It's such a romantic idea. The people who made Diablo 2 walked out of Blizzard, setup Flagship Studios and created Hellgate London. I was sold, and bought a copy, expecting the game to be as addictive as Diablo 2 was. I had a blast with Diablo 2 for 3 years, a solid investment with it's only expansion, Lord of Destruction.
I went to Funation at Ang Mo Kio hub and grabbed a copy of the collection's edition for $75 on Tuesday, and went straight home to give it a shot. The games is in full 3D, basically a fast pace action shooter with Diablo 2's skill tree. It was great for a while until the big ugly cracks started to show up.
As this blog always go for the ugly side of things, and with no exceptions made, this post will not be a promotion of the game, but paints a harsh review of reality for this game.
Installation was about 15mins from a DVD, taking 7GB of space. It didn't surprise me when the auto patch screen came right up when I started a multi-player game for the first time. It's kind of expected and didn't take too long to complete.
There were still many bugs in the game and it feels that it was rushed into the market for Halloween. I was expecting game balance issues but that was not the case. The very playability of the game is at stake because of it's numerous crucial bugs. Here is a list of what I have encountered so far.
- Memory leaks
The dread "Memory exhausted error". The coding is done pretty badly. The memory leak problem is so bad that no one can play without rebooting once every 3 hours. I haven't seen a commercial game having memory leak problem for a long time. Getting more memory is not the solution, it will just delay the onset of the problem. Sloppy ! - Lack of statistical numbers
The development team has left out the most important feature from Diablo 2 : The numbers. There is no way to find out how an item is different from another when there is only a miserable here and there. The modifers on the items are amazingly confusing and doesn't help in seperating the trash and gems. - Poor icons artwork
The choices for icons are very bad. Very often, you cannot tell the difference between different grades of a item and the icon itself makes little sense. I have to spend a lot of time trying to use the tooltip to see what the items really are. - Irritating NPCs
The NPCs made too much noise and there should be a way to shut them up. It''s fresh for the first time, but highly irritating after that. - Invisible party members, update problems to party bars and portraits, teleport to party location not working, party member does not show up on automap
As a MMO game, these are crucial features of the game that should be working perfectly from day one. It's a real eye sore here. The party member is either invisible to each other, or unable to teleport to each other. Half way through an instance, the party member's torso can just disappear, leaving a floating gun firing alongside with you. - Chat problems
The chat window itself is badly made. Switching channels is hard and I couldn't figure out how to filter chat channels. During peak hours, you can see a amazingly fast moving chat window flooded by WTB, WTS and WTT requests. This could only get worse if nothing is done about it. The chat window itself had low layer priority and that means whenever you open a menu, it gets hidden under it. Since it cannot be moved either, it became very hard to chat with people while opening the in-game menus like inventory, character, skills etc. Opening certain in-game menus also causes the chat box to go out of the screen. This is awful, a MMO game with serious in-game chat flaws. Come on, Guild Wars and World of Warcraft did way better than this. - Buddy list not working
A MMO game with a non-working buddy list ? There is no way to know if your good friend is online or not. Terrible. Back to MSN guys. - No Looking for Party/Quest mechanics
Another glaring problem. I am unable to get a team going to do quests quickly because I have to yell out in general chat before I can get a party started. Suddenly, World of Warcraft's LFG function and Diablo 2's Battle Net support looks so shiny. - Getting stuck in areas
It's advisable not to jump around at corners because it is likely to get you stuck. I got stuck once every 2 hours because I was jumping randomly at the edges of the instances I was clearing. Poor boundary boxes drawing at fault here. Since there is no /unstuck command, you have to quit the game and start from square one again. No more bunny hopping guys. - No in-game GM assistance
There is no GM to be found, no in-game ticketing system and so, you are on your own there. It's a wild wild west situation. Be it a game bug, or abuse by other players, there is no law enforcement available. This will eventually lead to the demise of the game if not tackled fast. As with any MMO game, if there is no enforcement guys around, the chat channels will be flooded with rubbish and people will leave the game for good because of the terrible bugs that cannot be submitted fast. As soon as the first duplication bug is exploited, all hell will break loose. The entire in-game economy will collapse and palladium will no crease to have any real value. - Need for identification for items
It's a legacy feature from Diablo 2 that should have been discarded. It's a waste of time to identify items and does not add value to the game at all. - Lack of support
There is virtually no support for the game. As I mention earlier, there is no in-game support at all. Asia support is done via hellgate.iahgames.com. You can log to the site, log a case but get no ticket number to trace your case. Not even a auto-email is sent until 15 hours later. The IAH forum is full of gripes from disgruntled players who alse experienced numerous game-stopping problems with the game. There are no replies from the administrators or developers at all. Smart move, because it's so buggy anyway. If there is support, it will be swamped completely and rendered useless. - Connection problem
You will get disconnected seemingly randomly or cannot connect to a multiplayer game. You just have to keep trying until you get through. The player authentication server is most likely at fault here. The game will tell you to check your firewall, anti-virus settings etc but it's simply a load of bullshit. - Free/Monthly subscription cannot be activated
The game comes a month of free online subscription that enables additional features such as bigger stash. However, the game still doesn't let us activate the subscription. Very disappointing. - Level cap
There was a level cap at level 22 until 6 Nov which made many players angry. This is the first time in gaming history that an unannounced level cap was imposed when the actual cap should be 50. - Lack of end-game content
There is no end-game content like in Guildwars of World of Warcraft. After going through the linear story, you are left with the option to PvP. And that means, to challenge another player without any rewards other than the satisfaction of killing another player and advancing through a ladder. This is another outdated "feature" from Diablo 2. The developers are expecting the gameplay to be the same as Diablo 2 where players just raid normal instances to no-end for items. That's too shallow. If I want to do PvP on a ladder, I will be better off in Guildwars or World of Warcraft. World of Warcraft features tough end-game instances which are so tough that it takes some time to overcome them. - And lastly, unable to load a multi-player game
The worst problem of them all. I am now completely unable to play a multi-player game. It simply hangs after it starts to load. Re-installations didn't work and my account was fine. So it's a game that I enjoyed for a few hours and that's it. I am not interested in single player games because it's worthless. If I am interested in single player game at all, I would have downloaded a pirated copy off Bittorrent.
This is not all, there were reports of people having other problems as well. Try and do a google search for "hellgate london problem" and you will see 1,930,000 results. Recruiting 10 million players to save London ? I seriously think that they need 10 million man hours to recode the game.
This game should not have be released at all. It belongs to early beta quality. Curse Electronic Arts for allowing this crap to be released at all. I smell corporate greediness in the air. The Flagship studio guys are better off learning a thing from their last company. Blizzard is famous for delaying a game until it is ready. Seldom do they patch a game for show stopping flaws. It has always been game balancing and more features. Guildwars was done properly and also made by people who left Blizzard.
The idea is good, but the implementation is bad. The gameplay is addictive despite it's serious flaws but not having the chance to play the game I have paid for is pissing me off. It will take a couple of hundreds of megabytes of patches to fix this still born game and I hope they can fix this fast.
Game score = 25 15% Very bad game
Hellgate london should have stayed as a beta. Too many show stopping bugs and terrible technical support. If you are considering buying the game, wait for another month and see if they have patched the game to a more playable level.
Latest Update :
On 10 Nov Sat, IAH they announced that all player data will be wiped on Monday ! This is probably the first in MMO history ! Everything will be lost to the nethers ! The character, the items ... everything ! Woah this one tops them all !
Apparently, Asia servers were not patched to patch 0, and they couldn't apply it without screwing all the players. This will go down in gaming history as the worst game ever released.
Update 12/1/08 : In the end, they managed to patch the game without wiping the character database. But to clean up the database, they added a "Elite" mode in a veiled attempt to force people to ditch their pre-patched characters
IAHGames and our partners have taken this event very seriously, and yesterday our CEO and Deputy CEO flew to Seoul to discuss the issue with the CEO of HanbitSoft. As a result of the meeting, HanbitSoft has graciously agreed support IAH Games' decision to provide free subscription time as compensation. HanbitSoft and Flagship Studios have also agreed to provide all further patches on par with US patching time lines, to ensure the SEA version of Hellgate: London stays up-to-date.
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