At the outset of this series I wanted to know why Diablo II was digital crack, and HGL – a product of the same group of people – was a chore.
An addictive game is usually a collection of smaller activities, goals, or meta-games for the player to pursue. In an RPG we might have things like:
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Hellgate: London
Final Thoughts”
A friend loaned me his Guild Wars account. (And now that I think of it, maybe this violates the TOS. In which case I purchased a completely new Guild Wars account and I have no friends.)
I’ll be trying it out tonight. I do have to be very careful with these games. I don’t talk about it here much, but aside from my day job and the hours I spend writing the endlessly spooling miles of text on this site, I’m also a Dad and I have to make sure I do Dad stuff regularly so my kids don’t grow up while I’m not looking.
So, this will be my first real MMO since about 2001. We’ll see how it goes.
UPDATE: Not everyone with “Shamus” in their name is me, but everyone that’s me has “Shamus” in their name.
This game looks fantastic. It’s a good thing, since I’m wandering around, lost and confused, but greatly enjoying the scenery.
You can click on someone’s name to whisper to them. This game REALLY needs to make it just as easy to mute people. It only takes a few idiots to really make a hash of the chat window.
Hellgate week plods ever onward. This is the last of these grim reviews. This has not been a pleasant experience, cataloging this long list of failures. I feel like a vulture that perches at the foot of your deathbed and then wearies you with an extended account of everything you did wrong in life. This is a joyless task, although I do have a purpose in mind.
Tomorrow I’ll have something more positive about the game.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Hellgate:London
Autopsy, Part 4″
This post focuses on some of the details of the crafting system, which is largely undocumented. What I have here is just my guesswork on the matter. I’m sure there are inaccuracies in it. Also note that I’ve only played the “marksman” class, so I don’t know how things are for the other classes in the game.
When describing the addictive pull of Diablo II, one person said, “You keep playing because you can’t shake this feeling that there just has to be a better sword out there, somewhere.” Killing monsters in search of loot gives much the same thrill people get from those scratch-off lottery tickets, or slot machines: The next one might be a winner. Each monster is a Pià±ata, just waiting for you to knock him open and see what goodies he has, and there’s always a chance you might hit the jackpot and get something really good.
Except, in this game the crafting system makes the search for loot largely irrelevant. There are level restrictions on items. To use a weapon of awesomeness factor X you must be at least level Y. If your weapon is under this limit, you can take it over to the nano forge and upgrade it. (I’m pretty sure it won’t let you upgrade the weapon if doing so would make the weapon unusable for you.) So, at any time you can be reasonably sure that you’ve got nearly the best weapon you’re allowed to wield.
The whole “there’s got to be a better sword”, thing never enters into it, because if you did find something better, you probably wouldn’t be allowed to equip it.
Suggestion: It was a bold move to introduce a crafting / upgrading system that negates the need for treasure hunting – which was the biggest draw for Diablo II over the years. It was either bold, or foolish. The crafting and upgrading had better be really compelling if they’re going to supplant treasure hunting as the focus of the game. Speaking of which…
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Hellgate:London
Autopsy, Part 3″
In the comments on yesterday’s post on Hellgate, Gahaz posted a link to this, which is a post from one of the last remaining programmers working on Hellgate. It is, as others have said, a depressing read.
The worst part is that he’s obviously painfully aware of the problems with Hellgate, but powerless to fix them. There would be hope for the project if it were still fully staffed, and they just needed a nudge from the fans to focus their efforts in the right place. But as it stands, it looks like the project is now on a skeleton crew and everyone else has jumped to other projects. They say that success has a thousand fathers, and failure is an orphan. That seems to be the case here.
It’s a shame because the more I look at things, the more it looks like Hellgate could have gone on to have some degree of success. People like the idea. They like the people behind it. They want to love the game. Lots of MMO games (which Hellgate sort of is) had rough releases and went on to fix the bugs and do well in the end. Hellgate isn’t getting that chance. When the game failed to become a cash cow, the staff was cut and the thing has been left to limp along until it drops dead.
It has to be rough for the people that left. They originally made an incredibly successful game. (Diablo II) Then their company (Blizzard) was bought out. I’ve never learned why, but something about the buyout made them unhappy enough to jump ship and form their own company. They started with a big vision, and worked away at it until they went broke. They were then forced to sell all of their efforts so far to EA in order to secure the backing to finish the thing. They avoided working for Vivendi Games, but in the end wound up working for a corporate monolith anyway, and this time it owned five years of their work. The game was released before it was ready – either because they were too slow or EA was too impatient, I’m not going to judge that one – and earned a quiet “meh” from fans. The staff was cut, many quit, and the dream ended.
I’m going to post the rest of my series of Hellgate, although it feels like beating a dead horse now.
In my initial post I praised Flagship for the fantastic intro movie. I was disappointed when I found out later that the movie was outsourced. It’s the most polished and well-executed part of the game, and Flagship Studios didn’t have anything to do with it.
Still, the movie is a good introduction to what seems like an interesting world, and by the time the movie ended I was eager to create a new character and dive into the world of Hellgate.
Third-person looter games are not known for their stories. Most players experienced the plot of Diablo II once, and on their numerous subsequent playthroughs they just clicked past the dialogs and hurried on to the looting and leveling. The same probably goes for games like World of Warcraft. But the story is as much a part of the world as the scenery and music. You couldn’t just cull the entire Diablo plot and backstory without damaging the game. Even when players are hanging around town, swapping items and griping about lag, that story layer is still there underneath everything, lending a certain credibility and purpose to the gameworld. Players want to inhabit an interesting story, even when they aren’t immersed or in character.
But the world of Hellgate is a joke. Literally. The missions you perform and the characters you meet and the dialog you read are all played for laughs. The game is constantly mocking itself, refusing to let the player take it seriously for a minute. It (mostly) doesn’t work as comedy because we don’t know the gameworld yet. It’s like watching Spaceballs before Star Wars, or reading DM of the Rings without knowing anything about Lord of the Rings.
What we have is a game with a dark and thrilling intro movie, which leads the player to where they must face waves of screaming demons and zombies in a ruined world. But every NPC you meet treats the whole thing with contempt, shrugging off the potential for edgy drama in favor of making lame jokes and inappropriate pop-culture references.
Here is a video they’ve put out in preparation for the release of the next patch.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Hellgate:London
Autopsy Part 2″
I’m going to do the inverse of my normal review process: I’m going to talk at [excruciating] length about the problems and failures within the game, but I’ll have one post at the end where I talk about what works. This is not because the game is horrible. It’s not, really. I’ve certainly paid more for worse. I’m just focusing on this game because of the contrast between what this team has accomplished in the past and what they achieved this time around.
As much as I despise the lumbering engine of idiocy that is EA, I don’t think it’s fair to lay blame for this mess at their feet and walk away. I’d love for another chance to excoriate my favorite villains, but this game was in the oven for five years. EA came in and dumped a bunch of money into the thing, without which it never would have seen the light of day. Certainly pushing a game out before it’s ready is a crime EA has perpetrated without shame in the past, but I don’t think we can charge them with impatience this time around. Particularly since, eight months after release, the thing is still far short of “baked to perfection”.
But even if we want to charge EA with the crime of short-sighted premature launching, that doesn’t excuse most of the problems I see with the game. There are fundamental mistakes in the design of this thing that go beyond a simple lack of testing and debugging. I still think the folks at Flagship Studios are a talented bunch, but they made some mistakes here that teach us a bit about what things must be like inside the gruesome sausage factory we call the videogame industry.
What we have is a group of people with proven talent and an obvious love for the games they make who nevertheless fell far short of their potential. I’m going to have a longer-than-usual series of longer-than-usual posts where I try and sort this out. People say they like my in-depth analysis? We’ll just see about that. My blatherings on this game are likely to wear out the pixels on your monitor.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Hellgate:London:
Autopsy Part 1″
An ongoing series where I work on making a 2D action game from scratch.
Both a celebration and an evisceration of tabletop roleplaying games, by twisting the Lord of the Rings films into a D&D game.
A programming project where I set out to make a Minecraft-style world so I can experiment with Octree data.
Why Google sucks, and what made me switch to crowdfunding for this site.
Some advice to game developers on how to stop ruining good stories with bad cutscenes.
Valve still hasn't admitted it, but the Half-Life franchise is dead. So what made these games so popular anyway?
Raytracing is coming. Slowly. Eventually. What is it and what will it mean for game development?
No, brutal, soul-sucking, marriage-destroying crunch mode in game development isn't a privilege or an opportunity. It's idiocy.
Deus Ex Mankind Divided was a clumsy, tone-deaf allegory that thought it was clever, and it managed to annoy people of all political stripes.
Would you have survived in the middle ages?
T w e n t y S i d e d
