You know, I may as well give my final skewering now. I have been playing this game for 5 months, longer than reviewers, longer than gamers. I may not be at the last boss of the final game, but I've played more than enough to see what's changed and know what's changed in the content I haven't gotten to in final yet.
If tomorrow, Flagship released a patch that fixed all technical flaws, revamped the UI and made it absolutely perfect and beyond criticism, if they made the multiplayer flawless and not confusing, if they even managed to make the pay structure fair and fitting, with premium, quality monthly content, this game would still struggle to earn a 5 out of ten. You see, the biggest problem with the game, once all the "superficial" flaws are taken off the table. . .is that it is simply not fun to play.
Where to start? Everyone knows Diablo 2. Even a short time with Hellgate will tell the educated gamer that Diablo 2 wasn't an inspiration for this game, a starting point. It was the end point, the goal. Flagship wasn't thinking about taking Diablo 2, a 7 year old game, and modernizing it. They were thinking of taking Diablo 2, changing the setting, and rereleasing a very basic copy of it in 3d. Maybe it's a good thing they kept their ambitions so low, since the game is a failure on every conceivable front.
What's the problem with that, you say? Diablo 2 is beloved, still played even today, despite it being low resolution and not widescreen. Ignoring the technical problems, again, Hellgate seems to think a basic copy is good enough, forgetting that part of the reason Diablo 2 is so beloved is that it was the second game in that format that most people have played, and that there is a strong nostalgia factor. In short, what made Diablo 2 so great in 2000 are things that have either easily been copied and improved upon (the gameplay and loot), or things that can't be readily improved upon (the nostalgia, possibly the inspired setting). The things Flagship have copied, in short, do not float so well in 2007. Or at least they don't float for a big budget, blockbuster game. Even Mythos, Hellgate's cooler little brother, knows that it will never shoot the moon. It's happiest to be a little cult phenomenon; it knows it will never ber James Dean.
There's more that's beyond patching. The setting at first sounds like it has good elements. Post-apocalyptic? Always cool with the kids. Knights and magic? More Diablo 2 leaking in. Subways and sewers? They really lend themselves to procedurally generated content, and save texture memory, don't they? And advertising! There are posters and billboards all over the serwers, no doubt Flagship got itself some of its many sponsors by singing the praises of potential in-game advertising. It's so obvious it's sickening; they'd charge you money to advertise to you. Er, that's not the gameplay problem here. The gameplay problem comes to the sewers and procedurally generated content. Within a few hours, you have seen every hallway and room type. We've played Dark Cloud 2, we know how repetetive this stuff gets in 3d. It floated in Diablo 2, in 2d, but making it in 3 dimensions highlights how repetetive procedurally generated content of today is. The trash, garbage, dumpsters, monsters, water and steam, and more, is all rendered brilliantly and beautifully, and really, there's a lot of it--it's not like you see the same pile of garbage every room--but even two differently modeled piles of garbage look like garbage to your average non-hobo with the the 1000+ dollar machine required to play this game. Room types? Well, there appear to be maybe 2 dozen types total. And that sounds generous going by my experience.
There are other issues with the envronment. Some of this can be patched, but looking at MMOs like WoW, I think it's unlikely (WoW was shockingly one of the other key inspirations here, along with Guild Wars). Clipping is an issue, and even worse, clipping behavior is wildly inconsistent. If you see a metal guardrail barrier, there's a solid chance you can walk right through it, even if that means falling onto the ground below into a pile of monsters. It makes no sense. Any rubble on the ground, you walk right through. It would not have taken much effort to make the player walk over it. That one's a little complaint, but that would have taken extremely little effort to implement, and it shits on immersion. There is a reason for this clipping wackiness. I said I wouldn't pick on the glitches, but I think this one will not be fixed because it will take some legitimately heavy testing: clipping is a "feature;" it keeps players from getting stuck in the environment. What I mentioned before, in my earlier post, is endemic to the entire game. In less than a day of playing, I got stuck in the environment 3 times, forcing logout in order to play again.
What else? Flagship would have you believe that they plan on adding NEW CLASSES that will rectify this, but the skill trees are still a joke. One per class, with maybe a third of the skills being useful. Since there is no repeccing at this time (I guarantee it will show up as a pay for feature in a few months), you have to make a brand new character if you want to explore the features you didn't get through in your first terrible playthrough. Fortunately, most of the skills you didn't get to are probably about as exciting as picking between butter and margarine on the morning's english muffin. But, but the NEW CLASSES you say? You're going to have to pay to play as them. So much fun paying a monthly fee to fix the shitty game design decisions of Flagship. This is not me taking a guess; you will have to pay to fix this flaw.
I guess I should briefly touch on why the gameplay is deficient, too, in comparison to Diablo 2. The game is bone easy, first of all. You can't change the difficulty level your first time through, either. You will NOT DIE while soloing this game. You will ESPECIALLY NOT DIE if you are playing as a riflemen or anyone that uses a sword as their primary. Heck, most enemies, even bosses, are generally dead before they even get to attack you. This is not an "I'm a good gamer" complaint, either. I'm not. The game is FUCKING EASY, and you have to play through it at base difficulty before you get to the more difficult levels. This game, you won't WANT to play through it more than once. The existing classes aren't very unique. They have gone to pains to make the classes generally non-traditional, and they have sort of succeeded, but this is exactly why the skill trees suck. The lack of clear identities means the game designers themselves were sort of at a loss with these classes. Along the lines of the clipping complaint, hit detection is also laughable. I mean, it is an RPG and all, but there's a large amount of swinging or shooting, being within 5 feet of something, and still having it register as a hit, in SP and multiplayer. That's dumb. We have the technology to make games not like this.
Also, once you stop paying, you lose all pay benefits. There was discussion of this before, but it is confirmed. You can't just wait a few months, pay for one month of premium, and get all the good stuff you missed permanently. You lose all premium content, including items, when you stop paying. Before the character number increase, when quitting premium, you had to pick your 3 favorite characters when going to free, all others were erased. Not put on hold; ERASED.
Good elements? The crafting and enchantment system is really good. A solid progression from WoW, Diablo 2, and Guild Wars. Even it's not perfect; you rarely know what sort of benefit you will get in the process of upgrading. I guess that's part of the fun, but even post-upgrade, unless you remember and write down the myriad of numbers associated with each item, you won't know exactly what benefit you got from the enchantment. The game doesn't tell you, and since most enchantments are kind of small, not earth shattering things, you are often left guessing how much better the hours and hours of searching for components left your item.
I've gone on for too long here, but I think I have painted a more accurate picture on why Hellgate sucks than any review has. Tom Chick, I am glad you took the game to task, but you really didn't even try to explain why the game is terrible in its heart. It's not just the skin that is zombie-rotten here. This game is a terrible, horrible bomb in every sense of the word, and Flagship can try for months and months to make it better, but most of these complaints are out of scope for a monthly update. At most, it would take a solid, work on it for a year or more, expansion pack to put this humpty dumpty together, but we know that is not on the books. It would also have to be a good expansion pack.
So, even if the patches are great, DO NOT BUY THIS GAME. It is a bomba in every, every sense of the word.
