This article just made it’s way through my Google Alerts not too long ago:
A bold entrepreneur’s ambition of making South Korea the vanguard of the computer game industry has ended as an unaccomplished mission.
HanbitSoft CEO Kim Young-man on Monday sold two thirds of his shares to a relatively unknown game company named T3 Entertainment, making it the new largest shareholder of Hanbit.
We know Hanbitsoft as being the publishers of Hellgate London in Korea.
Kim, who founded Hanbit in 1999 as a local distributor of hit game “StarCraft,” said he will remain as the chairman for a while. But when reporters asked him about Hanbit’s future on Wednesday, he passively handed over the questions to Kim Ki-young, the chief executive of T3.
“I decided to sell the shares because the two companies share the same vision of becoming a leader in the global game market,” the outgoing CEO said in a press conference held on Wednesday.
It’s interesting to note that Hanbitsoft made such losses last year when they went with Hellgate London and while the article does not specifically blame Hellgate alone, it seems to imply that it was one of the strong factors for the loss.
As the next step, Kim decided to finance a massive game project called “Hellgate: London,” which was developed by the same team that created “StarCraft.” He expected it would be a new milestone of Korean game industry’s history. But the new game didn’t do very well, yet, and Hanbit recorded a 7.2 billion won loss last year.
Now having yielded about two thirds of his shares to the newcomers from T3, Kim showed that he no longer has the same power he used to have.
When a reporter asked whether there will be downsizing of the organization, the old Hanbit boss said the company will need more manpower, not downsizing. But an executive of T3 immediately rebutted his remark by saying “T3 aims to have a small but strong organization. We will reduce the organization where there is a need.”
Sad to see the company have to sell a lot of it’s shares as it seemed to be quite a strong force in the Korean market. Good luck to their new ownership though and hopefully they can do well in the future with whatever game projects they decide to take on. Also good luck to Kim with whatever he decides to do.
This was posted by Scapes over on the official forums today:
In anticipation of Patch 2.0 reaching Test Center, players can elect to have their characters copied over to the Test Center server from the Sydonai (EU) and Shulgoth (US) servers. All that is needed is information on which character(s) you want transfered, what account name they are under, and which server they are on. To lay this out in list format:
1) Character Name(s)
2) Account Name
3) Server
To prevent any confusion, this transfer will copy your selected character from the live server it is on, not remove them from the live server. If interested, please fill out the Test Center Transfer Form published on HellgateLondon.com. If you’re having difficulty accessing the form, you can email events@hellgatelondon.com with the above information. Do NOT send your password.
The deadline for submitting your transfer request is May 26th, 11:59 PM PST. Please be advised that another transfer like this will not occur until after Patch 2.0 has been released on the live servers.
Thanks and see you on Test Center!
EDIT: If you have already emailed your transfer request, you do not need to fill out the form (but you can if you wish to be thorough).
– Scapes
Hey fellow Hellgate Guru and Mythos Guru users. Sol Invictus, the website owner and administrator is currently performing a few changes to the way these sites will function.
What is basically happening, is that the Mythos Guru forums will be merged into the Hellgate Guru forums. This does not mean they will be as one big forum, but rather that Mythos Guru will be a sub forum of Hellgate Guru and it will be a matter of clicking one extra button to get to the familiar Mythos Guru forums.
What this means:
- There will still be two separate front pages for news
- The new posts button will likely show both forums, unless we split it up later
- Likely, the users over at Mythos Guru will be deleted from the user base so as not to have duplicates. Your posts will be transferred over, but you will have to re-register on Hellgate Guru to have an account. This may or may not happen though and we appologise for any issues it causes
- There will be one account used to login to both forums which will mean same avatars, signatures and post counts over both sites
- The forums URL will be linked to Hellgate Guru so to all the Mythos Guru users, bookmark our new forums here once this is done
We will do our best to try to make this process as easy as we can on you guys.
The official forums have been updated with news of Patch 2.0 and Patch 2.1 and while detailed patch notes are not provided, the general summary and some hints are there:
Discover that which awaits you in the Abyss, brave Hellgaters! The Abyss Chronicles (Patch 2) is rapidly taking shape and form and we’re ready to share some of its most exciting offerings with you. As Hellgate: London’s second major content update, the Abyss Chronicles boasts an impressive and lengthy list of new features including a major class rebalance, new environments, new enemies, new skills, new bosses, and new inventory slots . Then there’s the Consignment House, Attribute Respec Vendor, item linking, achievement rewards, and lots more. Suffice to say, the Abyss Chronicle is big. Very big.
Plans are already underway for the patches beyond the Abyss Chronicles. A small content summary for Patch 2.1 has been included as well. This update will open up an entirely new side to Hellgate: London in the form of ranked player versus player (PvP) gameplay. Originally slated for release with the Abyss Chronicles, the decision to release new PvP content as part of a supplemental patch was brought about by a desire to introduce five cohesive elements of PvP in a single update: ranking, matchmaking, rewards, achievements, and Capture The Flag. Together, these features will provide a robust PvP experience within the Hellgate: London universe.
We are hoping to get a Patch 2.0 build into Test Center next week, but we will see what happens.
The Test Center is being updated with patch 1.3b as posted on the forums:
Scapes is off to Japan! (I saw him wheeling his little bag around )
Here’s what’s goin on:
- Royal Mail has been updated for speedier service.
- Fixed mods being lost in Shared Stash.
- Fixed a bug where you could see a players attributes under certain conditions.
- The donation reward armor bouns (Ares’ Bane) applies bonuses to shields.
- Fixed donation text misspelling of Palladium
- Russian clients should no longer crash on certain donation announcements.
- Engineers now have a 12 second shared cooldown on calldown skills: Smackdown, Shock and Awe, Naplam Strike.
Update is scheduled for 1:30 PM PST/8:30 PM GMT. Outage should be less than an hour.
Here is some random “news” type updates from the official forums for those of you who can’t access them.
First is the news that MattN, the Summoner Team Advocate, has been hired by FSS as a Junior Game Designer. Congratulations to MattN on his new position, however it now means that the Summoner Team Advocate position is once again open.
The original Summoner Team Advocate, MattN, has been hired as a Junior Game Designer here at Flagship Studios. Congrats and welcome, Matt! As such, the Summoner Team Advocate position is open and available for new Summoner aficionados to apply for. Additionally, the Guardian Team Advocate position is also available.
What is the Team Advocate Program
The goal of our Team Advocate Program is to amass the feedback, knowledge, and play experience of our community to better ensure that every aspect of Hellgate: London is as enjoyable as possible.
What are Team Advocates
Team Advocates are players that volunteer their free time to assist the Hellgate: London development team by providing testing, compilations of player feedback, general feedback on proposed changes, and new ideas on ways to improve their area of the game. Team Advocates also have a secondary mission of helping to keep the player base informed on Flagship Studios’ positions on issues related to their topics. Click here to find out more about the Team Advocate Program.
– Scapes
Second are the new amounts that have been set for the donation targets.
After monitoring players’ donation habits over the course of a week, we’ve decided to decrease the target amount for the war drive (donation) to two million palladium. When this donation goal is met, a random buff is bestowed upon all players on the server at that time and lasts for 30 minutes. These buffs do not dissipate upon logout, allowing for 30 total minutes of buff time.
Donate well; donate often! Donations of 100,000 palladium or higher will result in public recognition!
– Scapes
Third is the news from the front page Underground Communique 5, most of which we already know about, but the news being that Scapes is going on a vacation to Japan. What makes this important however is that on the forums he has been hinting that he will have the lowdown of the Patch 2 notes updated on the forums before he leaves!
The current ETA for the Abyss Chronicles to reach the live servers is late May.
It will be on Test Center before that time.
– Scapes
That’s about it for now. So yay Patch 2 notes soon!
In an effort to prevent server instability, the Shulgoth (US) and Sydonai (EU) servers will be restarted nightly starting today. Sydonai (EU) will restart nightly at 8:00 PM PDT (3:00 AM GMT) and Shulgoth (US) will restart at 6:00 AM PDT (1:00 PM GMT).
These daily restarts will continue until further notice.
– Scapes
The range is about 30-60 minutes but we’ll see how long this first restart takes.
– Scapes
IGN’s website, RPG Vault, has started a new section recently titled “Focus” where they invite a few leading industry developers to talk about an issue. While there isn’t anything strictly Hellgate or Mythos related in the article, one of the developers invited is from Flagship Studios.
Today, the “focus” discussion was about RPGs and the genre that certain games belong to, as well as how RPGs have changed over the years. The two industry developers today were Steve Bauman, the associate producer at Gas Powered Games (which incidently is making Demigod which you can read about on DemigodGuru) as well as Max Schaefer, who is the Co-Founder and COO of Flagship Studios.
In 1993, Max Schaefer, brother Erich and friend David Brevik co-founded Condor, which became Blizzard North when acquired in 1996. He served as Vice President of Blizzard North and a Director of Blizzard before the same trio plus Bill Roper and David Williams started Flagship Studios in 2003. Some of his credits include Diablo, Diablo II, Diablo II: Lord of Destruction, Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos and Hellgate: London.
The article talks about Max’s previous games like Diablo as well as other games in the genre.
The very first test we did at the beginning of the Diablo project was to make a guy with a mace, a simple dungeon, and a skeleton. We set it up so if you clicked the on skeleton, the guy would walk over and whack him one. It was a “lightning in a bottle’ moment, and there was no question we were on to something big. Instead of instructing my character to hit something, I just did it with my mouse click. Everyone could enjoy this! It’s a theory we’ve continued with our current title, Mythos, an action RPG if there ever was one.
So for me, the term action RPG was invented to refer to those games that concentrate on the visceral, graphic imagery and action of the genre. The emphasis is more on battle than lore. All the trappings can be there - the leveling, the stats, the magic loot, the crafting, the questing… It’s just that there tends to be less emphasis on dialogue, story or role-playing.
[...]
However, take the example of the 500-pound gorilla in the room, World of Warcraft. People generally agree it’s a classic RPG, but in reality, it’s also an action RPG: playing it takes a good amount of dexterity, there’s a decent amount of action, and there’s more an overall context than there is a specific story. But if there’s any title that defines the RPG market, and influences how developers must approach the genre, it’s World of Warcraft.
While many have tried, it’s probably futile to try to be a WoW-killer. Not only did the game have great talent with a virtually unlimited budget and timeline, it has also had many years of well-subsidized development post-launch. No publisher in its right mind would commit the resources necessary to beat it at that game. It’s just way too risky.
Steve’s discussion can be seen on page two and talks about his views of the genre.
The whole discussion is a very interesting read and provides some insight on how the genre has evolved.
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
