T w e n t y S i d e d

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″

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

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″

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

One of the major reasons I picked up Hellgate: London was because I knew it wasn’t very good.

This is a game crafted by the people who brought us Diablo II, a title which still captivates fans a decade after it more or less created a new genre of game and defied others to supplant it. A title with such fantastic inertia that it is still, right now, on store shelves, even as the shelf space for new PC games dwindles to almost nothing.

Eventually the Diablo II team left Blizzard, formed their own company, and set about to topple their own creation. Their vision resonated deeply with fans: Diablo, but first-person, with guns, fighting zombies, in a post-apocalyptic future. It’s Diablo meets Doom meets Fallout. This wasn’t just a game concept, this was a roadmap for world domination. Would anyone ever stop playing this game? Would there be any point to making more games after this one was released?

The answer came last Halloween when the game lurched onto store shelves and people discovered that it was surprisingly easy to stop playing. Somewhere in the transition the gameplay had lost all narcotic attributes. Somehow they had managed to re-create the game but stripped out the essential components which made Diablo II such a juggernaut. Since I was never able to pinpoint what made that game so good in the first place, I thought picking up Hellgate might help to draw those elements into sharp relief. If I could see what Diablo has that Hellgate doesn’t, then I might have a better understanding of where the magic came from.

So, when I saw Hellgate for $20 I figured it was time to find out. I feel compelled to point out that this recent A-list game is now selling for ten bucks cheaper than the expansion pack for its ten-year-old predecessor. Given the purportedly huge marketing push behind this game, this $20 price tag functions roughly like having the word FAIL on the box in large block letters.

So now I’m driven to play the game, not in pursuit of entertainment, but in a search for answers. The people who made Hellgate:London are talented, seasoned developers with a proven track record. How they managed to not make a brilliant game is something I’m eager to learn. I’ve installed it and dabbled a bit, but this weekend I’ll clock some real hours and try to see where they went wrong. I’m not so much playing the game as performing an autopsy on it.

I will say this: Whatever their shortcomings, the team at Flagship can take comfort in knowing that their cinematic craft remains undiminished. The opening cutscene is wonderfully done.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.