to date. There is a new town with a new quest line that includes four new boss fights, the Consignment House, the Blademaster rebalance, Mythic and Double-Edged items, rings that go into the new trinket slot, new armor sets for each faction, new weapons and uniques for each faction and on and on… I’ll let these Patch Notes get into the specifics, but we have a lot of improvements in this patch for subscribers and non-subscribers alike.
We’ve been fixing bugs and polishing this new content for a couple weeks now, and we plan on focusing on polishing it for a while longer. You will see by the list of caveats in this post that we aren’t finished yet. In fact, at the time of this writing we have made 140 changes since this specific build was completed – we are still fixing things as fast as we can, but we tried to get you the first build that was ready for Test Center. This post contains the current Patch Notes for The Abyss Chronicles, but I can guarantee you that things will keep changing over the next few weeks. During that time, as we see you guys playing in Test Center and hear your feedback, the new content will probably be nerfed, buffed, and radically changed. Please just roll with the punches.
We need your help to polish this Chronicle while it is still in Test Center. Players who are in Test Center enjoy several cool perks: double experience gain, a free Skill Retrainer each login, a free Attribute Retrainer each login, a free Expertise Retrainer each login, a Test Center-only vendor who sells the skill scrolls (he didn’t end up in this build), and a nice small community of fun people to play with. So, hop on Test Center and post the issues that you have found here in the forums.
Scapes also has a preview of the Trinkets up on the official website.
After consuming many worlds, the Abyss has acquired and retained magic secrets from many extinct civilizations. Only the strongest artifacts have survived within the Abyss. However, due to the omnipresent demonic taint of the Abyss, these trinkets have been corrupted and lost their original powers. The only device known to humankind to expel such corruption is the Transmogrifying Cube.
One of the new features introduced in the Abyss Chronicles (Patch 2) is the “trinkets” equipment slot, the first types of which are rings. Of the seven types of rings available, one drops from Champion monsters anywhere in Hellgate: London, two can only be found off of monsters in the Abyss, and four are specific drops from Abyss boss monsters. All rings drop as Cursed rarity items and need to be cleansed of their demon taint using the Transmogrifying Cube in order to be properly identified.
Each of these rings grant at least one point in two skills of a single class. The Abyss-only rings have an additional affix and the boss-specific rings have one or two additional affixes. While all seven rings can drop as Enhanced, Rare, or Legendary rarity, the boss-specific rings can also drop with Unique rarity. The higher the rarity level, the better the properties of the ring. All rings are tradable to all players.
There is also a new section of the forums dedicated specifically to the Developer blogs by Hellgate’s developers.
EDIT: The patch isn’t actually on TC yet, here is an update:
Ugh, the download. It’s totally borked our schedule today. We are almost done uploading it again in the US and the EU copy is getting close too. We will double check the consistency of the files this time.
Now, it’s getting a little late in PST. It’s too late at night to have enough Flagship eyes watching the first wave of players enter The Abyss on Test Center.
So, we have closed The Gate on Test Center until tomorrow morning.
Until then, read the Patch Notes a few times - it’s about 18 pages typed! This patch is huge!
Yes, we normally split up news posts into lots of bits, but I am busy today so it’s going to be one big news post!
First is the MAJOR news for most of you, which is the fact that patch 2 is coming to Test Center on Monday. The file is going to be a stand alone patch at a massive size of 1.3 gigs!
The Abyss Chronicles boasts a long list of new features and fixes and as such has required a long internal testing process. The studio is currently in a “bug squashing” stage with regards to the major content update meaning that development of Patch 2 is complete and we are now working on cleaning it up and making it pretty (and balanced). As part of the path of all our patches, the Abyss Chronicles will first be enjoying a good stay on our Test Center server where it can be poked and prodded and picked at by you, our thorough Hellgaters and brave test subjects.
The Abyss Chronicles is slated for Test Center launch this coming Monday, June 9th. The update will be applied via a standalone patch (1.3 gigabytes). We will have more information on this big move first thing next week.
– Scapes
Second is the news that Patch 1.3d has hit the test center today. The patch notes are the following:
Patch 1.3d introduces a few significant adjustments to gameplay, character creation, and one vendor NPC in particular. Players can now create Elite Mode characters (and subscribers can create Hardcore Mode characters) if their account has a character that reaches level 20 or above. The update also fixes a PRD bug and a character options issue.
Good hunting, Hellgaters!
The Hellgate: London Team
—
General
All accounts can now access Elite Mode when one of its characters reaches level 20 or above. (Accounts that already have a level 20 character or above will have to gain a level for this to apply.)
Subscriber accounts can now access Hardcore Mode when one of its characters reaches level 20 or above. (Accounts that already have a level 20 character or above will have to gain a level for this to apply.)
The rate at which Rank experience is gained has been rebalanced.
Our favorite Premium Item Merchant, Ko, just got a new shipment of items from a new supplier. Unfortunately, they aren’t quite the quality that he is used to getting. In fact, they are all mostly Enhanced items. Sure, he’s still got the Rare, Legendary and Unique stuff that he always had, but you are pretty likely to get an Enhanced item from him now. He’s got to do something with this new shipment after all.
Fixes
Fixed a bug which could cause a player’s PRD to function incorrectly if they were kicked from their party while warping through the PRD.
Fixed a bug where character options would change as a result of minimizing the character options tab.
Third is the new post on the forums by Tyler Thompson, which is of a thread that’s going to act like a blog of his. So follow i regularly!
Today, I also fixed a bug with ragdolls floating in the air. I caught up on about 50 company e-mails and reassigned several bugs. I met with HR to talk about a few issues. I prepared plans for what the UI SCRUM group will work on next - mostly cribbing from our Team Advocate’s suggestions for guilds, some auction house and e-mail features.
Then I spent a couple hours running around to see whether Patch 2.0 was ready for Test Center. I worked with Matt who was gathering the notes, got them passed to Evan to write them up, checked with Alan who was finishing up his to design changes, checked with QA about the bugs in the latest build, met with some engineers to make sure that they didn’t have concerns about the state of their features, and wrote an e-mail to just about everyone to make sure none of them knew of an issue that would block it.
Afterwards, I met with the team doing Auction House and Guild Features to talk about how long it will take to do their features.
Then I made a big decision about Patch 2.0 and Test Center, but I’ll leave info that to Scapes.
Lastly, is the new Undeground Communique #7, which this time talks of the three patch 1.3c, 1.3d and 2. The news of (most) transfers being complete and (most) items being transferred with the characters (Check your characters for if they worked before Patch 2 hits TC), new ATI drivers that fix issues in Vista as well as the new Sneak Shots about Patch 2 next week being about Trinkets!
With what seems to be a mistake on Scapes’ behalf, the Patch 2 trailer video has been uploaded to youtube a day early. The video was removed, but not before many fans saw it and made copies which have now appeared on youtube again.
And this is why I shouldn’t upload videos when sleepy.
The video has been replaced with the intended Patch 1.3 Trailer.
– Scapes
EDIT: Removed video on request, however those who know how to can still find it.
Enjoy!
P.S. Patch 2 makes me want to play the game again!
Scapes has posted a few bits of news on the official forums regarding patches. First is the news of patch 1.3c coming to the live servers tomorrow.
Hellgate: London Patch 1.3c will be live on the Shulgoth (US) and Sydonai (EU) servers tomorrow. This is the same build of Patch 1.3c that is currently on Test Center. The Shulgoth (US) server will update tomorrow, June 3rd, at 6:00 AM PDT. The Sydonai (EU) server will update later tomorrow at 8:00 PM PDT (0300 GMT). The downtime for each server will be about one hour.
Patch notes for Patch 1.3c will be available tomorrow after the launch.
– Scapes
There presently isn’t an ETA for when the Abyss Chronicles will be live on the Test Center server. An announcement will be made when there is one to share.
– Scapes
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
