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″
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.
Dear Planet Earth,
You owe me a new wireless router and a network interface card.
Do be more careful with the lightning bolts in the future. I don’t really see a need for such dramatics.
Your humble inhabitant,
Shamus
P.S. Lose the humidity. It sucks.
It was a really freaky storm. Most of the day was sunny, with smothering humidity. We heard the low rumbles in the distance as the storm went through its warmups. It was still during work hours and the storm sounded a ways off, so I didn’t worry about it. I usually power down during really bad storms, but this didn’t sound like much so I ignored it and kept working.
Then there was a single devastating crack. I powered everything down. There was twenty minutes of rain, and then it all cleared up again. Ignoring the rumblings in the distance, that single lightning bolt was the only one. But it sounded close.
When I brought the power back on I discovered that my wireless router was screwed up, as well as the built-in network card in my computer. The computers themselves are behind multiple surge protectors, but (duh) the router itself was plugged in directly to the wall. The lightning found and exploited that weakness in my defenses.
This is annoying, but I count myself very lucky. The odds of getting struck by lightning are low, but once it happens the odds that it will only obliterate part of a computer are even lower. This network card is built into the motherboard, which means a flood of untamed energy came in and then stopped once it had destroyed the cheapest and most easily replaceable integrated component. It took me longer to isolate the problem than it did to swap in a network card from another machine.
The spike or surge or whatever it was also blew a circuit breaker for the kitchen, which won’t reset.
Strange thing to have happen.
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