One of the major reasons I picked up Hellgate: London was because I knew it wasn’t very good. <\/p>\n
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<\/em> PC games dwindles to almost nothing.<\/p>\n 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? <\/p>\n The answer came last Halloween when the game lurched onto store shelves and people discovered that it was surprisingly easy<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n 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<\/em> than the expansion pack<\/em> 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. <\/p>\n 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<\/em> make a brilliant game is something I’m eager to learn. I’ve installed it<\/a> 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. <\/p>\n 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. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[92],"class_list":["post-1693","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews","tag-hellgate"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1693","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1693"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1693\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1693"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1693"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1693"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}