Does Hellgate:London get better?

Cafe Society
1

I played trhe Hellgate: London demo and it kinda was OK. No very good or bad. It’s primary selling point seemsot be that it’s exactlt like Diablo 2 except that it’s 3D.

I also takes place in a futuristic London invaded by demon hordes with men walking around in power armor with guns, magic spells, and swords, instead of taking place in a fantasy setting with men walking around in magic armor with bows, magic spells, and swords.

I liked the character generater, which was basically pick a class and choose what you look like. However, I had a hard time with the interface and the skills. There was a lot of trial and error trying to figure out how to how use the skills, since they often had no visible effect.

For example: the blademaster’s Surges I had to play around with for a long while before I figured out what to do with them. It’s exactly like a normal attack, with a small ring of glow to your character. But it’s hard to see and not very clear.

Other example: The marksman’s grenade attack was almost invisible against the action running around on-screen. There’s little to tell you where it went or if it hit, since it only seems to have any graphical effect on nearby enemies, not a big bang itself.

Final example: The health and mana bars are much smaller than in Diablo2. It’s a lot harder to watch out of the corner of your eye, and I often found myself on the brink of death.

Fighting monsters was fun, though I had a very hard time learning the timing of things with the blademaster. Monsters kept hitting me and I didn’t know why. Eventually, I figured out the following:

  1. Pressing forward while attacking makes the attack into a long rushing swing, which is very awkward.
  2. It’s hard to see whether or not you hit many enemies, because they’re crawling on the ground and just sort of die sometimes when you wave your sword over them.
  3. Even with just one enemy, it’s hard to see the little lifebar go down.
  4. The hit detection is terrible. Monsters would start the swing, I would dodge back, they’d miss by a country mile and I’d still get hit.
  5. I think zombies had some toxic goo they released when the died, but I wasn’t sure since it was hard to seperate from the blood spray.

I tried the Marksman next and had a much better time. The only trouble was that the guns tended to be ridiculously inaccurate (but get better with more Agility). The infinite ammo made up for it. Fighting bosses was much more fun with the marksman’s retreat, grenade, and shoot tactic than the Blademaster’s “run up and get slapped around like an Irish housewife” method. I definitely liked the out-of-doors areas better than the tunnels and sewers, but I was a little worried that everything was pretty much on rails. You could do or not do some side zones, but it was all streets with no cross-streets. You went forward, killed enemies, as left. No open areas or arenas.

So, I’m a little leary of the game but liked the concept. Anyone have the Straight Dope on it? Does it get better? Does it ever explain what half the terms on the armor are or what they do?

2

I just played the demo as well. Underwhelmed doesn’t even begin to cover it.

Amusingly just after that I checked my mail and got a magazine with a review it received a very poor 73% and the review was just complaint after complaint.

I think my plans to buy it have been indefinitely shelved.

3

Apparently the demo only includes the first crappy part, i played the beta that went up to level 22 and i’m hooked. Basically this part of the OP is true:

If you are not one of those people who still has D2 installed on their computer 10 years later then you are likely not going to see what the big deal is, its just another run of the mill action RPG.

4

This is what I don’t get about demos. Why in the hell are they usually the tutorial level or the first few rubbish levels and cut off when it starts threatening to be good? Personally if I was making a demo I’d dole out 30% of the game (perhaps in chunks if it was too big to download easy) that’s just a little less then the average player plays before giving up and more then enough to show any whiz-bang features I had in it.

5

I still enjoy playing some Diablo II now and again. But the idea of “Diablo II, but 3D” sounds to me like “steak, but with ketchup”. If it were a 2D game I’d probably be a lot more interested.

6

BlackKnight, you might enjoy Flagship’s side project, Mythos, which is really more like D2. There’s only a couple people working on it, one of them being the guy who made Fate. It’ll be in beta a while, but it’s so far getting a lot better player feedback than Hellgate.

Hellgate gets a bit better with levels, but the melee issue doesn’t go away - one of the primary complaints from players has been the stop-swing-lunge melee system which makes combat feel very jerky and awkward. Battling ranged classes can be really brutal; although I’ve traditionally preferred the rogue/warrior type, I find the Guardian (paladin-esque) to be more fun in Hellgate, since they have better survivability and more abilities to deal with packs. Blademaster Surges, by the way, only “activate” when you get the killing blow with the Surge attack - that one took me quite a while to figure out. Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it), Surges are largely considered useless beyond SoRestoration, with maybe a little SoWrath thrown in.

7

In one comment on the demo that I saw, a guy said he was canceling his collectors edition pre-order based on it.

They say in marketing you have to sell the sizzle and not the steak. The demo has neither. There is no hook that sets the game apart. Nothing that makes you say “Oh Wow!”. IOW, nothing that makes me want to spend $50 to buy it.

Considering that it was originally supposed to be released a year ago, I too am not impressed.

8

I haven’t have any problem seeing the explosion. Perhaps they’re landing too far from you?

The demo doesn’t have those big numbers in the middle of the circles to tell you exactly how much is left? Nor the loud honk when Health drops below a certain level?]

9

That’s basically what they’ve been doing with the beta.

10

Correction: that “Low Health” warning is more of a “whoop ding ding ding”. And grenade explosions are represented by a ripple effect.

11

Missed the edit window the second time. There’s a ripple effect plus a small explosion, neither of which are noticeable if the grenade lands too far away.

12

I tried the Marksman for a bit, and used the grenade as a longer range kill/taunt to draw stronger enemies from a pack. It takes a little practice to get used to their range, but once you do, they’re useful. I never had any problems seeing them, with the exception of “where the hell did it go” if it ricochets off a wall/curb/burned out hunk of car.

After playing the Beta a bit, I am going to buy the game, and use a week off work to play enough to get a character up to a high level and get sick of it in a glut. Then play more casually after that. I agree with the “if you still like Diablo II” assessment. It’s not remarkably different enough from Diablo and clones, except for the first person angle, that if you were bored with that, you’ll be bored with this. Good for me, I still play Diablo a few hours each month, rediscovering how solid a game it is.

For ratings, I believe PC Gamer gave it something like 89%. Mostly taking off points because the random levels don’t look so random after a while, with stock elements getting pieced together in similar ways each time.

It’s not a perfect game, but it is solid for what it is. And as a live game, it will likely only improve as developers patch more to it.

13

Anyone else finding the beta ridiculously easy? I’ve got an Evoker (I think) of about level 5. I don’t have to do anything except make sure my elementals are up - I have 3 fire elementals and some new type now that I can’t remember the name of. I bring 'em up, sit back, and wait for them to clear the level.

Neat, but dull. I hope they balance things out better in the live version.

14

I hated the grenades becasuse I couldn’t see them in flight. I pushed the button and had no idea what happened until they hit, and since I was often in the middle of a firefight, the meager graphics for it didn’t always register. Likewise, the health/mana bars are much smaller than in Diablo 2. I don’t want to take my eyes off the action and therefore tend to take stock only once the fight is over (and not always then).

Also, the damage effect where the screen briefly turns black-and-white is extremely irritating. I wish it would stop. Is there a way to tun this off in favor sf something else?

All in all, I think it’s a solid game, but I can’t say I’m terribly impressed. For a year late, it’s awful sloppy, especially as the design wasn’t particularly original or challenging. I’m rather concerned by the fact that they were revising and revising the development very late into the game’s cycle, which I think may have detracted fom the polish. Additionally, while I enjoyed D1 and D2, I’m not that much a Diablo junkie that I desperately new a new version of it.

15

As to the OP, I’ve always had lukewarm feelings about hack-and-slash RPG’s, and don’t particularly care for series/settings that are unrelentingly dark in tone (I get bored with it). So, no, I don’t really have any interest in this one.

I’m curious what the dopers (both proponent and detractor) think of the “free, but not” subscription the game will entail?

It’s going to be free to play online, but people who pay $10 a month got better looking (but functionally the same, they say) equipment, a VIP-shuttle to quickly move around the game world, only paying people can start guilds or be guild officers, and a variety of other features (that I currently don’t recall, anyone got a link to the announcement about this?).

Penny Arcade did a comic that played around with the concept of the disparity, but wasn’t intended as an actual criticism of the idea since there was very little info available about what the actual features would be. I believe their only real gripe at the time was calling the subscribers “Elite players” implying their somehow better, when luxury would be a more appropriate term (ie, they didn’t earn something, or achieve it, they’re just getting treated better because they’re paying more).

16

I think it’s fine. But then again, I’m in the group of people who don’t mind paying a small amount of money (say, $10 or $15) a month for games. I guess I just don’t understand why people will gladly pay that much for a movie, a meal, or any other entertainment that nets them about 2 or 3 hours of fun versus the 10 to 100 (or more) hours it gets you for online games. That said, it’s nice to open the game to people who don’t want to pay or can’t afford the monthly fee. Seems like it’s the best of both worlds.

17

Subscriber Features are listed here. I think it’s interesting, but I do think it’ll end up promoting a “have” and “have-not” dynamic with lots of crying and/or sour-graping from the “have nots” about the features they don’t get access to. What impact that will have on the game and its community, we’ll just have to wait and see, but I don’t reckon it’ll be any worse than, say, the raider v. casual arguments from other MMO’s which shall not be named.

18

Huh. I don’t have a dog in this fight, but I’m interested in other people’s reactions.

I subscribe to two MMO’s (WoW and CoH/V). I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong for pay-to-play in persistent online multiplayer games, but the fact that this game really isn’t different from Diablo 2 or Guild Wars (both of which do not have subscriptions) makes it kind of interesting. Especially in respect to the concerns over how the player base will react, and the fact that news of this came out a long while after they had begun hyping the game. During that time they always talked about it as not having a subscription, so I wonder if the change turned away any potential players.

I definitely agree that the free vs. paying divide will parallel the casual vs. raiding split in a number of ways, Words on the Interweb.

19

I’ve played up to level ten on a character, and can safely say that, while the first few zones are easy potshots, the difficulty starts ramping up pretty quickly after that. The first hell warphole (whatever it’s called) is the turning point between the beginning easy and dull intro, and the game starting to fight back. Once the game does start fighting back, it’s a lot more interesting. You have to fight with your skills, you have to start employing strategy in your movements. You have to monitor your equipment, use the Augment and Nano machines to make the weapons better*. I was getting bored up to that first warphole, because I’d gotten a few characters there, then decided to try something new. Now it’s a lot more interesting, I feel like the game’s finally beginning.

*Damn it stings to spend most of your money on upgrades on your gun, then the next time out, finding a better gun unmodded. Glad it’s just the Beta, and I’ve learned my lesson to play the augments/upgrades/nano a bit more conservatively.

20

My husband cancelled his pre-order precisely because of the "free-not free subscription thing.

He can’t see paying full price for half a game. He was all ready to get two copies so I would play with him, but this subscription thing ticked him off. He said it’s a decent enough game, but not worth an extra ten dollars a month for getting to play all character classes, etc.

I guess we’ll stick with our WoW subscriptions.