Flagship Studios is made up of ex Blizzard Diablo developers. The game will be a First Person RPG with some cool multiplayer options. Gamespot has an updated hands-on of the beta below.

http://www.gamespot.com/pc/rpg/hellgatelondon/news.html?sid=6180065&tag=topslot;title;2

Its Diablo 2 without Diablo...which is neither a good thing or a bad thing really.

It has the ability to be one of those games that you pick up while you're totally bored, but other then that its really nothing you haven't seen/done before (but from a different camera angle). The funniest thing about this game is all the Battle.Net Super Fanbois all over the net who think this game is THE NEXT BIG THING because "The guys who made this made Diablo!!!".

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How do you know that it's nothing that you haven't seen/done before? Besides, a good game is a good game, regardless of if it has been done before.

Mindlessly slaughtering near endless waves of monster with swords and or guns? I'm fairly sure I've done that quite a few times in more then a few games before. I was merely pointing out that the core gameplay mechanic isn't anything new or revolutionary, I didn't say that I thought that the game sucked. I just wouldn't, personally, be banking on it being all that the fanbois think that its going to be.

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it looks like a future version of diablo in first person. lol

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"Creating Havoc and Pie Since 2001!"
My Website: http://www.anthonyhays.com
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/cakvala

Comparing it to Diablo 2 is the most wrong comparison anybody could ever make.

Unless content changes drastically after level 22, I don't see this holding my attention for very long. It has horrible ballancing issues and almost worse itemization than World of Warcraft.

The item upgrade system seems neat at first, but breaks the game from level 1. All you need do is find a type of weapon you like, such as a gun with a flame cone or something with a spread/splash on it, get your hands on a decent green version and upgrade it to stupid overpowering levels that outclass boss drop legendaries.

Some class talents seem useless altogether. I found myself ignoring 80% of the talents of a marksman.

The pay to play part of the game will have to be something spectacular. Else people will just subscribe one month, play through everything, wait a few months till they dump content out and sub up again for a month. I see no long term loyalty.

What stage of beta is it in ? Or is it coming out soon?

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"Creating Havoc and Pie Since 2001!"
My Website: http://www.anthonyhays.com
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/cakvala

Comes out on halloween.

Was thinking about this game too....so what's your verdict Givin? worth it or no

I liked it, but I wish I could cancel my preorder at this point.

It's out now.. anyone playing it? Thoughts?

I did end up canceling it after all.

It will be 20 bucks soon.

I played the beta...the NDA was still in effect at the end of beta, and I never got notification it lifted prior to release. That's generally a bad sign.

The game was very very meh. I wouldn't recommend.

Graphics: Pretty, gorgeous even...but what's not?

Classes: Pet classes were stupidly overpowered. YOU WANNA SUMMON DEMONS? Here summon half a dozen. They'll tank, heal, dps...hell I just followed and looted. Engineers are also a pet class with slightly weaker pets but your dps is higher to compensate AND you have pets that slow the mobs coming at you so you can pick them off before they ever come at you.

Basically after you play a summoner you don't wanna play anything else. Evoker sucked (caster). Guardian (tank) was also rather OP, but more button mashing, since you didn't have pets to do everything for you.

Zones: All the same. At first the level of detail and design are amazing. Then it becomes more of the same, over and over and over again. I don't know how you have so much great art and make the British Museum sad and boring, but they managed it. Apparently the Museum consists of lots of pots, display cases with vague sameness under it, and crates LOTS OF CRATES! And every big room has about 2 dozen pots you can break for rupees. I mean...whatever they use for money.

Then when you go to the hell-land the first time you're like HOLY FUCKING SHIT. Then the 2nd time you're like, 'Wait, isn't this the exact same tier I was on, what about that shit in the distance that looks cool, is hell simply identical floating platforms....forever?

Yes. Yes it is.

If it was between this and say...the original Diablo...then sure this might win. But this isn't 1997 or whenever Diablo was released. This is a poor mishmash of a Diablo concept, with the 3D MMO environment...without the freeplay.

No thank you.

Additionally the quests were the stupidest shit I've ever seen. For the love of whatever fucking gods you believe in, PLEASE HIRE WRITERS. You can chain them up and pay them poorly...I swear. But you must hire them. Yes, many in the past used multi-skilled people to write, but those people were empassioned about it, or were the originators of the concept. This shit looked like it was written by a 7th grader who was ripping off whatever cliches they could...and were doing badly at it because they're only 12 years old.

It was painful. I found myself hating the quest givers and slamming keys to ignore the text because I didn't want to read their insipid bullshit. Also another clue it was written by that 12 year old boy, all the women were utterly horrible. And the quest givers around the 3rd tier started jumping around like meth addicts. I'm not kidding, they had this strange little emote jerky dance that was eerily similar to someone after a 2 week meth bender.

Yeah, I'll pass.

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This is funny in light of the fact that people suggested Blizzard lost all of its talent when Bill Roper and Co. left for this studio.

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Kuwen Furyblades
Hunter of Memento Reejeryn
Champion of Faydark

They did.

They now work for NCSoft fixing their fuckups.

What he said. Roper is still a god. Go look at everyone who had their hands in this dirty little pie. I have zero insider information here, other than someone who worked down the street from them and he and others at their gaming company were in rockstar awe of Roper. Which tells me jack and shit about where the clusterfuck was. I don't know whether it was lack of money, a too fast push onto the street, too many chiefs, a salvage project...what.

It has a lot of great elements to it that hint at 'might have beens'.

Here I'll write out a longer experience of my beta. So I get the invite, because I did not buy this game. I'm a game whore and I'll play it for free because I'm curious and because it will give me something to write about maybe.

I then proceed to download what might just be the largest beta files ever. I'm not sure if Vanguard had more files or not, but this was pretty fucking big. So then I log in. As the title leads one to guess, it takes place in London England. And no, that's not the Tardis on the character screen, one could only wish. (Though there's references in the very beginning to 'The Doctor'...it's not really 'The Doctor' just a subtle cocktease, sort of like finding out the hot chick is really a pre-op trannie).

I pick evoker because it's essentially a spell caster and leap right in. Literally. The tutorial is a pre-level which basically tells you how to use your shit, they're pretty stock, and this one does well. No complaints. Except...where the fuck am I, why is London completely destroyed, who the fuck are these religious whackos fighting...demons and zombies you say?

You're thrust into this interesting and dynamic world with absolutely no fucking information on it. And those that follow in speaking to you...tell you jack shit all. I am not a moron, and here's what I pieced together. This is either an alternate reality London, or London of the future. Apparently someone broke the fourth wall to hell, and now we have demons. And what battles demons is religion I guess because these fuckers call themselves by religious-y names. Except that you can play a summoner, who brings demons into this world under your control. You'd think that would get you tied to a stake and lit up like Lindsey Lohan at a bar...but no. It's okay that you summon demons because...well it is.

You met a rotten little kid who has you running quests who renames himself Wart after King Arthur. Yay. And an old man who doesn't tell you much but has shit for you to do too. You are rewarded with crappy armor and no real information. Yay. Then you do more shit to open a portal so you can advance to the next level of crappy sameness. Oh and you're in a tube station. How very British!

You can modify the crap out of your armor. Gem slotting? Ha! That shit is so 20th century. No you can actually pay money to upgrade your gear and get bonuses put on them. Then you can use materials and upgrade your gear as well. So once you find some nice gear with a really overpowered bonus...say close to 10% bonus to all pet damage (SO FUCKING OP) then you simply upgrade the shit out of it...and it remains better than legendary gear which drops. Unbalancing? Well...yes.

Grouping consists of avoiding like hell these random party portals that open where people attempt to shangi-hai you into their party. At least I think that's what it was.

Because you see, I could never get the chat function to work. Ever. Never. Hopefully it's working at launch. I didn't really regard this as too problematic though because looking around at the people playing and their chosen names...I didn't want to talk to them. I had enough battle.net to last a lifetime.

I tried out the classes as mentioned above. Not much to add. I was extremely disappointed at the demonic world sameness given that was kinda implied to be the fucking point of the game. I ended up ultimately at the end of a long quest chain being transported to some being's ...library and told cryptic shit about the plot which apparently involved 'wait and see'.

Oh, and when you didn't have quests with NPCs sometimes (if they ever talked to you at some time they would have this) they'd have " above them. Quote marks. You'd click on it and it would give you character information about them.

This was terrible because it basically told you everything about the character...all the flavor and details...that one NORMALLY WOULD PICK UP IN CONVERSATION. Do you really need to outright fucking tell me that the whackjob religious dude is a whackjob religious dude? Apparently so. Additionally the NPCs would overstate (and repeat) the obvious in horrible cliches.

Example: In the tutorial, you get a data thingy off this dying dude. And you take it to the scary religious/military dude. Then he explains to you that you have to find this 'Doctor'...and pretty much implies it's THE most important fucking thing. Ever.

And he's sending you...because...

well then he goes into this rambling, disjointed, horribly written monologue about how he's taking a chance on you rookie...and you better prove him right or it's his ass...but of course he believes in you or he wouldn't send you...but it's unfair he's sending you and he knows it...but life isn't fair and you need to pony up cowboy...

0_o

This would be amusing if it were intentional. If you got the feeling that this guy was simply a walking rambling movie quotes guy. Unfortunately he sounds like all the other quest NPCs so it's about as amusing as a mentally ill person peeing themselves as they bat away the invisible voices. Awkward and horrible.

This game sucked so much I didn't even want to play it for free. I thought, "I could be doing daily quests in World of Warcraft and making gold if I wanted to do something tedious".

So I logged out forever. The End.

I'll post some screenshots, they are pretty.

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I lied there will be no screenshots because I went to go pull them, and they're not there. Oh well. You'd have just seen the fucked up museum, a cool hellgate, the floating hell of sameness...and my character which looked really hot because I found the Wonderbra of Demonic Bonus Damage.

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I didn't for a second suggest that Bill Roper wasn't good at what he does, but he's hardly the 'iWin' button people made him out to be. The 'essence' of Blizzard is compromised of more than just a handful of individuals.

And if they did in fact lose all their talent to NCSoft as you suggest, why are they still so successful?

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Kuwen Furyblades
Hunter of Memento Reejeryn
Champion of Faydark

Because they were the first in the gene to realize if they cater to the LCD, they will make more money.

It's not a hard concept. Appeal to more people, get more cash. Simple math. Alienate your minority, include the majority.

Abolishment of the old PvP system to where there is no competition, only time. No longer do you have to worry about some level 59 who pvps 26 hours a day dumping you out of getting High Warlord next week. 10 games, get points. Repeat as often as desired.

The welfare epic machine. Arena makes it possible for anyone to acquire raid worthy gear without doing raids, with the added benefit that you control how the loot comes. No more praying to god a weapon drops instead of a rotting healing item. Again the only commitment is a menial time investment.

Slowly tuning back encounters that were previously considered assrape. Kael comes to mind for 2.3 as the most noteworthy. Gruul if you want a blast from the past.

Short time investment, high loot reward raid area trend. Zul'Amon will be semi difficult, but on a level where most casuals can make ground there.

Another issue is, it is not hard to replace bodies on a dev team at all. The market is saturated with them. What they lost was experienced devs. And it is evident if you compare Blackwing Lair past Vael to Naxx. All they did was go to ye ole stack o apps and select a handfull to replace the ones that walked to finish up the current batch of projects. Then they stuck them on new hotness to train them up. Thousands of people are more than willing to relocate to be a part of their team, just to get a shot to work on a WoW project. All it took was time to train them, and not much at that when all they do was pass the daily quota clipboard around with the weekly requirements on it to check off.

I picked up this game shortly after it was released. There were some long time posters from the Graffe boards who got into beta, said it had some interesting stuff. I had gotten burnt out on WoW so I figured it was time to try something else. Installed the game and got it patched up, and spent the next few days dicking around in single player mode checking out the skill trees and learning the mechanics of the game. I picked a blademaster as my first char, and did the same when I decided to give the multiplayer aspect a shot. On normal mode (which will take you from 1-30ish. You can probably get up to 35, but mob levels cap out at like 30.) blademasters tore through shit. I could wade through things around my level and walk away nearly untouched. Around the end of the story though, I definately noticed I was getting my ass handed to me a lot more, mainly because a lot of my equipment was outdated, and it seemed all the armor that would drop was either guardian type which does shit for me, or order type which is supposed to be a middleground between pure dps and pure tank.

The levels seem to go by pretty fast. Its not hard to level, and the normal mode is probably the better balanced of the difficulties that I've seen. I stayed around the level of the areas I'd move on to from just progressing through the story, without hardly ever going back through certain areas, except towards the end when I was trying to get some of my gimp gear replaced. I'm going to partially agree with Tarot on the npc dialogue stuff. It wasnt anything spectacular, and there were a lot of pop culture references in there, but its really no different than what Blizzard did with WoW giving npcs names that resemble figures in pop culture, and adding well known lines from movies/TV shows into their text. As for that whole "everyone seems batshit insane" complaint. Well, come on, they've been living in the london underground for 10+ years and the majority of humanity has been wiped out. As far as the story goes, the only thing that kind of irked me was it was built up pretty well, and the ending (while the video was neat) feels like an easy cop out to give you a reason to keep playing.

Pros -

The game looks damn nice, and the armor looks pretty cool too. Certain armor pieces have a tendancy to set the color for your entire set so you dont look like some hodge-podge mashup of colored armor. The weapons have some nice details on them, and the mod system is decently done.

Playing online is free, and they've fixed a bunch of the stability issues on their servers since launch. Theres still a few problems that pop up here and there, but its nowhere near as bad as it used to be.

Cons -

The point distribution system is sort of a pain to master. You get 5 points per level to distribute between your accuracy, strength, stamina, and willpower. I'm making this argument from the point of view of a blademaster. We need higher strength to wear better armor. It feels like the strength cost on higher level armors doesnt scale very well. I've been dumping the majority of points per level into strength and the cost from existing gear is still keeping very close to the max. Stamina is also a requirement on some pieces of gear, as well as a source of hitpoints. More willpower means I can equip better swords and use better mods. Givin's viewpoint on the item upgrade system is valid. I've found that rare weapons modded and fully upgraded are still just as good if not in some cases better than legendaries and they dont tax your wear requirements nearly as much.

The talent trees are ok, but it does feel like theres a lot of improvement that can be done to make certain skills more viable. Also, theres no respec in the game currently. The testers have been pushing for it since alpha and the devs wont seem to budge on it. Respecing would add a lot to the whole replayability factor, because no one really wants to sit there and level up a shitton of characters to test out different talents to see if they're worth it.

The repetative areas can get a little old. I agree, the British museum could use a little bit of a rework. The fight in the courtyard of the Tower of London was pretty cool, and getting to cut through the hordes of demons in the dried up river Thames was interesting. However, they really need to add some new scenery types soon, because even though most non story sections are randomly generated, theres only a few templates for the over and underground areas.

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Machival - Night Watch - Moonrunner
Krobelus - Night Watch - Moonrunner

It's interesting to read about this game.

I recently reinstalled Diablo 2, and have wondered why Blizzard had yet to release another sequel in the 7 or so years it's been since releasing their signature title was released.

I'm enjoying the game very much but the 640x480 graphics are painful, heh.

I imagine Hellgate:London isn't the clickfest that D2 is though, right?

Blizzard hasn't released a new diablo because they fired all of blizzard north, who were the guys who developed diablo.

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World of Warcraft: Kallaystra, Gweila, Steakumn, Tarathia [ Feathermoon/Horde ]

Fired or they left? Source?

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Kuwen Furyblades
Hunter of Memento Reejeryn
Champion of Faydark

Google yields similar results.



Maybe check http://www.flagshipstudios.com/

That would be moronic if they did fire them.

Nothing like biting the hand that feeds you...

Welcome to gaming, Blizzard is just as capable of doing stupid shit as anyone else.

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Marauder Harabakc Goat

Well if Hellgate London is any sign of the direction they were heading in, I say kudos to Blizz for firing them. If it is any indicator, it's the smartest move Blizzard has ever made.

Mythos by Flagship is a lot more fun. I have been playing the shit out of the beta.

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"Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit upon his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats." -Henry Louis Mencken
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VEGETARIAN -Noun (vej-i-tair-ee-uhn): Ancient tribal slang for the village idiot who can't hunt, fish or ride.