Hellgate: The Demon Goat Rope from Hell Goes to London [Archive]

mouselock

11-14-2007, 07:39 PM

Tom,

Did you think the game was "bad"? I get that you're disappointed, but taking it to task for not being WoW seems a bit farfetched. Hellgate descends from the Diablo lineage. I can see how the monthly fee and the RPG on the action-RPG bit might fool some people, but surely you weren't genuinely comparing it to WoW? Or even Guild Wars (which was a very pretty non-game if what you're interested in is jumping in and battling it out against monsters vs. say, a multiplayer PvP brawlfest with deep skill interactions). But your rating (regardless of trying to use the whole range) has a tag-line that says "Bad" underneath. And while I get the disappointment of it not being all it could be, I don't see where your the concerns you bring up in the text single it out from most of the other Diablo clones.

Inventory tedium? Why hello there mr "Drop horadric cube to disperse all it's contents so I can pick it back up, combine crap, and then re-stuff it full of stuff." Tedious and repetitive monster models? "No.. you see.. these imps are colored blue so they're different than those over there which are colored orange." Repetitive building structures? "Hey look, it's that tileset with the hidden door.. and there's the hidden door itself. You can tell because the game always places them in this configuration to make sure it works..."

I mean, every one of them is a valid concern, and they're also spread across each and every Diablo-like game (hell, the tileset complaint is lifted directly from the ancient days of Nethack and Zangband). So it's not like I'm debating the observations but rather exactly what standard you're trying to judge a Diablo-like game against. Because it doesn't seem to be other Diablo-like games. If you feel like they'd set the game up to be some fantastic amalgamation of Diablo-type games and something else, what's the something else? If you think it's time for Diablo-alikes to die and give way to a new genre because you're tired of the old one, I get that too. But I have no idea what you're trying to say when you compare it to WoW and Guild Wars except for the fact that you just didn't find the game "fun". And that's an odd inference to end up drawing when you're the one writing the review.

Jeff Green

11-14-2007, 07:41 PM

Space limitations? Is this going in GFW? Ouch. Because the GFW editors like the game, I mean.

Yes, this is the official review for GFW. And as Rob said, we had a few words about Hellgate in the podcast we posted yesterday. Sean Molloy and I keep *trying* to like the game, but, ya know, things like multiple copies of a boss monster in one room kind of prevent that from happening. I agree completely with Tom's review----when this thing is ready, I am ready to love it. But it's not ready yet.

rei

11-14-2007, 07:41 PM

WoW has set overall gaming standards such as with the UI that (from what I've seen with the beta) HGL is nowhere close to even reaching. Titan Quest (while still retaining the old perspective) has way more polish than HGL.

Coca Cola Zero

11-14-2007, 07:52 PM

Did you think the game was "bad"?

I don't speak for Tom but does it even matter? If Mario Galaxy or Portal had as many technical implementation issues as Hellgate does, they would deserve a 4.0 as well.

mono

11-14-2007, 08:13 PM

I'm only a lvl 10 in HGL, and completely agree with Tom's review. I still kind of enjoy running around swatting demons, but the game does feel as if its a shell of what it could be. I've completely given up on trying to add/party-with friends.

Also, man NeoGAF just makes me cringe with all the animated images, sigs, avatars. I found the setting to disable images in the User Control Panel, but it was a horrific glimpse of the scary forum world outside of Qt3.

Qmanol

11-14-2007, 08:30 PM

Tom,

Did you think the game was "bad"? I get that you're disappointed, but taking it to task for not being WoW seems a bit farfetched. Hellgate descends from the Diablo lineage.

You seem to think there is a big difference there. They're both level-and-loot chasing games, it's just that one emphasises persistent worlds and community at the expense of a monthly fee. I got into WoW because it was like Diablo to me.

pyrhic

11-14-2007, 08:46 PM

Good review. I'm happy this is the gfw review too, as I was expecting a marquis game like this to be handled with kid gloves

Adree

11-14-2007, 09:59 PM

There's no excuse not to have automatic inventory sorting. Playing tetris with your loot isn't fun.

Moggraider

11-14-2007, 10:14 PM

What? The last podcast GFW tore Hellgate a new one. Which I'm slowly getting to the point of doing myself.

I listened to that episode too, and yeah, there were a lot of negative comments (though there were for CoD 4, also), but I still walked away thinking they essentially liked the game, especially Jeff. It didn't sound like a 4, anyway. But, fine.

stusser

11-14-2007, 10:59 PM

Couldn't agree more. If the embarrassing crash bugs were fixed, it would deserve a 5 on the 1-10 scale. Mediocre.

As is, I stopped playing it until it's patched. Why waste my valuable time? It's november 2007 for chrissakes, we've got the witcher, crysis, COD4, AC, and mass effect!

mouselock

11-14-2007, 11:06 PM

I don't speak for Tom but does it even matter? If Mario Galaxy or Portal had as many technical implementation issues as Hellgate does, they would deserve a 4.0 as well.

Well as is always the case in PC games, the technical implementation issues of which you peak (read: bugs) are wildly varying. I have no memory leaks, no CTD's, and have hung once manipulating inventory. Now if you're referring to the things Tom actually criticized, I just simply disagree.

I get that it's really bad for them to, say, screw up billing or have server downtime for the halloween crap on the day of release. But god knows it's not unprecedented. I still remember the day of release for WoW.

And I just don't get the interface complaints with the possible exception of the chat interface. But then I don't get this huge "The multiplayer is busted" cry anyway for what is a Diablo clone (meaning it's designed to follow onto a game that was easily as much a single player game as a multiplayer game). That's probably a fair reason to ding the game, but it seems odd to me to pretend that if the game's multiplayer doesn't work the game doesn't work. My demon-slaying doesn't need no multiplayer, nor does it want multiplayer. I'm a one man army against the demon hordes. That's what's fun about the game to me - I pick the character concept and the skills to make it work, and then go out and bulid the character. Along the way I find a cool idea and then go build *that* character too.

Gendal

11-14-2007, 11:07 PM

Still love the game but yes, no sane person could say Tom's review was unfair.

KONY on GAF: "Tom Chick's reviews are always about making him look good. The game is just an excuse to write, it seems. But then, I'm biased so pay no attention."

Naw, you sposed to get over it at some point, bwah!

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=208265
He posts again a bit further down claiming it was Tom's lack of interpersonal skills and obvious Sony bias that led to his ban. I appreciated the chuckle.

stusser

11-14-2007, 11:10 PM

I have no memory leaks, no CTD's
Now I ain't callin you a liar, but, errr... lets just say that your experience varies widely from the norm.

mouselock

11-14-2007, 11:14 PM

You seem to think there is a big difference there.
They're both level-and-loot chasing games, it's just that one emphasises persistent worlds and community at the expense of a monthly fee. I got into WoW because it was like Diablo to me.

I completely disagree. WoW is a fundamentally tedious game and completely unworthwhile as a solo player. Without community wow would just be a tedious grind with shitty pacing. With community it's something Hellgate will never approach, because there are quite literally things in WoW that you will never, ever do by yourself. Not even after the expansion packs make you far more powerful than the most powerful monster in the game right now.

Hellgate (and moreover Diablo) are, to me, fundamentally single player games. You may be able to squeeze more fun out of them once you're done by playing with friends, but there is nothing in the basic game design that requires social interaction to make it work. If you want to play Hellgate or Diablo completely solo all the time, you can still experience 100% of what the game has to offer.

To me that's a pretty big difference. And it also is the one that I get the feeling Tom is either discounting or glossing over. I have no doubts that Hellgate pales in its multiplayer aspect compared to WoW, Guild Wars, Team Fortress, or any of a multitude of other games. But I don't think it's because those other games are better but rather because they're fundamentally different. Guild Wars without the multiplayer PvP is an utterly tedious game of halfheartedly outwitting dumb computer AI opponents. WoW without multiple players to play cooperatively comes down to nothing more than rotely repeating simple acts to advance a ticker. Team fortress without other players is staring at a lobby. Hellgate without other players is the same fundamental game; you just lose some potential synergies. It doesn't devolve into an innately boring (or at best, meta-gamey a-la WoW's 'let's play the auction house') setup.

stusser

11-14-2007, 11:18 PM

It doesn't devolve into an innately boring (or at best, meta-gamey a-la WoW's 'let's play the auction house') setup.
HGL is about running through identical subway tunnels shooting identical weapons at identical enemies to collect their uteruses in exchange for XP and phat lewt.

Now don't get me wrong, I enjoyed diablo2, I've got nothing against the genre. But saying its singleplayer is superior to WoW's ridiculously polished solo game is just crazytalk.

Why are we even talking about WoW anyway?

Ben Sones

11-14-2007, 11:33 PM

He posts again a bit further down claiming it was Tom's lack of interpersonal skills and obvious Sony bias that led to his ban. I appreciated the chuckle.

Actually, he didn't mention that he was banned. His exact response was:

Nah, I dealt with him and his buddies at the forum he runs. His lack of interpersonal skills and bias against Sony rubbed me the wrong way...sorry to derail.

I was trying to think of a funny response, but I couldn't come up with anything funnier than the original quote, honestly.

mouselock

11-14-2007, 11:33 PM

HGL is about running through identical subway tunnels shooting identical weapons at identical enemies to collect their uteruses in exchange for XP and phat lewt.

Now don't get me wrong, I enjoyed diablo2, I've got nothing against the genre. But saying its singleplayer is superior to WoW's ridiculously polished solo game is just crazytalk.

I prefer the game that requires somewhat more player skill and allows for faster character progression, all things being otherwise equal. You have to aim in both D2 and Hellgate, you don't in WoW. You have roughly similar character building choices, but a D2/Hellgate character gets built on the order of days, not weeks or months. Due to the randomization there's at least some variability when you go back to the same areas for yet more XP grinding in D2/Hellgate, unlike WoW. Etc.

What WoW does is tortuously drag out the levelling curve and hit that pavlovian response square between the eyes. If that's what you get out of all these games then I can understand, but it's sure not what I enjoy about the games.

[/quote]
Why are we even talking about WoW anyway?[/QUOTE]

Because Tom used it as an example against which to measure Hellgate, and I questioned what exactly it was that he was trying to measure, since they're vastly different genres of game to me. (Then again, I have a hell of a time understanding how anyone could ever be satisfied with WoW as a single player experience after having experienced WoW as a group cooperative game. I can't speak to the PvP one way or the other.) I know they are. I just don't get it since in my mind it takes all of 13 seconds to grok the way that WoW works and after that it's just about the pavlovian triggers and that just doesn't do it for me. Didn't in EQ, won't in the next game either, because there's never enough complexity in the rest of the game (loot interactions, skill interactions, etc..) to have hidden complexity like in Diablo and similar games.

stusser

11-14-2007, 11:49 PM

Lorini

11-14-2007, 11:53 PM

I agree with Mouselock 100%. Also stusser, you nor anyone else has any idea of what the 'norm' is, since every buyer of HG:L has not been heard from. And it's clear that there's enough computers having problems that the game should definetely be rated down for the state that it is in. Perhaps one day the game will be in a fine technical state, maybe not, but it should certainly be judged on how it shipped.

As far as the inventory complaints go, I really disagree. Inventory management is about 1000 times easier than it is with Wow and all of its stupid bags, grey crap, and everything else you have to go through to deal with inventory in WoW. HG:L, you're going to be breaking most stuff down, and even if you want to sell stuff, all you have to do is use your PRD to get to a station to sell it. Gee, if you could do that in WoW, they'd have to do something new like provide more content to make up for all the time you spend trekking back and forth to vendors.

The smart UI again is so much better than WoW. Just think of what WoW could be with a shift button that changed depending on the situation. WoW doesn't have this and probably will never have to. I also like the ability to have no mini-map, a small mini-map or a superimposed one. The inclusion of the Q and E keys for easy use is good too. I can't think of anything in the UI that is particularly bad, although I must note that I don't play with other people and don't have chat up. Yes, it would be nice to have an inventory sort, but since I break down nearly everything after level 7 or so, it's not much missed.

Because Flagship (apparently at least) didn't balance the classes, we shouldn't have to worry about wholesale nerfs to our characters. The lack of balance to me is a positive thing. It also shows the difference between the player expectations of the two types of games. Players go through the roof at the slightest imbalance in WoW classes, but I have not seen the slightest complaint that the Summoner class in HGL is signficantly easier to play than the Evoker class. I believe that's because the experience with any given character is a lot shorter in HG:L than it would be in WoW. HGL doesn't allow re-specs and one of the devs said it's because in their game, you will play your character about 20 hours instead of 20 days like in WoW.

So at any rate, I love the game myself, played it more than many Qt3 favs like Bioshock, Witcher (timed combat, yuck) Dwarf Fortress, and others. Sorry not everyone enjoys it too, but there is plenty out there for everyone's entertainment.

I am also curious why anyone would think this was like Guild Wars too, I just didn't see that in the marketing approach, but I'm probably blind :)

Coca Cola Zero

11-14-2007, 11:58 PM

And I just don't get the interface complaints with the possible exception of the chat interface. But then I don't get this huge "The multiplayer is busted" cry anyway for what is a Diablo clone (meaning it's designed to follow onto a game that was easily as much a single player game as a multiplayer game).

Offer the game with MMO-style pricing and you deserve to get dinged for not hitting the minimum baseline acceptable MMO UI. Them's the f'in breaks.

And, yes, I realize you don't HAVE to upgrade to Elite status to play the basic game... but Flagship and their publishers are solely responsible for the perception of this game as an MMO (and thus making it fair game to be compared to what already exists in that space).

mouselock

11-15-2007, 12:12 AM

Offer the game with MMO-style pricing and you deserve to get dinged for not hitting the minimum baseline acceptable MMO UI. Them's the f'in breaks.

A fair criticism. However, the overwhelming feeling I got from Tom's review was "This isn't as good of an MMO as other things out there." And while it's a fair criticism, it doesn't address the non-MMO portion of the game at all, which is a disservice to gamers like me who were looking for a Diablo type game. If I want an MMO, I'll stick with WoW.

mouselock

11-15-2007, 12:20 AM

HGL attacks the exact same conditioned operant response. It's a dungeon hack for XP and phat lewt. You just like it more initially because the rewards come more frequently for less effort.

I like it more because I can play around in the meta-space the game has given me. There's interest to be had (and accessibility of) building variant characters just to see what happens. This is totally imfeasible for a WoW type game. To the extent where I don't think there's any particular similarity (in my mind) to why I enjoy WoW and why I enjoy Hellgate. (Specifically, I couldn't give a damn about the conditioned operant response portion of WoW. It's too slow, too unrewarding, and ultimately boring. What I enjoy about WoW is the ability for truly superlative cooperative play. I tend to not even play WoW unless I'm either playing with my fiance as a social activity, or running dungeons with folks for the cooperative play aspect.)

Again, I have no problem with that, I loved D2. But D2 was a much, much better game on every level except the ancient low res 2D engine.

I don't get why D2 was a much much better game from Tom's review or your statements. Because.. you didn't have inventory tetris? (So fucking wrong; let's play "Hunt the least necessary rune so we don't have to portal three times from this loot drop!") Because the skill trees were better? Subjective, but it's at least a valid criticism. Because the cut-scenes were better? Fucking please. The 17th time through D2 was so about the cut scenes, lemme tellya. Because the item system was better? Sorry, no. The item system in HG:L is a refined and elegant extrapolation of the D2 system with it's basic Gem slots. HG:L has multiple slot types in multiple categories with multiple "gems" which have a wide variety of effects based on quality, far more than just the +1/2/3/4/5 of Diablo's gems. I disagree with your earlier assessment that all the weapons are the same at base, too. There's a huge difference between an automatic rifle and a rocket pistol. It totally changes the way you play if you're smart. Hell, the weapons themselves have wildly varying characters. There are the ones that have an included grapple, the ones with splash damage, the ones which are devestating in close range, the ones which have a wide dispersion pattern at far range, and for all of these there are subsets of available damage type which interact wth the monster types. Then there's the whole shield overload argument and the effectiveness thereof, but only for another subset of monsters.

Have you played the game, or have you just played the demo? I ask because my opinions of the demo were much the same as yours. My opinions of the game, however, are vastly better.

Mordrak

11-15-2007, 12:39 AM

I completely disagree. WoW is a fundamentally tedious game and completely unworthwhile as a solo player. Without community wow would just be a tedious grind with shitty pacing. With community it's something Hellgate will never approach, because there are quite literally things in WoW that you will never, ever do by yourself. Not even after the expansion packs make you far more powerful than the most powerful monster in the game right now.

WoW's pacing is better than Hellgate's, because it actually has some. There's nothing to pace in Hellgate. They pretty much throw the entire game at you in the first 10 levels.

Hellgate (and moreover Diablo) are, to me, fundamentally single player games. You may be able to squeeze more fun out of them once you're done by playing with friends, but there is nothing in the basic game design that requires social interaction to make it work. If you want to play Hellgate or Diablo completely solo all the time, you can still experience 100% of what the game has to offer.

As a single player game, even a non-professional like me can tell from the first 3 acts that the game is sorely lacking. Had it been released at the same time Diablo 2 was (how many years was that?) it'd still be crap comparatively.

Diablo 2 Classic:
-has more levels
-more differentiation between and within classes
-more character slots
-more variety between and within in its acts
-collectible item sets
-more interesting skills (corpse explosion anyone?)
-items weren't restricted by class allowing for more experimentation in character/class builds.
-more difficulty levels
-has distinct creature death animations
-contains no advertising

Hellgate has:
--better graphics
--more compelling camera perspective
--gear upgrading

Titan Quest is a vastly better update to the genre than Hellgate and it only received high 7s and low 8s generally. Though I think Titan Quest suffers a bit from the almost monotone environments through most of it.

To me that's a pretty big difference. And it also is the one that I get the feeling Tom is either discounting or glossing over. I have no doubts that Hellgate pales in its multiplayer aspect compared to WoW, Guild Wars, Team Fortress, or any of a multitude of other games. But I don't think it's because those other games are better but rather because they're fundamentally different.

People are making those comparisons because Flagship themselves spent so much time billing it as an MMO so they could justify billing us. Flagship set themselves up for it.

Guild Wars without the multiplayer PvP is an utterly tedious game of halfheartedly outwitting dumb computer AI opponents. WoW without multiple players to play cooperatively comes down to nothing more than rotely repeating simple acts to advance a ticker. Team fortress without other players is staring at a lobby. Hellgate without other players is the same fundamental game; you just lose some potential synergies. It doesn't devolve into an innately boring (or at best, meta-gamey a-la WoW's 'let's play the auction house') setup.

It sounds like you're describing Hellgate, not those games. Variety is the spice of life, but Flagship forgot include much. What it does include is like a depression-era soup pot. Guild Wars and WoW pace their games. They are a fine meal, allowing us to savor the flavors within them like we do between courses or dishes. Hellgate is an amalgam of week old left overs, with hardly any sustenance to be found. Sure, if I didn't have anything else, I might play Hellgate. That doesn't make it taste good though.

Aeon221

11-15-2007, 01:36 AM

Or even Guild Wars (which was a very pretty non-game if what you're interested in is jumping in and battling it out against monsters vs. say, a multiplayer PvP brawlfest with deep skill interactions).

Not to cherry pick and defend my favorite game or anything, but, uh, no, wrong. I've got this feeling that you never made it out of Ascalon and still think the Charr are the big boss -- evaluating from that viewpoint is as flawed as me posting a judgement of Hellgate (craptacular) from the demo.

Guild Wars has more variety in foe types than any game I've ever played, bar none.

Cronox

11-15-2007, 02:13 AM

Not to cherry pick and defend my favorite game or anything, but, uh, no, wrong. I've got this feeling that you never made it out of Ascalon and still think the Charr are the big boss -- evaluating from that viewpoint is as flawed as me posting a judgement of Hellgate (craptacular) from the demo.

Guild Wars has more variety in foe types than any game I've ever played, bar none.
I second this comment, I played Guild wars as a single player game (I did do some PvP and some grouping for quests but never played with friends or in a guild) and had a great time for the 80 hours or so I put in to it.

The hour I spent on the HGL demo was enough to convince me not to buy it. To me the game felt like a very unpolished version of WoW without the excellent player interaction elements. Personally I consider games like WoW and Guild Wars to be the natural evolution of Diablo style games and HGL really reinforced this.

Edit: I'm not arguing that WoW is perfect, I agree that it's pacing is terrible which is why I no longer subscribe. I do consider it the same style of game as HGL, both are grind heavy, item collection, level up fests, which don’t offer too much in the way of challenge and are far more laid back to play then virtually any other game.

Wendelius

11-15-2007, 02:29 AM

[Edit: sorry. Network issues truncated my message. reposted in full]

I agree with the original point that the whole WoW (or insert MMO of choice here) comparison is unwarranted. This game is not a MMO. It's an action RPG with mildly (not massively) multiplayer instanced hubs which takes you through a story. Flagship is giving the wrong impression and, if they were trying to make a MMO, completely failed.

I am in a guild. I rarely exchange more than a few words with the other members because the chat interface is so poor. The game doesn't require grouping (although it is fun if you don't need to use the keyboard based chat) but that doesn't happen much with guildmates again. We basically meet up mainly to make up for the incredibly stupid lack of a mailbox / guild bank / any other loot transfer functionality.

That being said, both my wife and I have got it installed. When you have the ability to make trades easily thanks to our 2 accounts, to group and never have to deal with any kind of chat difficulty and are blessed enough to play on machines that tolerate HGL well (my wife has frozen twice in all the time we played, I have never frozen or crashed), then the game is good mindless fun. We alternate between LOTRO and this and it's fun being showered by loot drops and spending time tweaking the stats to what you like. And 2 chars can complement each other in very cool ways in the missions.

Memory leaks? they might not crash some machines but they exist. After a long session (2 hours+), XP will take ages to close the game and end the disk trashing. I'm just lucky enough not to crash during that time.

If you are lucky with your config and have got a readily available groupmate and are willing to forget you even thought this was a social game (rather than a solo / duo hunting game), then there is quite a bit of fun to be had. But it's far from polished. I don't think anyone will be crazy enough to argue with that.

Wendelius

PS: This game gets huge bonus points with my Canadian wife for "The Strange Brew" quest. She made me watch that movie and was delighted to see it referred to in the game. It's beauty, eh? :)

Cronox

11-15-2007, 02:41 AM

I agree with the original point that the whole WoW (or insert MMO of choice here) comparison is unwarranted. This game is not a MMO. It's an action RPG with mildly (not massively) multiplayer instanced hubs which takes you through a story.

But aren’t MMOs (at least the WoW/EQ/UO style ones) just action RPGs with other people in the game world?

malkav11

11-15-2007, 02:45 AM

Hellgate definitely has its issues. Core among them, the decision to randomize the terrain - sorry, it just doesn't work very well in the context of a post-demonic-invasion London. I don't think it works very well ever outside of actual turn-based Roguelikes, personally. But it still works a damn sight better in things like Diablo II than it does here.

But I think the most crippling problems aren't so much design as they are technical. And for the most part I've only encountered those through hearsay, not my own time with the game. So I'd probably give it a 6, myself. With some hope that a few months worth of patches will eliminate some of the other, smaller flaws as well.

Wendelius

11-15-2007, 02:50 AM

But aren’t MMOs (at least the WoW/EQ/UO style ones) just action RPGs with other people in the game world?

World is the thing. My message was truncated so you didn't get the full argument. But this is not a world. Any time you leave a station, you are alone (except for party members). There is no crafting, no trading, basic chat, no emotes, no real trading, ... This is not a world. It's a series of online instances with lobbies for players to meet up. I know it's online multiplayer and you can meet up players and go hunt with them. But it's a different class of a game from a truly massively multiplayer game where all those players are in the world with you. You can meet them in random places. You can interact with them.

This is only a bit more of an online world (because it's persistent) than the first Diablo where 4 players could connect and go hunt together. But it doesn't add much to the worldliness of said Diablo, IMO.

Anyway, I believe it's the wrong type of discussion to have about HGL. How it plays and what its good and bad points are is what should be relevant, I believe. And that's now covered in my non truncated post. ;)

Wendelius

TomChick

11-15-2007, 02:54 AM

Mouselock, I'm happy to go into more specifics about the game or the review, but the point of what I wrote was very simple: to convey the sense of immense frustration I felt trying to play Hellgate, a game that was released too early, features some questionable design decisions, and is saddled with a questionable and, frankly, insulting business model. GfW was supportive enough to let me write the review the way I did rather than just a standard dispassionate laundry list of good/bad features. It seems your disagreement is more with my tone than the content of what I wrote, because you seem to be arguing against invented things I didn't write.

For instance, what makes you think I'm comparing Hellgate to World of Warcraft? There's nothing like that in the review. How do you figure that my complaints apply only to multiplayer and not single player? What's all this hooha you're writing about whether Diablo 2 is better than Hellgate?

-Tom

Brian Rucker

11-15-2007, 05:52 AM

He's probably talking about your reference to Flagship knowing you've got a WoW icon on your desktop and being able to go back easily. I kinda took that as a reference myself to other MMOs and what they can do both in terms of content in addition to Diablo-style grinding as well as having much more functional models for UI and communication online. Like you said, if Flagship's going to charge for premium content along an MMORPG model (and it looks and feels like an MMORPG, even if it's not one, to most players) then the comparison's more than fair IMHO.

The way I see it there was a day and age where Diablo-style games were top of the heap. MMORPGs came along, gobbled that up, and added layers of additional gameplay on top. Dinosaurs and opposable thumbs.

That's not to say Hellgate's not a blast to play, when it's not busily frustrating for technical reasons, and a bit more digestable for someone with less time to invest or interest in multiplayer gaming. I'm having a pretty good time experimenting with different builds. Then again, I had fun with the old SWG's skill-based system too for similiar reasons - though the rewards of getting a new ability or improving one weren't always as clear cut and visceral as they are in Hellgate. But there was so much else going on and if I didn't like an element of the interface I could just move it around, resize it, or take it away entirely.

That last little thing is a primo example of the Rip VanWinklism of Hellgate. Have those developers been asleep all this time? Did they miss what's been going on in the gaming world since D2 came out?

They're pitching the online/subscription aspect of this game so hard that I think most reasonable people would expect stable network performance and basic interface amenities that are just commonplace with MMORPGs.

It's 2007. They've already got an uphill fight against games that have massively, if you'll pardon the word, usurped the single-player roguelike's place in gamer's hearts.

DeepT

11-15-2007, 07:11 AM

Id like that complaint about splash screens to become standard fair for reviews. It is just ridiculous now. At least with Crysis you can go to the videos directory and rename/delete them all. It is going to be my standard practice after installing a game is to see if there is a way to gimp the splash screens. It is OK to make us watch them the first time, but after that, every game should just go strait to the main menu.

Ben Sones

11-15-2007, 07:12 AM

Hellgate has:

--more compelling camera perspective

That one is debatable. I like isometric games (and sort of miss having them around, these days).

11-15-2007, 07:16 AM

We're several years on from Diablo II. Hellgate should've been a revolution that nodded to D2 - as D2 was to the likes of angband - but instead it barely passes muster.

Hanzii

11-15-2007, 07:24 AM

I just want to say that I called this almost a year ago.
... and I only played the game for 20 minutes (and no I didn't finish the game)

mouselock

11-15-2007, 07:56 AM

The hour I spent on the HGL demo was enough to convince me not to buy it. To me the game felt like a very unpolished version of WoW without the excellent player interaction elements. Personally I consider games like WoW and Guild Wars to be the natural evolution of Diablo style games and HGL really reinforced this.

See, the thing is, the hour I spent with the Hellgate demo was also enough to convince me not to buy it. Anyone arguing from the demo (which was a sad, sad thing) hasn't really experienced what Hellgate actually is, IMO. I was not going to buy either based on the demo, but a friend whose opinion I trusted vouched for having a blast in the actual game after feeling the same about the demo (I have no idea why he bought the game without external prodding, of course.), and I find the same thing.

I guess it goes down to whether or not you actually enjoy the character building aspect. It's a lot more accessible here than in WoW due to time scales alone, and I find the fundamental gameplay more appealing. YMMV widely apparently, but saying that you know what the game is from the demo seems a bit dubious to me, personally, because my two experiences between demo and game were so radically different. (Does't make the game good, doesn't excuse Flagship for putting out a lousy demo; I'm just saying I find the full game to be far more interesting than the shitty demo.)

mouselock

11-15-2007, 07:58 AM

Id like that complaint about splash screens to become standard fair for reviews. It is just ridiculous now. At least with Crysis you can go to the videos directory and rename/delete them all.

You can click through the HG videos the very first time they come up. While that's not as nice as not having them at all, it's not like they're uninterruptible like some games. I'd rather have the HG:L interstitials than the Crysis ones since I don't have to screw with original game files to get through them quickly.

forgeforsaken

11-15-2007, 08:26 AM

See, the thing is, the hour I spent with the Hellgate demo was also enough to convince me not to buy it. Anyone arguing from the demo (which was a sad, sad thing) hasn't really experienced what Hellgate actually is, IMO.

So what is this big difference between the two? I know Guild Wars, Titans Quest, etc all had demos that I thought acurately gave me an idea of what the game would be like.

mouselock

11-15-2007, 09:26 AM

So what is this big difference between the two? I know Guild Wars, Titans Quest, etc all had demos that I thought acurately gave me an idea of what the game would be like.

Well for one the demo caps you at level 4 which prevents you from having any real feel for what the skill trees are like. There's 3 skills per class until level 5, and each super-class shares one of those trees (albeit they seem to be arranged somewhat differently; or maybe it's just substantial skill overlap). In my mind the choices for classes in the demo should have included a cabalist, since that's what I've actually been playing and enjoying.

I guess the primary problem I see is that the demo just flat out cuts you off at low level with none of the game really explored. The "boss" in the demo isn't anything at all boss-like compared to the real game (or even mini-boss like). And most importantly, you don't see most of the variety of the items in the game. The whole item-centric setup is very deep IMO, and that (along with skill tree building) was the crux of Diablo to me, and exactly what I was looking for in a game following on the Diablo legacy.

Enemy variety, background tilesets, cut scenes, multiplayer, and, well, everything else are secondary to whether there are interesting character builds to be discovered and interesting item combinations to be found. And I think there are. (Especially if you pay attention to the mini game, since some subsets of damage type are somewhat rare for some classes - my cabalist has real trouble finding physical damage, so the satisfaction at finding a direct physical damage gun finally to finish up the current minigame setup was about equal to getting that great magical item in WoW or your character's first usable unique in Diablo II.)

I don't disagree with most of Tom's nitpicks on the game, with the exception of the complaint about skill respecs. I just don't think that most of them have anything to do with the core gameplay and innate game of a Diablo-type game. Which is why I was curious about the WoW comparisons; I don't think the "core" gameplay of WoW or Diablo are anything at all alike. A new suit of gear in WoW will not radically change what my character does. But it can radically change what my Hellgate or Diablo character does or, more likely, radically change my next build pattern for the character. And despite every single rough edge (and Hellgate has plenty) there's more depth in the skill tree/item system in Hellgate than I've seen in a similar game since Diablo. (Titan's Quest probably has a somewhat deeper skill tree, but their item system is shallow in comparison, IMO.)

ravenight

11-15-2007, 09:47 AM

Hi everyone, first post and it's a long one - I'll try to keep 'em shorter after this ;)

But for every minute of this, I had three minutes of postcrash rebooting past your seven (7!) splash screens, 10 minutes of slogging through an area I've already seen a hundred times before, and 12 minutes of sorting through the confetti mosaic that is your inventory screen.

Crashing is certainly a problem, one that some people have been experiencing far more than others (I haven't crashed once in release), but the rest of this complaint shows exactly why I love this game: You consider it taking 10 minutes to do something unacceptably long. The thing that Hellgate brings to multiplayer secure-server RPGs is a speed of gameplay that makes the typical "run for 10 minutes, fly for 10 minutes, run for 10 minutes" approach to MMO gameplay seem like watching paint dry. Not that it didn't already seem like that, its just that HGL actually shows you can make a game that doesn't have it.

And the oppressive sameness of your levels! Does one tunnel turning right differ in any meaningful way from the same tunnel turning left?

This is just a complaint I can't agree with. The levels are quite varied, with a bunch of possible rooms inside, each of which has variety to its layout. I know that the pattern-matching of your brain can look at a room that has a different arrangement of boxes and walls and burn-out cars and so on and say, "this is just the same room as before but with some stuff moved around", but in most games the stuff isn't even moved around. There is far more variation here than in GW, DDO, CoH/V, AO, or WoW's instances, and it even compares favorably, IMO, to the sprawling terrain in WoW - yes, there is more total variation in that game, but it unfolds so slowly that by the time you reach the next area you'd have seen many varieties in HGL.

I find it strange that so many reviewers of HGL are not at all interested in talking about what the game does, but I guess that's just a disconnect between where I'd like to see reviews come from and where they actually do. Most reviewers aren't really capable of analyzing what a game means in terms of the worthwhile innovations it brings, or the notable failed experiments, which just dissappoints me all the more when the ones who could say something meaningful about it choose not to.

IMO, Hellgate is worthwhile for showing that FPS gameplay in an RPG setting can work (CoD4 also probably shows this, coming from the other side but I'm still waiting for my copy to arrive). It is worthwhile for little things like the mini-game of trying to set your character up so he does each of the different types of damage effectively in order to be able to clear the when they show up. It is worthwhile for the Augmentrex (which lets you permanently add randomized properties to items, for a fee, with a limit on the number of total properties) and the mod system (like jewels in D2, but with specific types that fit in specific slots). It is worthwhile for having a Hub-and-Instance game in which players can join each others instances without partying ahead of time. And for having the ability to dynamically add extra levels within a level at random. Those things are all cool, and the speed of the game is such that it really is fun to just play. Yes, the level is somewhat the same, yes you've seen the monsters before (though the particular configuration of monsters might actually be new, or the combination of monsters and area my be a different one than you've seen - which is meaningful, since you actually move over the area and fight the monsters all at once), but it is still fun to pop them like a pinata, get loot and level up.

There are legitimate complaints about the service and the technical problems. And even though I disagree about a lot of the things different reviews have complained about, there are also legitimate gameplay concerns (like the difficulty of partying, the obtrusiveness of the chat window, the lack of a place to go for trading or at least an AH, etc). All of those things are reasons to mark it down, but the very fact that those things are likely to be addressed in future updates highlights what is wrong with the whole review process: it is trying to be advice for buyers and also an assessment of the value of a game in the overall picture (and also entertaining at the same time).

I wish sites would stop rushing to assign scores and go with just some sort of actual buying recommendation, like "must buy, I don't care who you are" / "buy it if you like the genre" / "buy it only if you are willing to overlook some flaws" / "you probably don't want to buy it" / "you really don't want to buy it", then go back and officially rate the game some set amount of time later or at repeated intervals if it has turned out well and is still being supported or talked about or heavily played. Maybe have a "for it's time" score that is given after a couple weeks have passed so it can sink in fully, but then update the most popular games so that there is always a list of games you could be playing instead of the newly rated ones and a clear point of comparison - is this game better than D2 right now, rather than having to compare the game to what D2 "should be" if it was updated to now.

Mouselock, I'm happy to go into more specifics about the game or the review, but the point of what I wrote was very simple: to convey the sense of immense frustration I felt trying to play Hellgate, a game that was released too early, features some questionable design decisions, and is saddled with a questionable and, frankly, insulting business model.

What you wrote is a very good letter to the editor detailing your criticisms of the game. What I don't like as much is that you attached the official score of one of the big review sources to it and intentionally gave it a much lower mark than is reasonable, with the argument that they want to use the whole scale (which is only valid if the editors there are actually enforcing the use the whole scale thing for all their reviews, which doesn't seem to be true to me). I understand that what you are trying to accomplish is to tell readers not to buy the game in as clear language as possible, but I don't think that HGL is a game warrants that level of "buyer beware".

mouselock

11-15-2007, 09:52 AM

It seems your disagreement is more with my tone than the content of what I wrote, because you seem to be arguing against invented things I didn't write.

My disagreement is with the fact that I get the impression at it's base, despite your avowed love of action RPGs, you were expecting Hellgate to be more of an MMO than an action RPG. Others here claim they're the same thing, so maybe you feel similarly too. If so we fundamentally disagree and there's not much to be done about that.

For instance, what makes you think I'm comparing Hellgate to World of Warcraft?

After all, with so much competition for online dollars, surely a publisher like EA and a group of veteran developers like the guys at Flagship Studios understand they must rise to the occasion. Surely they know that World of WarCraft is waiting on my desktop, just a few icons over. Surely, Hellgate, you'd be up to the task.

So not only do we mention WoW by name as the product competing for your valuable gaming time, but we talk about competition for online dollars. As we've already discussed in this thread, that's the fault of Flagship for the stupid subscription model. On the other hand, there's an entire game to be had there for $40 and comparing that game, without subscription to WoW or any online multiplayer game seems absurd to me.

Yeah, sure, your character classes are distinct, each its own little game (and an even better game when played in a group -- something you do your best to make difficult). But you don't go far enough with the skills, which are glib, unremarkable, and (due to a ridiculous lack of a re-spec option), a one-way trip down a tree of potentially bad choices.

So the character classes are distinct and interesting. I'm not sure how this happens with "unremarkable" skills, mind, but somehow despite the skills being unremarkable, the character classes end up being distinct and interesting. (I'm apparently not literate enough to get what you mean by "glib" skills. If you mean facile and shallow on a per skill basis, well, Whirlwind was pretty glib too, but it still made for some fantastic character builds in Diablo.) What about the underlying gameplay..?

You've given me moments of exhilarating sword-swinging and spell-slinging, perched at the verge of death but for a quickly quaffed antitoxin or a nick-of-time healing aura, helpfully suggested via context-sensitive Shift and Control keys.

Well, that was good too, apparently. So what's the problem?

But for every minute of this, I had three minutes of postcrash rebooting past your seven (7!) splash screens, 10 minutes of slogging through an area I've already seen a hundred times before, and 12 minutes of sorting through the confetti mosaic that is your inventory screen. I admit I enjoyed the obtuse calculus of trying to figure out how to best dress my paper doll and mod my weapons, but why so user-hostile, Hellgate?

You see those 7 splash screens, what, once per play session? Why are you slogging through areas you've already seen 100 times? Why aren't you using the station terminals to travel unless you're explicitly farming for money/items? What's your problem with the inventory screen? You have slots, things go into slots, just like every other PC Action RPG I've ever seen. Did you hate all of their inventory setups too, or is there something I'm missing that makes Hellgate's worse?

I'm sorry to say this, but you're not a 10th the MMO you think you are.

I'm not entirely convinced we're even attempting to look at the same game by this point. This, btw, is why I go on and on about the multiplayer, Tom. Because you're viewing Hellgate as an MMO. As an MMO it's an utter failure. Anyone proclaiming that without even playing the game is within their right. It wasn't designed as an MMO, it doesn't have the basis that MMOs have. No complaints there.

Unfortunately, I was rather hoping you'd be reviewing - Hellgate: The Action RPG.

Ultimately I get the feeling you actually liked the game but you didn't like the subscription model or the bugs. Which is why my first question regarding your review was whether or not you found the game to actually be bad. I guess I can see marking the game way down because the subscription model sucks or the bugs are really that bad, but it's still somewhat hard to reconcile. I don't recall, for example, you giving WoW a 6 or 7 despite it being completely unplayable for the first week or two. Maybe my experiences are different as someone who bought it a week after launch and a week after the launch-day patch?

Sorry for the length; I'm not trying to be combatitive here. But I just honestly don't get where you're coming from and I'm trying to understand the criticisms. Ultimately it doesn't matter since I"m enjoying the game which is all that matters for me and my $45. But I'll admit to being suspicious about whether or not I can trust your take on any action RPG any more, because you seem to weight so heavily in favor of things that aren't the core interest of action RPGs in my mind in this review.

Ben Sones

11-15-2007, 10:01 AM

So not only do we mention WoW by name as the product competing for your valuable gaming time, but we talk about competition for online dollars. As we've already discussed in this thread, that's the fault of Flagship for the stupid subscription model. On the other hand, there's an entire game to be had there for $40 and comparing that game, without subscription to WoW or any online multiplayer game seems absurd to me.

Except that he didn't do that. His WoW comparison was quite specific: he was talking about Hellgate's "special content for subscribers." That is from the sentence immediately preceding the ones that you quoted. It seemed pretty clear to me that he was not saying "Hellgate is an MMO," or even "Hellgate should have been an MMO," but rather that there are other games out there that already charge monthly fees, and that they have set a high standard for other games wishing to do the same.

mouselock

11-15-2007, 10:06 AM

Except that he didn't do that. His WoW comparison was quite specific: he was talking about Hellgate's "special content for subscribers." That is from the sentence immediately preceding the ones that you quoted. It seemed pretty clear to me that he was not saying "Hellgate is an MMO," or even "Hellgate should have been an MMO," but rather that there are other games out there that already charge monthly fees, and that they have set a high standard for other games wishing to do the same.

Somehow that context completely escaped me. Mea culpa. (Though the latter sentence about it not being 1/10th the MMO it thinks it is muddies the context up a bit later again.) Thanks!

Chris Nahr

11-15-2007, 10:08 AM

My disagreement is with the fact that I get the impression at it's base, despite your avowed love of action RPGs, you were expecting Hellgate to be more of an MMO than an action RPG.

I didn't get that impression at all.

So not only do we mention WoW by name as the product competing for your valuable gaming time, but we talk about competition for online dollars. As we've already discussed in this thread, that's the fault of Flagship for the stupid subscription model.

Yes, and I didn't take this comment to have any deeper meaning than that. IMO you're vastly overreacting to a brief comment that I took simply to mean "I could be playing better games that also involve bashing monsters for loot."

Ultimately I get the feeling you actually liked the game but you didn't like the subscription model or the bugs.

Again, I don't know where you got that impression from Tom's review. He clearly complains that the entire gameplay is a drag.

Seriously, dude. You're arguing with a reviewer that he doesn't know whether he actually enjoyed the game he reviewed? WTF?

Which is why my first question regarding your review was whether or not you found the game to actually be bad.

I think it's stunningly obvious that this is in fact the case.

Chris Nahr

11-15-2007, 10:12 AM

This is just a complaint I can't agree with. The levels are quite varied, with a bunch of possible rooms inside, each of which has variety to its layout.

Okay, now we're entering the outer space of fanboyism. Unless the retail game's levels are dramatically different from the incredibly boring and repetitive levels in the demo, this "variety" exists only in a purely technical sense. Yes, the pixels of the wall textures are not actually all identical. They sure look a lot as if they were, though!

Brian Rucker

11-15-2007, 10:38 AM

Back before I picked up Hellgate I was pretty excited about the randomized level layouts and yon beasties. And the truth is, the tougher the game gets the more the creature's attributes (and how they interact with other creatures with different attributes nearby) matter. I take a few seconds to sort out my best selection of weapons and tactics before running into combat. I read what the random Boss's random traits are. I plan a route of retreat if I screw up.

But, man, the maps do not matter at all. For all that work making that 3D engine there's no real "terrain effect". There are just streets, empty buildings, chambers and hallways in entirely predictable patterns. They have no real impact on the game. Now in more realistic, gritty, games randomized terrain can add a huge amount of tension because the whole feel of the map and the tactical questions it poses change. Even in abstract JRPG-tactical games these things can matter (in a Candyland meets mystical correspondences and affinities way).

Does anyone in Hellgate really spend time figuring out how to best make use of terrain and does the random quality of the maps really add all that much in this title? I love randomization, that's what got me in the door here. But it needs to mean something in gameplay terms. Not just for the sake of it.

Case

11-15-2007, 10:46 AM

HGL is about running through identical subway tunnels shooting identical weapons at identical enemies to collect their uteruses in exchange for XP and phat lewt.

Did you play the British Museum level? Or that street level with the bookstore (the name escapes me now)? Those didn't feel generic or identical at all.

Jeff Green

11-15-2007, 10:49 AM

What I don't like as much is that you attached the official score of one of the big review sources to it and intentionally gave it a much lower mark than is reasonable, with the argument that they want to use the whole scale (which is only valid if the editors there are actually enforcing the use the whole scale thing for all their reviews, which doesn't seem to be true to me).

Excuse me, but what?

He didn't give it an intentionally lower score than was reasonable--he gave it the score that he felt it deserved, and one that the magazine editors agreed with. I don't know where you're getting that we don't use the whole scale, but, in fact, GFW is one of the only current sources that DOES do that.

You may not agree with the review, but don't make false assumptions about the score. 5 is average. We all agreed Hellgate was below average. Maybe you don't think so, but Tom Chick and GFW do--at least in its current state, which is all we can review right now. (Do I think it has potential to be much better--I sure do. And that's why it's staying on my hard drive.)

Lorini

11-15-2007, 10:53 AM

The only effect I've seen of the terrain is that the Marksman's grenades bounce off of stuff, so if a monster is fortunate enough to be standing behind a fireplug or something, it's going to be dammed hard to hit him with the grenade.

I guess I'm just not good enough of a player to be able to really look at the surroundings; I'm usually so busy trying to stay alive that it doesn't matter much.

stusser

11-15-2007, 11:08 AM

Did you play the British Museum level? Or that street level with the bookstore (the name escapes me now)? Those didn't feel generic or identical at all.
Yes, there are a couple of cool set piece areas, which only emphasize how depressingly generic the rest of the game is.

mouselock

11-15-2007, 11:21 AM

Yes, and I didn't take this comment to have any deeper meaning than that. IMO you're vastly overreacting to a brief comment that I took simply to mean "I could be playing better games that also involve bashing monsters for loot."

And my fundamental dissent is that WoW and Hellgate are not both "games that involve bashing monsters for loot" in any similar circumstance. That's like calling, fuck, Auto Assault and Need for Speed "games about driving cars" in my book. I may well be on the fringe here, but this is what my confusion stems from. WoW is not at all about bashing monsters for loot to me. Moreover, the claim that that aspect of WoW makes it superlative to HG:L is flat-out crazytalk in my world. That's the most trivial and boring aspect of WoW in my world, and I literally can't understand how people could possibly enjoy playing WoW solely to whack on a monster and hope it spits forth the mythical purple.

Again, I don't know where you got that impression from Tom's review. He clearly complains that the entire gameplay is a drag.

No, he doesn't, as I highlighted by the quotes I pull out. According to those snippets he digs the fact that character types are well differentiated and enjoys the adrenaline rush of wading through throngs of demons, saving himself by the skin of his teeth with a timely health injection or antivenom.

Seriously, dude. You're arguing with a reviewer that he doesn't know whether he actually enjoyed the game he reviewed? WTF?

No, I'm trying to figure out why when he seems to like the things that I consider to be core gameplay, he ends up thinking the game is "not good". (There's also the ancillary point of the score labelling the game "bad" when he and Jeff Green both have now used "below average" instead. I'm not sure those things equate in my mind, but I guess they do for the GFW review staff?)

JPR

11-15-2007, 12:23 PM

They both described it as worse than mediocre. 5 is mediocre, 4 is bad -- one worse than mediocre.

Oh, and mediocre means 'average'.

shang

11-15-2007, 01:01 PM

Oh, and mediocre means 'average'.

Are they synonymous btw? I'm not sure since I'm not a native speaker, but I've always had the impression that "mediocre" has a more negative tone than simply average.

stusser

11-15-2007, 01:06 PM

They're not really synonymous. Mediocre has a more negative connotation than simply average.

11-15-2007, 01:08 PM

Seems like this score is punishing Hellgate since it did/has a lot of potential. I really don't think it deserves a 4.0. It's fairly fun in single player at least. I'll probably play it at least 10hrs or so. Games that are really "below average" I won't play at all. There are a lot of annoyances with it from the UI, crashing, memory leaks, and my own personal pet peeve is Hellgate's moronic idea to change the levels from a range of light/darkness as if that makes it a new graphics set. Some levels are so dark you can barely see anything even with brightness maxed. I'd rather the levels all are bright enough to navigate easily even if that means they all look exactly alike with the same light levels.

JPR

11-15-2007, 01:11 PM

They're not really synonymous. Mediocre has a more negative connotation than simply average.

I double-checked the definition before I posted -- multiple definitions, one of which is "moderate to inferior in quality", and another of which is "average".

Brian Rucker

11-15-2007, 01:12 PM

Well, I held on to my lowlight goggles from that one mission for just such situations...

Henry Wilson

11-15-2007, 01:20 PM

GfW was supportive enough to let me write the review the way I did rather than just a standard dispassionate laundry list of good/bad features. It seems your disagreement is more with my tone than the content of what I wrote, because you seem to be arguing against invented things I didn't write.

My problem with your review is the way you lead Hellgate on, suggesting that if Hellgate gets its act together it will have a chance; that things will be just like they were before, except that both of you will be wiser and richer for getting through this rough patch.

When we all know that before you dropped the bomb on Hellgate you were here telling the guys what you planned to do to it; and we all know that no matter what Hellgate does to improve itself you're going to move on to some prettier game and block Hellgate's phone number.

LordGek

11-15-2007, 01:23 PM

The game is still pretty hosed but I have FAITH it will get better.

As it is now I still suffer through the crashes and random slow downs (yeah, its Hellgate: London the Slide Show!) just because I love to see this game's ragdoll physics in action. I mean, c'mon, isn't it cool to see a Screecher drop from the sky or some Imp Trooper's crumpled body slide down a hillside?

stusser

11-15-2007, 01:25 PM

I double-checked the definition before I posted -- multiple definitions, one of which is "moderate to inferior in quality", and another of which is "average".
Yes, but that's not how it's colloquially used.

But I digress.

Thrag

11-15-2007, 01:25 PM

I had to give up trying to play multiplayer and trying to use DX10 but the game with the latest patches runs fairly well now. It still will crash occasionally when changing areas after a long play period. So far I've played a single player engineer up to level 22.

Once you are able to get down to it the killing for look is pretty fun. I like the variety of weapons. I am still using one of the first cool weapons I found because it had great bonuses and lots of upgrade slots and it shoots a large fire field. Since you can upgrade things it makes it easy to get a lot of life out of a favorite weapon or piece of armor. Great for taking care of large groups of zombies. My other main weapon is a normal sniper rifle I found that had eight upgrade slots. A quick run through the augmentrex (or whatever it's called) gave it some decent properties and the upgrade slots got it up to some 250 damage with a huge chance to "phase" an enemy. Great for bosses and other special large monsters. I liked that I could turn an ordinary weapon into a super upgraded killing machine.

The monster variety isn't bad. Zombies of various speeds, leaping lizards, flying things, all sorts of bashing and shooting demons, large brains that use invisibility to appear behind you in the heat of battle, etc. Of course all these monsters have standard brain dead AI (two modes, ignore and move directly into combat range and attack).

Terrain is useful. It's always good to get to a high place to try to pick things off from afar. On maps that are not street maps but just blasted out areas there is usually a ridge that runs all the way around the area you can use to snipe from. On street maps, jump on top of a car to get a better vantage point, and the occasional multi-story building makes a great firing location.

The story, as someone mentioned in an earlier thread, suffers from it's presentation making it hard to pay attention to or care about. Some voice acting for the dialog would have gone a long way, instead we have single sentence click through which is about the worst possible presentation since it destroys any flow the dialog might have had.

I don't worry too much about sorting my inventory since 99% of what I pick up gets disassembled right away. It's not worth the money to bring it back. You get plenty of case since all you need to spend it on is analyzers and upgrades. The only way to get decent items (other than drops) is that rare moment when the crap crafter has something useful to you.

As a single player game I'd give it a slightly above average rating. It won't be a game I rush home every night to play and finish in record time, but it will probably be something I come back to now and again for a dungeon crawling fix.

mouselock

11-15-2007, 01:34 PM

As a single player game I'd give it a slightly above average rating. It won't be a game I rush home every night to play and finish in record time, but it will probably be something I come back to now and again for a dungeon crawling fix.

That's about where I'd put it too. I'm guessing numerically on the same scale I'd rate it a 6.5 or so. Of course, right now I'd knock it up a chunk just because I've been starved for a good example of this type of game what with all the teases from Silverfall and Loki (you want to talk about bad, check out the Loki demo and its interface!).

Dalai

11-15-2007, 01:40 PM

I don't know where you're getting that we don't use the whole scale, but, in fact, GFW is one of the only current sources that DOES do that.

Brave (http://dspace.dial.pipex.com/ap2/info/marks.html)!

73% seems pretty low nowadays...

Raife

11-15-2007, 01:58 PM

Brave (http://dspace.dial.pipex.com/ap2/info/marks.html)!

That's the ugliest website I've seen in awhile. Someone should tell them that MySpace pages are not something anyone should really try to emulate.

ravenight

11-15-2007, 02:05 PM

Excuse me, but what?

He didn't give it an intentionally lower score than was reasonable--he gave it the score that he felt it deserved, and one that the magazine editors agreed with. I don't know where you're getting that we don't use the whole scale, but, in fact, GFW is one of the only current sources that DOES do that.

You may not agree with the review, but don't make false assumptions about the score. 5 is average. We all agreed Hellgate was below average. Maybe you don't think so, but Tom Chick and GFW do--at least in its current state, which is all we can review right now. (Do I think it has potential to be much better--I sure do. And that's why it's staying on my hard drive.)

The average of the 30 scores on the first page of latest reviews for 1up is 7.1 (http://www.1up.com/do/sortIndex?ct=REVIEW) - I don't know how many of those are in GfW or what GfW's average is, so I appologize if I am wrong about that, but I did check the 1up scores before posting what I said and they support the fact that 5 is just simply not average. There certainly is a wider range of scores from 1up than other sites, but that doesn't mean 5 is average.

Raife

11-15-2007, 02:34 PM

The average of the 30 scores on the first page of latest reviews for 1up is 7.1 (http://www.1up.com/do/sortIndex?ct=REVIEW) - I don't know how many of those are in GfW or what GfW's average is, so I appologize if I am wrong about that, but I did check the 1up scores before posting what I said and they support the fact that 5 is just simply not average. There certainly is a wider range of scores from 1up than other sites, but that doesn't mean 5 is average.

Are you really trying to argue that they aren't effectively scoring games on a curve? That the entire range of scores within a given time period isn't evenly distributed based on what else is out? Because that would be a really sucky way to evaluate games.

stusser

11-15-2007, 02:37 PM

Fugitive

11-15-2007, 02:38 PM

They could also simply be reviewing better-than-average games in general. Not every bit of shovelware that would drag the scores down is going to get a full review.

Hump

11-15-2007, 02:51 PM

I wish there were a way to surgically remove the weapons and upgrades and install it to another, more interesting game as its the only feature I enjoy.

Its an ugly, cynical, cheap feeling game. The Templars should be dressed in Polyester lounge-wear instead of armor.

Rob_Merritt

11-15-2007, 03:02 PM

Dave Long

11-15-2007, 03:03 PM

I haven't done anything for GFW for awhile, but they definitely wanted me to use the whole 1-10 scale when I did.

mouselock

11-15-2007, 03:04 PM

You should of scored it a thimble.

Look.. it's clearly a two camel and a kumquat caliber game.

skyride

11-15-2007, 03:17 PM

I don't quiet get Tom's MMO/WoW and GW comparisons. I don't need my Diablo clones to be Massively Multiplayer (is that something they promised?). Do I want WoW like grindiness to get any interesting drops? No thanks. I love GW but it has never scratched the loot itch like Diablo could (because in GW you can easily get maxed loot and loot makes very little difference in combat). Other than all the bugs, I think HG is a really good game. It gives you everything D2 gave and a more engaging combat experience. Ok, the story and cinematics aren't as good but that's not important to me.

ravenight

11-15-2007, 03:32 PM

Yup, one page from the month before christmas is a small atypical sample. If you want to argue that GFW isn't really scoring like they say, pull in a year or two.

No really, do it, that would be pretty interesting stuff to talk about. Certainly more so than broken-ass HGL.

Well, using that same link (which is all I have access to right now, though I suppose we could record it and talk about this again in 6 months), which has a list of reviews stretching back to 5/21/07 (295 reviews total on 10 pages), I see 53 that are less than 5.0 and 15 that are 5. Again, I'd be willing to believe this represents a significantly wider spectrum than most sites, but it still means that 5 is not an "average" score. I'm not faulting 1up or GfW for not ensuring 5 is the average, after all, if you got a 5/10 on a test it would not be an average score. I'm just saying that giving hellgate a 4.0 isn't putting it "a notch below average", it is putting it as far from average as the orange box, but in the opposite direction.

Jeff Green

11-15-2007, 03:36 PM

Well, using that same link (which is all I have access to right now, though I suppose we could record it and talk about this again in 6 months), which has a list of reviews stretching back to 5/21/07 (295 reviews total on 10 pages), I see 53 that are less than 5.0 and 15 that are 5. Again, I'd be willing to believe this represents a significantly wider spectrum than most sites, but it still means that 5 is not an "average" score. I'm not faulting 1up or GfW for not ensuring 5 is the average, after all, if you got a 5/10 on a test it would not be an average score. I'm just saying that giving hellgate a 4.0 isn't putting it "a notch below average", it is putting it as far from average as the orange box, but in the opposite direction.

Hang on a second. Once again, we are not talking about a curve here. When we say 5 means average, that doesn't mean the average score overall on the site is a 5. It means an AVERAGE GAME gets a 5. It has nothing to do with how any other games did. 5 is average. A game that is below average gets less than a 5. Is this really that hard to get?

Mordrak

11-15-2007, 03:41 PM

Hang on a second. Once again, we are not talking about a curve here. When we say 5 means average, that doesn't mean the average score overall on the site is a 5. It means an AVERAGE GAME gets a 5. It has nothing to do with how any other games did. 5 is average. A game that is below average gets less than a 5. Is this really that hard to get?
Whenever you use the word average, people will ask, "An average of what?" There has to be another word or phrase, maybe competent but unremarkable?

ravenight

11-15-2007, 03:41 PM

Hang on a second. Once again, we are not talking about a curve here. When we say 5 means average, that doesn't mean the average score overall on the site is a 5. It means an AVERAGE GAME gets a 5. It has nothing to do with how any other games did. 5 is average. A game that is below average gets less than a 5. Is this really that hard to get?

Yes - I don't understand how 3/4 of the games can be above average.

Dave Long

11-15-2007, 03:41 PM

Is this really that hard to get?
Apparently so.

The mental damage done by the 6-9 scale is off the charts!

TomChick

11-15-2007, 03:42 PM

I'm trying to figure out why when he seems to like the things that I consider to be core gameplay, he ends up thinking the game is "not good".

I don't know what to tell you, mouselock, since it's all there in the text.

At this point, it sounds to me like you're doing fanboy nitpicking at a review that doesn't like your game, complete with quotes out of context and "you should have written more about feature x" jeremiads.

I don't quiet get Tom's MMO/WoW and GW comparisons.

The GW comparison is pretty easy, since both GW and Hellgate share a lot in common. As I mentioned in the review, it does a lot of what Hellgate does, but it does it better and for free. That GW is essentially a lootless game doesn't invalidate this.

As for the MMO comparisons, that has more to do with Hellgate's business model than Hellgate's gameplay. And, frankly, I don't see the connection either. You'll have to ask Flagship/EA what they were thinking.

BTW, the game's still on my harddrive and I'm looking forward to seeing what they do with their December update.

-Tom

EDIT: Whee, we're arguing about ratings scales now! I'm glad it took until the third page of the thread, though.

espressojim

11-15-2007, 03:54 PM

Whenever you use the word average, people will ask, "An average of what?" There has to be another word or phrase, maybe competent but unremarkable?

Unremarkable compared to what?

Face it, you need a distribution of data to do any of these comparisons. You can't compare things in a vaccume. So, the question comes down to: what's the distribution you're comparing to? Are you comparing a game to "A" level games? Everything? Only projects where you know someone on the team?

mouselock

11-15-2007, 04:20 PM

I don't know what to tell you, mouselock, since it's all there in the text.

At this point, it sounds to me like you're doing fanboy nitpicking at a review that doesn't like your game, complete with quotes out of context and "you should have written more about feature x" jeremiads.

Sorry Tom. That wasn't my intention.

malkav11

11-15-2007, 04:23 PM

Okay, now we're entering the outer space of fanboyism. Unless the retail game's levels are dramatically different from the incredibly boring and repetitive levels in the demo, this "variety" exists only in a purely technical sense. Yes, the pixels of the wall textures are not actually all identical. They sure look a lot as if they were, though!

The demo has roughly two tilesets. The full game has at least ten or twelve, plus the set piece levels. This doesn't eliminate the issues of repetitiveness, but it does mitigate it and the demo (as in many other things) is not a good representation of the final product.

They really need to knock together a less offputting demo.

Grifman

11-15-2007, 04:27 PM

I just want to say that I called this almost a year ago.
... and I only played the game for 20 minutes (and no I didn't finish the game)

Even a blind hog can find an acorn every once in a while :)

Jafisob

11-15-2007, 04:39 PM

...

Inventory tedium? Why hello there mr "Drop horadric cube to disperse all it's contents so I can pick it back up, combine crap, and then re-stuff it full of stuff." Tedious and repetitive monster models? "No.. you see.. these imps are colored blue so they're different than those over there which are colored orange." Repetitive building structures? "Hey look, it's that tileset with the hidden door.. and there's the hidden door itself. You can tell because the game always places them in this configuration to make sure it works..."

....

Having played other games I have to agree with 'Inventory tedium' being a big negative factor against HGL. HGL is far more problematic than any game I have played recently as far as inventory goes. I am having to spend waaaaay too much time in my inventory, moving stuff around, and breaking things down to make room for more loot. The stuff should auto sort, stack into components of more than 20 for medpacks and the like, and should separate crafting components into their own container or just abstract them into a chart with a number next to each.

TomChick

11-15-2007, 04:56 PM

Sorry Tom. That wasn't my intention.

Well, don't be so nice. Now I feel like a jerk. Okay, you obviously did me the courtesy of going through the review I wrote, so it's only fair if I return the favor with your post.

My disagreement is with the fact that I get the impression at it's base, despite your avowed love of action RPGs, you were expecting Hellgate to be more of an MMO than an action RPG.

I hope you don't get that impression from the review. I expected Hellgate to be an action RPG with enough MMO elements to justify a monthly fee. I think it's middling as an action RPG and horrible as an MMO.

So not only do we mention WoW by name as the product competing for your valuable gaming time, but we talk about competition for online dollars.

Someone else already addressed this point, but you were taking the comment out of context.

Yeah, sure, your character classes are distinct, each its own little game (and an even better game when played in a group -- something you do your best to make difficult). But you don't go far enough with the skills, which are glib, unremarkable, and (due to a ridiculous lack of a re-spec option), a one-way trip down a tree of potentially bad choices.

So the character classes are distinct and interesting. I'm not sure how this happens with "unremarkable" skills, mind, but somehow despite the skills being unremarkable, the character classes end up being distinct and interesting. (I'm apparently not literate enough to get what you mean by "glib" skills. If you mean facile and shallow on a per skill basis, well, Whirlwind was pretty glib too, but it still made for some fantastic character builds in Diablo.) What about the underlying gameplay..?

By glib, I meant superficial, shallow, not very well thought out. I think you have the right idea.

The characters are distinct, and they make for interesting grouping. My favorite way of playing was as a Marksman in a party, picking off monsters from a distance while the tanks engaged them. It made for a very different experience than playing my Guardian, Engineer (probably my favorite class), or Evoker. It felt like a shooter set inside an action RPG. And it looked great playing that way.

So, yeah, good work with the classes. But the skills within each class -- a vital carrot in the action RPG formula! -- were a real letdown. I grind for an hour to go up a level, and my skill point goes towards shaving a half second off the cooldown time of one of my skills? Because that's not an exaggeration.

Or take my Guardian. He was my main, and the guy I used to get to the end (he was also arguably the least interesting class, but lordy, try soloing some of those level with any other class along the regular leveling curve!). By the time I was done playing, I had wasted a quarter of my Guardian's skill points on auras that were no longer useful to me. Ouch. Of the 38 hours on my /played time, that must have represented, I dunno, seven or eight of them?

You've given me moments of exhilarating sword-swinging and spell-slinging, perched at the verge of death but for a quickly quaffed antitoxin or a nick-of-time healing aura, helpfully suggested via context-sensitive Shift and Control keys.

Well, that was good too, apparently. So what's the problem?

I would refer you to context. Such as, oh, maybe the rest of the review. :)

You see those 7 splash screens, what, once per play session?

It's part of a larger point about the game. Those seven splash screens are pretty frickin' absurd and I think any company that does this deserves to be called on it.

Why are you slogging through areas you've already seen 100 times?

Maybe you should ask the guys at Flagship who designed the levels that consist of the same tunnels and streets. Because if there's some other way to level up, I'd love to know about it.

Why aren't you using the station terminals to travel unless you're explicitly farming for money/items?

What makes you think I'm not? I don't understand this question, unless you think I'm replaying levels I've already played to get back and forth among tube stops. I'm not.

What's your problem with the inventory screen? You have slots, things go into slots, just like every other PC Action RPG I've ever seen. Did you hate all of their inventory setups too, or is there something I'm missing that makes Hellgate's worse?

Where to start? No auto-sort, no easy way to see what mods are installed on what weapons, no easy way to distinguish mods from "potions", lack of info about weapons in the tooltips, no way to reference my equipped weapons from certain screens, etc., etc. I can get you more complaints if you want me to check my notes, but I find it hard to believe you can't understand complaints about the inventory interface.

I'm not entirely convinced we're even attempting to look at the same game by this point. This, btw, is why I go on and on about the multiplayer, Tom. Because you're viewing Hellgate as an MMO...Unfortunately, I was rather hoping you'd be reviewing - Hellgate: The Action RPG.

And here's where I pretty much shut down and put your post on my mental "ignore" list. Because I now know you read the review, because you were just quoting the relevant parts. How are discussions of skills, classes, inventory, and level design not a review of Hellgate as an action RPG? Seriously, dude, WTF?

Ultimately I get the feeling you actually liked the game but you didn't like the subscription model or the bugs. Which is why my first question regarding your review was whether or not you found the game to actually be bad.

Yes, actually bad. How can you not see that? I know you read the review!

Ultimately it doesn't matter since I"m enjoying the game which is all that matters for me and my $45. But I'll admit to being suspicious about whether or not I can trust your take on any action RPG any more, because you seem to weight so heavily in favor of things that aren't the core interest of action RPGs in my mind in this review.

Again, WTF? I wrote a 700-word review that discusses Hellgate as the action RPG that it is, with some comments about its feeble stab at an MMO business model. And this is what you walk away with?

-Tom

Rob_Merritt

11-15-2007, 05:08 PM

Apparently so.

The mental damage done by the 6-9 scale is off the charts!

In a 6 to 9 scale the game still probably ranks as a 4.

Mordrak

11-15-2007, 05:09 PM

Unremarkable compared to what?

Face it, you need a distribution of data to do any of these comparisons. You can't compare things in a vaccume.

Agreed, but the idea behind competent but unremarkable as opposed to average is that it doesn't evoke a specific expectation about that distribution related to the score. Saying a 5 is average creates an expectation about the actual average score on a website. Let's say that a game that is competent but unremarkable means there's no major bug related issues with the game and it doesn't offer an experience that's all that different from many other games in the market (or have been in the market).

The former leads to statistical nitpicking. They don't have to engage the game, just your site's reviews in general. The latter gets people talking about the game. If someone disagrees, they now have to look at the game and say what does this game offer (or not) as an experience?

Taranis

11-15-2007, 05:19 PM

rei

11-15-2007, 05:47 PM

The blind fanboy outrage is a little unsettling now.

Thrag

11-15-2007, 05:53 PM

I was pretty excited about this game after reading PC-GAMER's review of HGL but after reading all the complaints posted on QT3, the Demo and Tom's review all my enthusiasm has transformed into pure disappointment. How could they screw this game up?

By wasting resources trying to wedge some MMO like features in so they can justify a monthly fee instead of just concentrating on the quality of experience of the core gameplay.

ravenight

11-15-2007, 06:16 PM

The former leads to statistical nitpicking. They don't have to engage the game, just your site's reviews in general. The latter gets people talking about the game. If someone disagrees, they now have to look at the game and say what does this game offer (or not) as an experience?

Well, I don't really think you can evaluate a game in a vacuum divorced from what else is going on. If you could, then games would never get old - all the classics from the 80's and 90's would be just as fun today as they were then. But that isn't how it works.

It doesn't seem to me that HGL's inventory system is much worse than other action RPGs, e.g. Tom's complaints about it are valid, and there are things that could make it even better, but aside from not displaying the abilities granted by mods in the mouse-over, none of the things are really present in other games in the genre.

By the time I was done playing, I had wasted a quarter of my Guardian's skill points on auras that were no longer useful to me. Ouch. Of the 38 hours on my /played time, that must have represented, I dunno, seven or eight of them?

This I don't get - are you suggesting that because you wanted to reuse the skill points later you had wasted seven or eight hours? Or let me put it more directly: why is respeccing more fun? And if it is more fun, then why should you have to go through the leveling process in the first place, why not have the fun of respeccing to any possible build right from the start?

But the skills within each class -- a vital carrot in the action RPG formula! -- were a real letdown. I grind for an hour to go up a level, and my skill point goes towards shaving a half second off the cooldown time of one of my skills? Because that's not an exaggeration.

I totally agree that the extra points beyond the first should have been more powerful to make levels other than 5, 10, 15, etc (where you can access more skills) more fun and to increase the diversity between character builds even more. On the other hand, I see where they were going with it - the intent is to have it be possible to make a hybrid build that is viable, not only specialists, so you can get a significant chunk of the power that is in a particular skill from the first point. I like the concept, but the solution doesn't really work. Tabula Rasa's solution is much better: make each level of a skill a new, more powerful, separately activated ability, but increase the skill point cost at each level. That way you have both a benefit for specialization (really powerful skills) and a benefit for spreading out (you can still use most of the skills, just on a more limited basis).

TomChick

11-15-2007, 07:16 PM

Ravenight, you're taking my comment out of context. I was replying to mouselock's complaint that he didn't understand what I meant with my criticism of Hellgate's skills. I was explaining how they seemed poorly thought out. Later skills make earlier skills useless. In my book, that's a game design no-no when you have to invest so much time unlocking the skills.

Or let me put it more directly: why is respeccing more fun? And if it is more fun, then why should you have to go through the leveling process in the first place, why not have the fun of respeccing to any possible build right from the start?

Consider Titan's Quest, which uses respeccing as a money sink (I hesitate to mention World of Warcraft, lest you guys start howling that I have no business comparing Hellgate to World of Warcraft...).

Also, Titan's Quest isn't a game with six character classes and only three character slots, but with the option to pay more money for a fourth. Because, you know, if I was a cynical bastard, I'd almost guess Hellgate has a financial incentive to disallow respeccing.

Finally, I'll make a deal with you: I won't play the "fun" wild card if you won't. I mean, seriously, you want me to tell you why repeccing is "more fun"?

-Tom

stusser

11-15-2007, 07:41 PM

... and all of a sudden, a sudden hush came over the crowd, the strange muted quality you get in your ears after leaving a six hour heavy metal blowout concert. It was so quiet, so eerie you could hear a pin drop. Nobody moved. The world held its breath. A dead, dark silence. We turned and looked and Chick stood alone bathed in the spotlight's pure glare, surrounded by the velvet darkness, opened his eyes, and... smiled. We all understood the sacrifices he had made to come to this point. The pain he had endured. With tears rolling down his cheeks, he reached into his bag of tricks, deep within his being, and with exuberance borne from sheer bullish desperation pulled out his last play, his soul bared for all to see.

There followed five... ten... twelve seconds of silence. And the floodlights came on and the audience stood as one and roared in approval! I'll never forget that moment as long as I live. For we were reborn as one in light and fury and love.

Chick had played the "fun card".

And the world would never be the same.

id4698

11-15-2007, 07:51 PM

I think that someone earlier mentioned the "lack of heart" in the game, and I think that statement sums it up for me.

I played for a short time in beta, but didn't ever find myself interested in coming back. It felt more like an experiment to see what all of the hype was about. Honestly, I found combat mechanical and several lacking...slap in some boxes that you can smash (which I get is aimed at the Diablo feel), and I lost interest.

One of the other problems that I found was the strange inventory/camera thing that would happen when moving gear around. Simply equipping a weapon was like somehow steering a Soyuz capsule towards a wildly spinning space-station.

It seems that many are slamming Tom (mainly in the 1Up comments below his review), but I have to agree with him. I also agree that it says something when Mythos is actually funner to play.

Hellgate had something...a concept that I think we all get really excited about as gamers. Despite that, it is my opinion that it came up rather short.

SwampIrish

11-15-2007, 07:55 PM

EDIT: Whee, we're arguing about ratings scales now! I'm glad it took until the third page of the thread, though.

In my mind, I took you up on your bet. So you owe me a dollar. I guess owing me one in your mind evens us up.

markv

11-15-2007, 09:15 PM

I think the one thing that has been pissing me off about this game is the hit boxes from metal poles and the likes are so huge that I can't even wing a demon on the other side of it, because you know you see the bullet hitting an invisible wall 2 feet away from the pole.

I'm not sure if there's been a patch in the past week or so that has fixed it, because I haven't played it really since then because I was getting pretty annoyed at that, and the fact that my system was a thrashing nightmare after quitting from a gaming session.

Lorini

11-15-2007, 10:10 PM

stusser, I'm waiting for someone to ask Tom if he completed the game before he reviewed it <ducking>

mouselock

11-15-2007, 10:41 PM

Again, WTF? I wrote a 700-word review that discusses Hellgate as the action RPG that it is, with some comments about its feeble stab at an MMO business model. And this is what you walk away with?

-Tom

Because my mind just glosses over the negatives you quote as part and parcel of the action RPG package.

I might have actually liked to see a bit more criticism of the specifics like the mention of it being a pain to tell what mods you have on your weapons. That, for example, resonates more with me than vague criticisms of the inventory in general, because to me the inventory system in all the "good" action RPGs sucks anyway, and I didn't get why the Hellgate one sucked more. (And maybe it doesn't, but it's just that it fails to suck less along with all sorts of other things that fail to suck less.)

Ultimately I guess it's just a disconnect between the review and the implicit (and apparently ingrained) assumption on my part that you being a fan of action RPGs meant tacit acceptance of this stuff which seems to be part and parcel of the genre (inventory tetris, killing and re-killing the same monsters over and over again, inability to reassign skills and the fact that if you really want a primo character build you're generally required to go the "hard" route early on to save skill points for later skills, etc.).

Thanks for the clarification. I really wasn't trying to nitpick, but rather understand.

mouselock

11-15-2007, 10:42 PM

By wasting resources trying to wedge some MMO like features in so they can justify a monthly fee instead of just concentrating on the quality of experience of the core gameplay.

Given what I've seen of the premium content, I'm not particularly convinced they wasted a whole lot of resources coming up with it.

mouselock

11-15-2007, 10:50 PM

It seems that many are slamming Tom (mainly in the 1Up comments below his review), but I have to agree with him. I also agree that it says something when Mythos is actually funner to play.

I've seen this comment a number of times. What makes Mythos better to folks? It's got amazingly similar skill tree structures and loot patterning. And even less choice in terms of classes.

ravenight

11-15-2007, 10:55 PM

No, I think it's best we don't get into the respeccing vs. not, since I doubt there's anyone who would be swayed to either side by some arguments in a forum. My point was simply that not everyone agrees that respeccing is always more fun, and that the reason is the same one as why they enjoy leveling in the first place.

However,

Consider Titan's Quest, which uses respeccing as a money sink...
Also, Titan's Quest isn't a game with six character classes and only three character slots, but with the option to pay more money for a fourth. Because, you know, if I was a cynical bastard, I'd almost guess Hellgate has a financial incentive to disallow respeccing.

They do have one - people replay the game more when there is no respeccing than when there is respeccing. Replaying the game means going through varied content again, rather than sitting in the same levels at the end game grinding, which leads to more replayability and hence, more customers continuing to pay.

Speaking of Titan's Quest, it really baffles me that you think HGL is vastly inferior to it. I would say that they are mostly on par for the same price, with HGL getting points for 3D action, better items and some secure server play, and TQ getting points for better polish - especially with the stuff surrounding the plot, and a larger number of skills and skill tree combinations. But then HGL has this wild card of potentially being much more enjoyable down the road because of the subscription-based content. (I do hope that if significant improvements get made down the line the game be re-reviewed, though I have no idea if any significant improvements will be made). It really seems like most of your complaints are that you think the game could have been so much better than it is, not things that would actually cause such a bad score in a game with lower expectations.

I guess it's just a really hit or miss game - either you wanted an FPS attached to a slot machine, with the rest being gravy that could have tasted better, or you wanted some other thing that they couldn't deliver and won't settle for just and FPS attached to a slot machine. For those of us who have been waiting for a fast-paced loot-oriented game for almost 6 years, HGL just needed to be a beginning - get the core gameplay working and the rest is just details to work out in patches - and HGL nails that core gameplay right down the middle. That sounds like fanboyism, and I suppose it is, but it isn't blind fanboyism because it is based on actually playing the game.

Kunikos

11-15-2007, 10:57 PM

Talisker

11-15-2007, 11:00 PM

They do have one - people replay the game more when there is no respeccing than when there is respeccing.
I take it you hate games that let you save anywhere, too.

ravenight

11-15-2007, 11:08 PM

I've seen this comment a number of times. What makes Mythos better to folks? It's got amazingly similar skill tree structures and loot patterning. And even less choice in terms of classes.

Well, it has more straightforward similarity to D2, so it is much easier to fall into the familiar pattern. It definitely doesn't do as much cool stuff, like have weapons whose pattern of fire actually matters, but it does have a really large number of skills per class and I think the freedom of being able to design a much wider variety of characters (including the fact that there are few if any class-specific items) appeals a lot more to gamers who wanted to see an iteration of D2, not the huge change that HGL is. I actually like Mythos a lot (possibly more than HGL, I'm not sure - it is still unfinished, though) for that reason, but I also like that HGL brings some innovation to the formula. Both the games together show that FSS understands how to pace and itemize an action RPG in a way that other companies don't seem to get (including Iron Lore, though TQ was a lot closer than some of the other things I've tried).

mouselock

11-15-2007, 11:11 PM

It's colorful, free, and plays more like Diablo.

By "plays more like Diablo" do you mean isometric or...? I'm probably being obtuse again, but all of these games mentioned (Hellgate, Mythos, Titan's Quest, not so much on the WoW) seem to play more or less "equally" like Diablo. No, strike that, I think the hellgate weapon mod system nudges it slightly more toward D2 + Expansion.

One thing I really really dislike about Mythos is the choice to do the "shadowing" thing when you walk under obscuring geometry instead of the fading walls thing. That bugs me a lot for some reason.

mouselock

11-15-2007, 11:15 PM

I take it you hate games that let you save anywhere, too.

That's a rather glib rejoinder. I suspect there's not a small portion of Diablo II players like myself for whom the main fun bit of the game is coming up with character builds and gear for those builds. I distinctly remember seeing a runeword-crossbow'd sorceress build in diablo that used bizarre sorceress talents along with an odd runeworded crossbow to make some abomination who basically shot huge balls of exploding fiery bolted death at things. That was fantastic to me, finding this wholly unexpected method of playing a non-weapon based (traditionally) character, and then planning and executing for it, including figuring out how to get through the lower levels when you had neither the superb weapon nor the facile use of low-level skill points (because you needed them for later and couldn't spend them now).

ravenight

11-15-2007, 11:16 PM

I take it you hate games that let you save anywhere, too.

No - I think they are completely different things. Respeccing isn't like saving your game, unless you mean something like saving right before a battle in Civ so that you can make sure you beat it.

I really do think that being able to change to any skill configuration hurts gameplay as much as being able to make a character of any level or being able to design the exact weapon you want - there is no fee that could be attached to that that wouldn't take interesting gameplay and change it to mindless grinding.

Now, that said, I think there are good reasons to have respeccing, in certain games, and a game focused on competitve PvP is one of them. Guild Wars, for instance.

Mordrak

11-15-2007, 11:59 PM

Well, I don't really think you can evaluate a game in a vacuum divorced from what else is going on. If you could, then games would never get old - all the classics from the 80's and 90's would be just as fun today as they were then. But that isn't how it works.

It's not the game that changes, but us. Games would get stale, even if new games never came out. But you missed my point. Saying a game is competent but unremarkable is taking into account other games. It's just not a numerical calculation.

Let's say 5 is competent, but unremarkable. Let's also say that most games receive a 7 or above. How can these both coexist? Well that's because most games might be remarkable. They attempt to manipulate the genre or gameplay structures enough that their experience is distinct and they excel in one or more areas. If we say 5 is average, but then the average turns out to be 7, people like you get up in arms about it.

It doesn't seem to me that HGL's inventory system is much worse than other action RPGs, e.g. Tom's complaints about it are valid, and there are things that could make it even better, but aside from not displaying the abilities granted by mods in the mouse-over, none of the things are really present in other games in the genre.

Many of the UI problems are more than just not functional. Tom brought up one of my personal pet peeves about the game, which is the amount of techno-junk that clutters my inventory. The icons are bland and hard to make out due to their size. I can't intuitively look at the icon and determine what it does (or have a good guess). Not only that, even once I do know what it looks like, most crafting or one-use items are only one square. Since the designs are not distinct, it's tough at a glance to figure out what's what. The very limited inventory space while you're playing only makes that junk more frustrating. I don't look at my inventory and say, "Wow, look at all this neat gear!" Instead I say, "Look at all this crap."

That's just one example, but there are many others. However this post is going to be long enough as it is.

Speaking of Titan's Quest, it really baffles me that you think HGL is vastly inferior to it. I would say that they are mostly on par for the same price, with HGL getting points for 3D action, better items and some secure server play.
Titan Quest succesfully iterated on the genre, both by including respecs and through its mastery system. It's much more flexible and interesting than Hellgate with its traditional MMO like class and item structures.

Titan Quest was 3D also. If you hadn't noticed, buildings in Hellgate basically serve as the edge of 2D map. Both are basically 2D games using 3D graphics. Lastly, secure server play only matters if you are competing with strangers in some way.

It's also handy that Titan Quest, you know, actually works and was relatively bug free at launch. There was one major online bug that made me put it down for awhile though.

But then HGL has this wild card of potentially being much more enjoyable down the road because of the subscription-based content. (I do hope that
if significant improvements get made down the line the game be re-reviewed, though I have no idea if any significant improvements will be made).

So they should be reviewing the game based on what it might be in some alternate future universe rather than how it is right here and now?

It really seems like most of your complaints are that you think the game could have been so much better than it is, not things that would actually cause such a bad score in a game with lower expectations.

Yes, my complaint is that it is a bad game and I'd rather play a good one.

It's colorful, free, and plays more like Diablo.

You forgot to mention stable, at least from what I've played. When Mythos stops being free (ie you start noticing you have to pay for the good items), it might become un-fun.

Jafisob

11-16-2007, 12:12 AM

malkav11

11-16-2007, 02:19 AM

KieronGillen

11-16-2007, 06:11 AM

That one is debatable. I like isometric games (and sort of miss having them around, these days).

I'd say it was very debatable. Frankly, some stuff you can get away with in isometric feels incredibly odd in first-person. For me, that was one of my many problems with my initial play with Hellgate in Beta, and why I never went back.

KG

KieronGillen

11-16-2007, 06:14 AM

That's the ugliest website I've seen in awhile. Someone should tell them that MySpace pages are not something anyone should really try to emulate.

It was made in 1997 or so and not updated since.

KG

Rollory

11-16-2007, 06:19 AM

HAY GUYZ so every time I load this forum I see this at the top and I read it as "Demon goat rape" and I wonder if I'm on 4chan or something.

Tom, better subject next time plzkthx.

Anaxagoras

11-16-2007, 06:50 AM

I have not played HGL, so I have no idea if Tom's review was accurate or fair.

But man... that was one of the best written reviews I've read in a awhile.

Brian Rucker

11-16-2007, 07:30 AM

I think respecs are particularly vital for Hellgate because it simply isn't obvious how skills will play until you try them. Particularly for Evokers. The fact that spell damage is based on your focus items means that the primary differences between them lie in the way the attack manifests and any secondary characteristics it might have. And the tooltips don't tell you the former and don't always tell you the latter, either. (Although to be fair, the secondary effect system is fairly easy to pick up.)

Beyond that the whole depth of character design and how, after reading the forums over there, Diablo players approach this kind of game - well, it's not really explicitly laid out in the manual. Anything beyond the very surface of what things do simply doesn't exist in either the manual or the tooltips. You can't expect, in this day and age, most players to keep banging their heads against a wall and enjoying it unless, of course, that's a freakin' selling point for the game!

Hey folks! Got alot of time on your hands? Mother's basement getting you down?

Of course, look at the demographics ten years on from the Diablo era. Many of us are the mothers (and fathers) with Cartmanesque brats in our basements now. What once was pretty acceptable just isn't quite the same anymore but, I'm sure, there are still folks out there who like that classic experience. And probably the gold standard.

calvin940

11-16-2007, 07:34 AM

Everyone who is not disingenuous or obtuse comes down on the side of allowing respecs.

Or they like going to the dentist and asking for no anesthetic when they get wisdom teeth pulled.

Rob_Merritt

11-16-2007, 07:44 AM

Look.. it's clearly a two camel and a kumquat caliber game.

I'll give you the two camels but you are totally over rating Hellgate with add that kumquat to the score.

Brian Rucker

11-16-2007, 07:56 AM

For all the issues and annoyances and valid criticisms I find myself still trying to play. The ultimate killer though is that, even after turning down my graphics options, I'm still getting the memory error as well as constant issues with the online service - where my main character is and where my friends are. On some level there's a pretty fun little game here. I think the problem is that somehow it just got too big for its britches.

mouselock

11-16-2007, 08:32 AM

Titan Quest succesfully iterated on the genre, both by including respecs and through its mastery system. It's much more flexible and interesting than Hellgate with its traditional MMO like class and item structures.

This is where personal opinion comes into play. I've had the Titan's Quest expansion forever because when TQ came out I bought it and played through it, once, and figured the expansion with new content at the end would revitalize that. Not so much.

Why? Because while I could respec, I still had to build a new character with new masteries from scratch. But, moreover, because at it's heart the item chase in TQ was ultimately unfulfilling. The item chase worked against itself.. in Diablo and Hellgate you want to get the rarer items. A good rare with lots of slots leads to great customization potential. In TQ you can attach one relic, and that only on a certain threshold of item and below. That crippled the game for me, and I'm glad to see that Hellgate not only goes back to tremendous amounts of customization, but one-ups Diablo by having different types of slots.

As for cluttering up your inventory, well, it's just like TQ in that way to me. You start off saving anything because it might be cool. Then you start to summarily destroy normal crap. Then you start to only care about greens with +skills. Then only blues. Ammo and other augments work the same way. I don't see how it's any more fiddly to manage the ammo/batteries/etc in Hellgate than it is to manage relic bits in TQ. Hell, at least Hellgate doesn't drop the same bits on you over and over again and yet put them in different slots. (Having to do the drop-shuffle combine of relics near the end of a run before I'd ported back to town to sell in TQ was exceedingly tedious.)

This is the same thing that confused me about Tom's review: I can't think of a game that's done the inventory management any better, so why is it such a sin for Hellgate when it apparently was only a middling quibble for previous games?

mouselock

11-16-2007, 08:34 AM

I think respecs are particularly vital for Hellgate because it simply isn't obvious how skills will play until you try them. Particularly for Evokers. The fact that spell damage is based on your focus items means that the primary differences between them lie in the way the attack manifests and any secondary characteristics it might have. And the tooltips don't tell you the former and don't always tell you the latter, either. (Although to be fair, the secondary effect system is fairly easy to pick up.)

Well I'd say that documentation is more important than respeccing personally, but summoners have a similar issue. I was all excited when I got to where I could buy the summon witchdoctor skill: I'd finally have a healer to help heal my carnagor while he was tanking. Except apparently you can only have a carnagor or a witch-doctor out at a given time. This makes the witch-doctor decidedly less appealing, because the only thing he heals at that point is me, and I don't want to be taking damage!

mouselock

11-16-2007, 08:35 AM

I'll give you the two camels but you are totally over rating Hellgate with add that kumquat to the score.

Hey.. if you're the type of person that likes this genre of the game, you'll clearly feel the kumquat is warranted. Hell, given a few patches it might even be a two kumquat game.

Njal

11-16-2007, 09:07 AM

Well, I bought a lifetime membership yesterday. I love the core gameplay. I also agreed a lot with mouselock on Tom's review in that I thought he liked it more that the score showed (obviously I was wrong), however I also agree completely with Tom's review except perhaps in the final score.

Obviously I like it enough to drop $200 on it despite it's flaws. I feel that like D2 I will keep coming back to this over time for years. In the mean time it's still a blast despite crashes and annoying interface stupidity. Mind you I'm using TS with my friend to play the game so the chat interface remains a happy (in that I'm not using it) mystery to me.

Raife

11-16-2007, 09:31 AM

It was made in 1997 or so and not updated since.

They have multiple layouts you can choose from beyond the original style, and those actually make it worse. Also, the website says the last update was August of 2006, but maybe "AP2 is finished" was referring to that Aliens vs. Predator sequel.

I used to have some respect for you, Kieron, but now you're lumped in with that Chick guy who wantonly scores his reviews. Way to go.

Islanti

11-16-2007, 09:46 AM

The GW comparison is pretty easy, since both GW and Hellgate share a lot in common. As I mentioned in the review, it does a lot of what Hellgate does, but it does it better and for free. That GW is essentially a lootless game doesn't invalidate this.It's interesting to note that both Guild Wars and Hellgate were developed by ex-Blizzard folks (more so with Hellgate, but Arena.net was founded by some big names from Blizzard).

Desslock

11-16-2007, 09:52 AM

Jeff Green

11-16-2007, 10:00 AM

I really could care less about respecs - in fact, if anything, I prefer not having them, since they make the game less of an RPG, imo. They seem more of an MMO concept, that I'd rather not see imported into more action-RPGs - they feel too "gamey" to me.

You're worried about action-RPGs feeling too...."gamey"? Why? Because normally they're more like sims?

Respecs only give players more options. It's like the endless save-game debate. If respecs simplify stuff for you too much, or feel like a "cheat"--then don't use them. Be Mr. Hardcore. But denying them to all players is, IMHO, like what other people are saying here--making gamers bang their heads against a wall just cuz you think it's good for them. Titan Quest totally proved you can do this and do it right---just "charge" players up the wazoo with in-game money, so that it's a cost, a trade-off.

Why deny players more options?

ravenight

11-16-2007, 10:03 AM

It's not the game that changes, but us. Games would get stale, even if new games never came out. But you missed my point. Saying a game is competent but unremarkable is taking into account other games. It's just not a numerical calculation.

Let's say 5 is competent, but unremarkable. Let's also say that most games receive a 7 or above. How can these both coexist? Well that's because most games might be remarkable. They attempt to manipulate the genre or gameplay structures enough that their experience is distinct and they excel in one or more areas. If we say 5 is average, but then the average turns out to be 7, people like you get up in arms about it.

My point is that if the bell curve of scores centers around 7 with a standard deviation of less than 2 (I'm just approximating here for the sake of an example, I haven't run the numbers), then it really doesn't matter what name you use for the rating 4, the rating still means "well over a standard deviation below average". It still means that 75-80% of games that come out are better than the one you gave the 4, and I think that is not a good indication of where hellgate lies.

Titan Quest succesfully iterated on the genre, both by including respecs and through its mastery system. It's much more flexible and interesting than Hellgate with its traditional MMO like class and item structures.

I don't think HGL's class or item structure is any more MMO-like than TQ's unless you mean simply that defining the class as combination of 2 half-classes is somehow different. The end result is the same, though, they both have a static number of classes, with TQ having many more classes but also much more overlap between them. The big difference between them and traditional MMO classes is that there are no skills you get just for leveling - you have to spend points on which skills you want and are generally better of specializing in a few of them than trying to do everything.

Also, I think HGL successfully iterates on the genre by increasing the speed of action, the item vacuuming, adding mod slots, the augmentrex and nano-forge, the varied status effects, the mini-game and the randomly appearing sub-levels. It also innovates by switching to an FPS-oriented style that I think is interesting but ultimately seems to have been off-putting to many. It adds an element of twich skill to the game that wasn't there before, but doesn't seem to add enough twitch for those who really like twitch to be satisfied. I do think it could make for really interesting PvP if they get some sort of arena going.

Titan Quest was 3D also. If you hadn't noticed, buildings in Hellgate basically serve as the edge of 2D map. Both are basically 2D games using 3D graphics. Lastly, secure server play only matters if you are competing with strangers in some way.

No, HGL is truly 3D in that you can be above or below enemies and unable to reach them with melee attacks (or be reached) - there aren't a ton of levels that show this off, unfortunately, but it is there. Plus jumping on objects and using them as cover is a significant change from the play of previous ARPGs.

Secure servers matter to me for the sake of trading with a large community.

So they should be reviewing the game based on what it might be in some alternate future universe rather than how it is right here and now?

That isn't what I said at all, but let's be clear here: Reviewers certainly can't review a game based on promises or potential, because those things have no guarantee of becoming reality. However, what is the point of even recording the review score if it is fixed in place at the moment it happens and never updated to reflect the actual state of the game? Both Jeff and Tom find the game essentially unplayable right now, but believe it has a chance of improving significantly with the right patches/content updates. Since we know there will be patches and content updates, we know that the game as it exists after the Dec patch will not be the same one that was reviewed. It may not be any better, but if it is (or if it is worse) there is no process by which that information is conveyed to consumers.

You forgot to mention stable, at least from what I've played. When Mythos stops being free (ie you start noticing you have to pay for the good items), it might become un-fun.

BTW, The Mythos devs have said there won't be any items in the game that can't be acquired for free, because you can trade for the purchased currency.

Lorini

11-16-2007, 10:12 AM

How about something in between? You could re-spec 1 point for every 5/10 spent. I understand that from FSS's point of view, you are not creating a 'main' character, they want you to create lots of characters. OTOH, gimping a character forever because of a mis-click seems cruel. At some point I would hope that there would be builds posted on fansites somewhere where folks could get an idea on what is effective. Although I'm very curious if the weapons you get significantly influence your spec. My highest character is 12, so I wouldn't know yet.

Desslock

11-16-2007, 10:13 AM

You're worried about action-RPGs feeling too...."gamey"? Why? Because normally they're more like sims?

No, I'd just rather they be more like "RPGs", and emphasize that aspect -- where choices are meaningful, and reflect a personalized adventure.

Respecs only give players more options. It's like the endless save-game debate. If respecs simplify stuff for you too much, or feel like a "cheat"--then don't use them. [snip] Why deny players more options?

Why deny players the right to max out a character right away then? Why not allow players the right to make themselves invulnerable? Why not allow players to explode all enemies with a button press? Why deny players more options?

Being able to instantly reverse all of your character development choices is no more, or less, of a cheat than any of the above. They all essentially allow you to skip making the consequential choices, and dealing with the consequences, that make up the heart of an RPG.

I can completely understand why someone would want to skip that stuff because they consider it busywork and they just want to try different stuff whenever they want, and don't want to make consequential choices, but it "breaks" the game in the same way cheat codes do, from my perspective, so it's certainly not something I miss or would ever penalize a game for not including (which is all I'm saying - not that there's a "right" or "wrong" type of game, or that people shouldn't argue for the inclusion of cheat codes that they enjoy using).

Brian Rucker

11-16-2007, 10:17 AM

I suppose my problem is that so much of the game feels so very repetative, something that good randomization systems should allieviate, that it's really not much fun doing it all over and over again with the same general type of character just because you made some bad skill picks. And the fact of the matter is Hellgate doesn't remotely even equip a new player to make good skill choices. It's also, at least for some of us, not quite compelling enough to make us old players.

At least not in the state it's currently in.

Raife

11-16-2007, 10:20 AM

It still means that 75-80% of games that come out are better than the one you gave the 4, and I think that is not a good indication of where hellgate lies.

Right, we get that. However, this windmill you're tilting at doesn't look like it's going to move, so you should probably put your time into more productive efforts. Like maybe starting a magazine to review computer games where you'll have the editorial control to fanboy out.

That isn't what I said at all, but let's be clear here: Reviewers certainly can't review a game based on promises or potential, because those things have no guarantee of becoming reality. However, what is the point of even recording the review score if it is fixed in place at the moment it happens and never updated to reflect the actual state of the game? Both Jeff and Tom find the game essentially unplayable right now, but believe it has a chance of improving significantly with the right patches/content updates. Since we know there will be patches and content updates, we know that the game as it exists after the Dec patch will not be the same one that was reviewed. It may not be any better, but if it is (or if it is worse) there is no process by which that information is conveyed to consumers.

Maybe they'll revisit it again at some point, you have no way of knowing either way. Now you're arguing that their review should somehow take into account whatever updates a game may or may not have at some point in the future. Release is now. This is the product people will or will not buy.

Desslock

11-16-2007, 10:28 AM

I suppose my problem is that so much of the game feels so very repetative, something that good randomization systems should allieviate.

It's funny, I actually think the perspective makes the repetitiveness of the tilesets far more noticeable and annoying. Compared to Diablo 2, for instance, there's obviously far more tilesets and variations within tilesets - the "randomness" in D2/Diablo 1, and those isometric perspective games essentially just consists of random walls and barriers - there's no meaningful, interesting exploration, and it's not really missed. In a first person perspective, that lack of variety seems more evident and boring. Hellgate is like City of Heroes in that respect.

Alistair

11-16-2007, 10:29 AM

Being able to instantly reverse all of your character development choices is no more, or less, of a cheat than any of the above.

These things should be user options, and you play in whatever mode works for you...

ravenight

11-16-2007, 10:45 AM

Maybe they'll revisit it again at some point, you have no way of knowing either way. Now you're arguing that their review should somehow take into account whatever updates a game may or may not have at some point in the future. Release is now. This is the product people will or will not buy.

No, what I'm saying is what I said at the beginning: they (=reviews in general) should divorce their release-day deadline-driven buying recommendation from their rating of a game that is saved on the site and attempts to provide some indication of the value of the game in general.

DDO is actually a really good example of this. The game has changed an awful lot since its release, and though I haven't gone back to play it (except for on one of the "old accounts play free" weekends), so many things are different that any reviews from just after release are probably poor indications of the current experience of playing the game. Since they haven't release an expansion, only updates, they haven't gotten any new reviews, and this is a failing of the current review system.

Mordrak

11-16-2007, 10:48 AM

Why? Because while I could respec, I still had to build a new character with new masteries from scratch. But, moreover, because at it's heart the item chase in TQ was ultimately unfulfilling. The item chase worked against itself.. in Diablo and Hellgate you want to get the rarer items.

The item chase for uniques was enough for me in Titan Quest. You are right there is less item customization, but since you are more so defined by you're class in these games (or skillpoint selection), that outweighs the item customization. Also, iirc, Titan Quest didn't have class specific gear, so in that way, it was more flexible than Hellgate.

That crippled the game for me, and I'm glad to see that Hellgate not only goes back to tremendous amounts of customization, but one-ups Diablo by having different types of slots.

Diablo had different types that went into the same slots. Not much of a difference. From what I could tell of from the beta, the different types of slots are basically an illusion. Any stat can be can be generated on any mod. It's not like battery mod slots only have x, y, or z effect. This could have changed for all I know, but the extent of thought that went into slotting weapons was does it match the hole in my weapon. Weee.

As for cluttering up your inventory, well, it's just like TQ in that way to me. You start off saving anything because it might be cool. Then you start to summarily destroy normal crap. Then you start to only care about greens with +skills. Then only blues.

Except that I can quickly determine what I want to pick up (using the filtering of the alt,x,z keys) and move on. The vacuuming aspect of Hellgate's item pick ups means I'm constantly stopping while I play to finagle with my limited space. Also, like I addressed in my post, Titan Quests icons are distinctive enough (and items limited enough) that inventory management isn't a chore. Plus Titan Quest is allowed to expand your inventory space in the game because it's not using it as draw for a monthly fee.

Hellgate with all these different mod slots, item buffs, crafting components, make your inventory look like a mess.

Ammo and other augments work the same way. I don't see how it's any more fiddly to manage the ammo/batteries/etc in Hellgate than it is to manage relic bits in TQ. Hell, at least Hellgate doesn't drop the same bits on you over and over again and yet put them in different slots. (Having to do the drop-shuffle combine of relics near the end of a run before I'd ported back to town to sell in TQ was exceedingly tedious.)

I'm not really sure what you're talking about here. I did have to spend time occasionally combining runes, but not that often.

This is the same thing that confused me about Tom's review: I can't think of a game that's done the inventory management any better, so why is it such a sin for Hellgate when it apparently was only a middling quibble for previous games?
Titan Quest's was better. It increased your space over the game, the expansion added item sorts and shared slots between characters. It was easy to distinguish what was what in my inventory at a glance.

My point is that if the bell curve of scores centers around 7 with a standard deviation of less than 2 (I'm just approximating here for the sake of an example, I haven't run the numbers), then it really doesn't matter what name you use for the rating 4, the rating still means "well over a standard deviation below average". It still means that 75-80% of games that come out are better than the one you gave the 4, and I think that is not a good indication of where hellgate lies.

Actually, that depends on if the site reviews every single game that ever comes out. I'm not sure even shotgun sites like Gamespot or 1UP manage that. The technical problems alone put it below most games, let alone the design problems and the shitty subscriber system. Had it played just fine and cleaned up its interface and had a semblance of the story they seemed to be selling in their marketing cinemas, I might agree with you.

I don't think HGL's class or item structure is any more MMO-like than TQ's unless you mean simply that defining the class as combination of 2 half-classes is somehow different. The end result is the same, though, they both have a static number of classes, with TQ having many more classes but also much more overlap between them. The big difference between them and traditional MMO classes is that there are no skills you get just for leveling - you have to spend points on which skills you want and are generally better of specializing in a few of them than trying to do everything.

I was referring to most of the gear being class based rather than stat based and the strange emphasis members during beta were putting on using typical MMO nomenclature (the guardian is a tank, etc).

Also, I think HGL successfully iterates on the genre by increasing the speed of action, the item vacuuming, adding mod slots, the augmentrex and nano-forge, the varied status effects, the mini-game and the randomly appearing sub-levels.

The mod slots aren't original, they just upped the types of slots. I'm not sure that's an improvement really. Gear upgrading is nice, but whatever the hell it was that added properties to your gear is a very shallow gambling system. I would have preferred armor modding similar to weapons. That's more involving.

Also, the gambling system in Diablo 2 is devilishly designed. It refreshes items (since you are usually looking for specific item types) every time you leave the outpost or town. So the game encourages to go out and fight monsters and come back to see what's populated the gambling npc. Hellgate just eats all your money without the intermediate reward of seeing the item type you're looking for pop up. It's strange that the missing step makes Hellgate's property machine feel shallow, but it does.

That's an example of the pacing that Hellgate is missing in general. Diablo 2's gambling builds to a climax. Hellgate's doesn't.

It also innovates by switching to an FPS-oriented style that I think is interesting but ultimately seems to have been off-putting to many. It adds an element of twich skill to the game that wasn't there before, but doesn't seem to add enough twitch for those who really like twitch to be satisfied. I do think it could make for really interesting PvP if they get some sort of arena going.

So SHUMPs aren't twitchy? FPS-style isn't what makes it twitchy. It's the speed of combat. Other than the marksman class, there isn't a whole of of twitch based aiming in the game at least any more so than other games in the genre.

mouselock

11-16-2007, 10:52 AM

These things should be user options, and you play in whatever mode works for you...

Why? The developer's job is to build a compelling experience, not to anticipate any of a myriad number of customer needs. If Hellgate were so overwhelmingly fantastic that nobody could start playing, this "necessary option" of respeccing would be a minor nitpick, nothing more.

Having more options doesn't inherently make a game better. Allowing a user "full control" over a game doesn't either.

Brian Rucker

11-16-2007, 10:53 AM

It's funny, I actually think the perspective makes the repetitiveness of the tilesets far more noticeable and annoying. Compared to Diablo 2, for instance, there's obviously far more tilesets and variations within tilesets - the "randomness" in D2/Diablo 1, and those isometric perspective games essentially just consists of random walls and barriers - there's no meaningful, interesting exploration, and it's not really missed. In a first person perspective, that lack of variety seems more evident and boring. Hellgate is like City of Heroes in that respect.

Yeah, I've heard the CoH/CoV comparison before too. Maybe the first person/over-the-shoulder perspective is a factor but, oddly, that's what tends to draw me in more than Diablo/D2 did.

I didn't play a huge amount of Diablo, because I also found that pretty repetative, and stats really are no substitute for inherent narrative qualities in a game design when it comes to a game being a platform for story generation. For example, I could probably fire up a randomly generated scenario of X-Com or Falcon 4, and walk away with enough unique seeming incidents I could build a little story around what happened inside that engine. I can't really fault Hellgate for this as no CRPGs, action or otherwise, really seem to do this well short of maybe Darkland.

But coming down to the maps alone, because that's kind of key, it just doesn't seem that randomization is really helping Hellgate out. The randomized foes, sure - to an extent, but aside from figuring out if there are explosive cannisters handy - what does terrain really do for you? Between tilesets, sure, there are different considerations. Is my sniper rifle and beacon or my pair of machine pistols and autofire going to be more handy? But within those tilesets the choices and decisions are almost autopilotable.

I'm still finding my urge to play strong enough I log on for a bit until the exe chokes or the net drops. I have to credit that to the first-person view and the visceral fun of some of the weaponry. But I'm less and less obsessed with skills or loot because I know I'm really just making an experimental character that will be deleted for the "real" one once I know what I'm doing, which I won't even then, because until I max out particular combinations of skills and pair them with assorted items/powerups I won't have a clue to what they do really.

Maybe that's enough of a draw for some people. I love learning the ropes of a game that can hold my interest and the deeper it is the longer my interest lasts. But the sheer lack of variables in the randomization engine in Hellgate really isn't holding my interest very well and the bugs are stomping out even those stubborn embers.

Anyhow. Long enough, last post on Hellgate until the patch. I've got other games to play.

The Bitter Cynic

11-16-2007, 11:09 AM

I like the game.

I like Tom's review too.

Did anyone notice the TARDIS in the London Museum?

Desslock

11-16-2007, 11:40 AM

Did anyone notice the TARDIS in the London Museum?

I think it's a randomly placed Easter Egg.

Fugitive

11-16-2007, 12:19 PM

Did anyone notice the TARDIS in the London Museum?
I saw it once, but I can't remember where. I think it had "Strange Box" written on it instead of "Police Box", too.

Thrag

11-16-2007, 12:34 PM

id4698

11-16-2007, 05:08 PM

No, I'd just rather they be more like "RPGs", and emphasize that aspect -- where choices are meaningful, and reflect a personalized adventure.

Why deny players the right to max out a character right away then? Why not allow players the right to make themselves invulnerable? Why not allow players to explode all enemies with a button press? Why deny players more options?

Being able to instantly reverse all of your character development choices is no more, or less, of a cheat than any of the above. They all essentially allow you to skip making the consequential choices, and dealing with the consequences, that make up the heart of an RPG.

I can completely understand why someone would want to skip that stuff because they consider it busywork and they just want to try different stuff whenever they want, and don't want to make consequential choices, but it "breaks" the game in the same way cheat codes do, from my perspective, so it's certainly not something I miss or would ever penalize a game for not including (which is all I'm saying - not that there's a "right" or "wrong" type of game, or that people shouldn't argue for the inclusion of cheat codes that they enjoy using).

I think that you completely missed Jeff's point...and more than that, just aren't getting it.

Desslock

11-16-2007, 05:13 PM

I think that you completely missed Jeff's point...and more than that, just aren't getting it.

Try again. I'm certainly not getting your "no. you don't get it", because you haven't elucidated why.

Let me try to explain my perspective again -- there's no right/wrong here, there's just personal preferences about what makes the better game. In my opinion, you can't remove choices, and the consequences associated with those choices, and have a meaningful roleplaying experience. Why have an RPG's character development system at all, if you can immediately circumvent it by creating any type of character you want - if that's an "option" that is a positive feature, why not just allow players to choose whatever level they want, and whatever skills they want, at any time? Those are all just "options", which people could use, or not.

Similarly, why not just allow me to skip fighting altogether, by being invulnerable or being able to destroy anything I want. There's no end of cheat code/options people can develop that could possibly be included in a game -- I don't think a game is better for including them - in fact, I think it's a cheat for designers to avoid developing a balanced, interesting game, if you just allow all choices to be meaningless or reversible.

I can understand some people liking the freedom to basically waltz their way through the game however they want, in the same way some people play shooters on the easiest difficulty level so they don't actually have to play the game or develop any skill in it in order to see the storyline, etc. But I have no interest in that myself, and I think it cheapens any sense of achievement granted to other gamers, and inconsequential choices actually "break" an RPG and make it uninteresting for me personally, so I'm certainly not going to penalize a developer, or mention the lack of those cheats as a meaningful omission, for designing a game without them.

id4698

11-16-2007, 05:27 PM

Try again. I'm certainly not getting your "no. you don't get it", because you haven't elucidated why.

You are right, I didn't and I apologize.

I think that you are missing the point because of the simple fact that you angled his point towards the word "cheat".

In my view, having an option to respec is not even remotely like cheating. I don't understand how your logic turned what he said towards that. It is like saying "Bill dropped his +2 flaming sword for that +4 Ice sword in the last dungeon and is thus cheating. He should have stuck with the Rusty Bastard sword that he got from the rats at level one".

It's not like you are hacking the code to shoot through the walls or for flight or something. It is simply giving the player an option...if you don't like what you started with, you don't need to go all the way back three months and start over. And on top of that, if you feel hardcore and want to go back three months of work...it is your "option". It doesn't give him some "edge" over anybody...nor does it break the game in any way. See "World of Warcraft".

More than that, I think under the ideal of a "RPG", it makes sense.

id4698

11-16-2007, 05:30 PM

Try again. I'm certainly not getting your "no. you don't get it", because you haven't elucidated why.

Let me try to explain my perspective again -- there's no right/wrong here, there's just personal preferences about what makes the better game. In my opinion, you can't remove choices, and the consequences associated with those choices, and have a meaningful roleplaying experience. Why have an RPG's character development system at all, if you can immediately circumvent it by creating any type of character you want - if that's an "option" that is a positive feature, why not just allow players to choose whatever level they want, and whatever skills they want, at any time? Those are all just "options", which people could use, or not.

Similarly, why not just allow me to skip fighting altogether, by being invulnerable or being able to destroy anything I want. There's no end of cheat code/options people can develop that could possibly be included in a game -- I don't think a game is better for including them - in fact, I think it's a cheat for designers to avoid developing a balanced, interesting game, if you just allow all choices to be meaningless or reversible.

I can understand some people liking the freedom to basically waltz their way through the game however they want, in the same way some people play shooters on the easiest difficulty level so they don't actually have to play the game or develop any skill in it in order to see the storyline, etc. But I have no interest in that myself, and I think it cheapens any sense of achievement granted to other gamers, and inconsequential choices actually "break" an RPG and make it uninteresting for me personally, so I'm certainly not going to penalize a developer, or mention the lack of those cheats as a meaningful omission, for designing a game without them.

Again, I don't see how it is anything like skipping fights or "waltzing" through anything. In real life, if I went to school for 4 years to be a history teacher, and then decided "Hell, I want to be an accountant now"...am I cheating?

In a properly balanced game, I can't fathom how respecing is anything like cheating. Back to Jeff's point, it allows options. It gives no outright edge, nor does it imbalance the game.

And again, if you disagree with it, simply don't respec your character.

TomChick

11-16-2007, 05:35 PM

It doesn't help that the skill descriptions are so vague. I might be a bit more forgiving of forcing players into a single irrevocable character build if Flagship had provided players with a bit more information about what they're getting themselves into. As it is, Hellgate gives you minimal information to make one-way choices that, ultimately, aren't that interesting.

Not to mention, the lack of respec feels tailored to Hellgate's shameless attempts to stick its fingers into my pockets. Three slots, huh? Fourth one for a price? Ha. Nice try, Flagship.

-Tom

Desslock

11-16-2007, 05:35 PM

It is simply giving the player an option...if you don't like what you started with, you don't need to go all the way back three months and start over.

I edited in a more detailed explanation of what I meant when you were posting this, so see the prior post for a better indication of my perspective.

I agree that respecs make sense in MMOs for the reason you mentioned - being able to avoid 3 months of re-grinding that you don't have any interest in is a feature I liked in City of Heroes, etc. I just think that concern is less valid in an action/MMO like Hellgate, which only takes 40 hours to buzz through.

I don't have any interest in "winning" an RPG by having a character, of any type, with skills maxed out. For me, RPGs are enjoyable because of the experience of role-playing an alter-ego through a personalized adventure, where choices and decisions have consequences. If you remove those aspects from the experience, I think you're fundamentally crippling the game as an RPG.

It's the journey, the decisions, the choices and consequences - not the end result of the character, that makes an RPG what it is.

Jeff Green

11-16-2007, 05:45 PM

Try again. I'm certainly not getting your "no. you don't get it", because you haven't elucidated why.

Let me try to explain my perspective again -- there's no right/wrong here, there's just personal preferences about what makes the better game.

Indeed. There is no right/wrong. This is healthy debate amongst grizzled old gamers. You kids be quiet and let the adults talk.

In my opinion, you can't remove choices, and the consequences associated with those choices, and have a meaningful roleplaying experience. Why have an RPG's character development system at all, if you can immediately circumvent it by creating any type of character you want - if that's an "option" that is a positive feature, why not just allow players to choose whatever level they want, and whatever skills they want, at any time? Those are all just "options", which people could use, or not.

Seems to me like you are both oversimplifying and over-demonizing what respeccing is about. Just because a gamer might be able to redistribute points does not mean they can't have a "meaningful role-playing experience." Maybe the one they've been having so far just blows. Or maybe--as in the case with HG-- the game does such a poor job of explaining what the skills are, that you realize it was a mistake to use a point at all. And if you impose a restriction on it--like a huge fee--then you are making it be another decision the gamer has to make.

Similarly, why not just allow me to skip fighting altogether, by being invulnerable or being able to destroy anything I want. There's no end of cheat code/options people can develop that could possibly be included in a game -- I don't think a game is better for including them - in fact, I think it's a cheat for designers to avoid developing a balanced, interesting game, if you just allow all choices to be meaningless or reversible.

Again, I feel you are totally misrepresenting what a respec even is. It's not even close to "skipping fighting" or being invulnerable. Come on, dude. And how is it that just because a player could respec, a game doesn't have to be balanced? Huh? If the trees aren't balanced, then no amount of respeccing would hide the fact that the game blew.

I can understand some people liking the freedom to basically waltz their way through the game however they want, in the same way some people play shooters on the easiest difficulty level so they don't actually have to play the game or develop any skill in it in order to see the storyline, etc. But I have no interest in that myself, and I think it cheapens any sense of achievement granted to other gamers, and inconsequential choices actually "break" an RPG and make it uninteresting for me personally, so I'm certainly not going to penalize a developer, or mention the lack of those cheats as a meaningful omission, for designing a game without them.

PLAY IT LIKE A MAN OR DON'T PLAY IT ALL, YOU SISSIES. ANYTHING LESS IS ...CHEATING!

Face it, you're just more hardcore than us, Desslock. :)

TomChick

11-16-2007, 05:47 PM

Stefan, you're reducing the argument to an absurd position that no one's taking. For instance:

I can understand some people liking the freedom to basically waltz their way through the game however they want

No one is suggesting this.

Plenty of RPGs have some built-in mechanism to let you explore their various skills, classes, spells, and whatnot without forcing you into lots of tedious replaying. Whether it's by controlling a party (Bioware), some form of mixing and matching (Titan Quest and Guild Wars' split classes), a built-in system of skill loadouts like cards in a CCG (Guild Wars), or respeccing. You don't have to compromise the RP to be a better G.

I understand what you're getting at, but I don't see how it applies to Hellgate's poorly designed skill system, which feels part and parcel of their cheap ploy to pad out playing time and encourage people to cough up $10 a month for the extra character slot.

-Tom

EDIT: Damn you and your fast fingers, Green!

Brian Rucker

11-16-2007, 06:16 PM

To me, respeccing is just a way to try out other character builds without having to grind through the whole game again.

On a similar note, what games like this need is not a mode where everything is harder and so takes longer thus increasing the grind, but a quick mode that seriously decreases the grind.

I think what games like this really need, and I was getting at this in my overly meandering post, is a gameplay experience - the front end - which is compelling enough you want to play through it over and over. To my way of thinking this is where emergent gameplay via dynamic and randomized systems comes in. Random for the sake of random takes me back to the days of D&D encounter and treasure tables. Now I'm a bit older and more, well, grizzled. I've fought through dynamic campaigns on entire warfronts and experienced compelling tactical gameplay set up on random parameters in other games. I've seen AI that fools me enough to believe - at least for a while.

How ya gonna keep 'em down on the farm after they seen Paree?

On one hand this is an utterly unfair assessment. I'm not a Diablophile and I kinda knew what I was getting into but the lizard part of my brain does like a bit of the old loot and pillage, it's true, and I keep hoping to find good randomized games out there that can keep me engaged. This one looked kinda fun and, well, who knows?

But...the randomization really falls flat. There's not enough variation or, maybe better put, convergences of variations that make each map enough of a different exercise to keep me interested enough in doing it - again.

A few times through, fine - I do like the look and feel of the various classes. My lizard brain merrily rattles its tail when I gets me some fine new toy or everything comes together with some clever application of skills.

But over and over and over and over because I don't know how skills really work and I can't shift them around when I learn better?

This might actually work better for me than it currently does -if- I was doing this with friends online. I think a singleplayer baseball game would bore me to tears too but playing with real life friends makes it more of a backdrop for hanging out no matter how repetative it gets.

Assuming your client doesn't constantly crash, the game fail to render you or your friends in instances or a hundred other well documented issues, and the network doesn't kick your ass clear to Sheboygan whenever it feels like getting pissy.

fuzzyslug

11-16-2007, 06:23 PM

This whole thing sounds like a respec is needed almost solely because the skill system/tree is just badly designed. You shouldn't be able to screw yourself, no matter how much you want to do so.

calvin940

11-16-2007, 06:25 PM

Sometimes what gets lost is the concept that games are supposed to be ..uhm.. fun. Going through the game and learning as you go along you may understand that some less than ideal choices were made and what you thought you wanted is no longer what you in fact want. Respeccing means that you can right those wrongs and continue to play to have fun.

How much fun are you going to have when you realize that none of that tree can be undone and well, too bad, sucked in. How much fun is that? How much longer will I play the game (as a subscriber) if I now am stuck with this?

If a person wants to be hardcore, then be hardcore. Pretend you can't respec and go nuts. I don't mind. I'm in it for the fun.

Cal

Desslock

11-16-2007, 06:50 PM

Or maybe--as in the case with HG-- the game does such a poor job of explaining what the skills are, that you realize it was a mistake to use a point at all.

and

And how is it that just because a player could respec, a game doesn't have to be balanced? .

If the game's balanced, how can it be a "mistake" to allocate a point? That's what I meant. All choices should be equally valid, or at least as worthwhile as any other given the character you've decided to roleplay.

Agree that if a game does a poor job of just explaining what the hell you're getting, then that's a bad trait, but a different and related point which you could ascribe to almost every RPG that's ever been made -- why can't I "respec" my character in NWN2 - Mask of the Betrayer? Why can't I suddenly turn my eye-sniping rifle-toting character in Fallout into a melee character, or a diplomat? Because that's the entire foundation of the game - making choices that have consequences.

Again, I'm not saying that some people might now like to be able to make those switches in NWN2, or Fallout, but I think it's inappropriate to penalize a game for not permitting those things, when it's fundamental to the genre to make choices of consequences.

(at least until MMOs came along and made people think RPGs were more about putting time in "grinding" for rewards rather than enjoying the experience and making meaningful roleplaying choices)

Thrag

11-16-2007, 06:51 PM

I think what games like this really need, and I was getting at this in my overly meandering post, is a gameplay experience - the front end - which is compelling enough you want to play through it over and over.

Well of course, however unless it is a truly amazing game I'm unlikely to dedicate another month or more of play just to try out one more character type when there are new games coming out all the time (and all the other games I played through as one character and vaguely intend to play again as a different character type but in reality never will). While long grinds are great for getting people to pay a monthly fee, for me they kill any desire to replay a game after I've played though once.

Believe me, I want a compelling gameplay experience as much as the next guy, but I'd also like convenient ways of trying different character classes and builds without necessarily dedicating the time to grind through the entire game again.

calvin940

11-16-2007, 06:55 PM

but a different and related point which you could ascribe to almost every RPG that's ever been made -- why can't I "respec" my character in NWN2 - Mask of the Betrayer? Why can't I suddenly turn my eye-sniping rifle-toting character in Fallout into a melee character, or a diplomat? Because that's the entire foundation of the game - making choices that have consequences.

Because they don't require 12 or more actual days of gametime to replay them, that's why.

Cal

Edit: I had stopped playing after level 8 because I just couldn't stand the problems with the game (network error disconnects, occasional lockups, and what seemed to be latency related problems). I was under the impression the game was longer than it was based on my friends also playing it well into the late levels.

Mordrak

11-16-2007, 06:56 PM

Agree that if a game does a poor job of just explaining what the hell you're getting, then that's a bad trait, but a different and related point which you could ascribe to almost every RPG that's ever been made -- why can't I "respec" my character in NWN2 - Mask of the Betrayer? Why can't I suddenly turn my eye-sniping rifle-toting character in Fallout into a melee character, or a diplomat? Because that's the entire foundation of the game - making choices that have consequences.

Both of your examples are narrative rpgs first and foremost. The choices you make in character class and skills play a role in the narrative that in games like Hellgate, Titan Quest, and Diablo they do not. The latter games lend themselves to the abstraction and metagaming because of this and it becomes a much more build focus experience.

Desslock

11-16-2007, 07:00 PM

I understand what you're getting at, but I don't see how it applies to Hellgate's poorly designed skill system, which feels part and parcel of their cheap ploy to pad out playing time and encourage people to cough up $10 a month for the extra character slot.

If you think Hellgate's skill system sucks (which I don't, by the way), being able to respec doesn't fix that problem - it just gives you a way to ignore it or work around it.

I don't think incorporating a respec system fixes a crappy skill system any more than including a no-clipping mode fixes poor level design, or adding a slider that allows you to make combat ridiculously easy (or hard) fixes an unengaging combat system.

Having a crappy skill system is a poorly designed gameplay feature that's worthy of criticism. Maybe having a respec system would be better, in that instance, but I think the criticism is more appropriately directed at the skill system, not at the absence of a bandaid like respecing.

Desslock

11-16-2007, 07:02 PM

Because they don't require 12 or more actual days of gametime to replay them, that's why.

Neither does Hellgate, which is a smaller game than either of the ones I mentioned.

I agree with your other post above - games should be fun. If a game isn't fun for you without having a respec option, then I can certainly see why you'd advocate their inclusion. Similarly, there are gamers like Steve Bauman who like shooter but don't have fun with them (or at least find them most enjoyable) when they can blast through them on super-easy mode with no challenge. Some people probably don't play games until they get all the cheat codes so they can immediately go into God mode -- nobody can tell you how to best enjoy your game.

But I don't think the absence of any of those cheats or short-cuts is a design flaw -- the fact that you might want to skip all the gameplay required to develop a character is a more damning criticism of a game, in my opinion. Or that choices are so bad that you feel you're screwed or can't enjoy the game unless those choices are revocable.

Like I said, in an RPG I don't expect to be able to immediately jump to where I was with a differently developed character, since the game is about making consequential choices, so I don't miss the ability to do so. Like Mordrak said, action-RPGs (and MMOs) are really different creatures though, so I guess your interests really depend upon what you most enjoy about those games - people seem to most like skipping to the end (jumping to level 60 in a month; respecing, being able to skip a character's development, etc.) which makes the appeal of those games even less explicable to me.

id4698

11-16-2007, 07:30 PM

I edited in a more detailed explanation of what I meant when you were posting this, so see the prior post for a better indication of my perspective.

I agree that respecs make sense in MMOs for the reason you mentioned - being able to avoid 3 months of re-grinding that you don't have any interest in is a feature I liked in City of Heroes, etc. I just think that concern is less valid in an action/MMO like Hellgate, which only takes 40 hours to buzz through.

I don't have any interest in "winning" an RPG by having a character, of any type, with skills maxed out. For me, RPGs are enjoyable because of the experience of role-playing an alter-ego through a personalized adventure, where choices and decisions have consequences. If you remove those aspects from the experience, I think you're fundamentally crippling the game as an RPG.

It's the journey, the decisions, the choices and consequences - not the end result of the character, that makes an RPG what it is.

I happen to agree with that perspective. I hate min/maxing and uber-builds. The irony is that I don't even respec.

But I still understand it (respecs) in many games.

id4698

11-16-2007, 07:38 PM

Indeed. There is no right/wrong. This is healthy debate amongst grizzled old gamers. You kids be quiet and let the adults talk.

Seems to me like you are both oversimplifying and over-demonizing what respeccing is about.

I defend your point and break it down to an explainable level and this is what I get eh? Friends like these...:).

Again, I feel you are totally misrepresenting what a respec even is. It's not even close to "skipping fighting" or being invulnerable. Come on, dude. And how is it that just because a player could respec, a game doesn't have to be balanced? Huh? If the trees aren't balanced, then no amount of respeccing would hide the fact that the game blew.

And then you say what I said anyways. Come on Jeff! Come on! What do I have to do around here!

mouselock

11-16-2007, 07:53 PM

This whole thing sounds like a respec is needed almost solely because the skill system/tree is just badly designed. You shouldn't be able to screw yourself, no matter how much you want to do so.

I don't know that it's badly designed so much as completely undocumented. I'm not sure the skills themselves are any more poorly designed than in any other similar type game, but there's precious little information as to some of the more opaque mechanics (e.g. only having one non-elemental summons at a time as a summoner.. assumably at least; I can't have my carnagor and witch doctor out at the same time).

calvin940

11-16-2007, 07:57 PM

Neither does Hellgate, which is a smaller game than either of the ones I mentioned.

I agree with your other post above - games should be fun. If a game isn't fun for you without having a respec option, then I can certainly see why you'd advocate their inclusion. Similarly, there are gamers like Steve Bauman who like shooter but don't have fun with them (or at least find them most enjoyable) when they can blast through them on super-easy mode with no challenge. Some people probably don't play games until they get all the cheat codes so they can immediately go into God mode -- nobody can tell you how to best enjoy your game.

Wanting respeccing in a game actually says more about me than it does the game. I have a tendancy to hold back decisions to improve my character when there is a sense of loss should I make a mistake. I am one of those people that hordes grenades, skillpoints, talent points, power-ups, (whatever you name it) to the point where I have gone on to finish games without ever using these points/features/skills etc because I don't want to make a mistake spending them on something that just pisses me off. I tend to miss out on the neat things about games that way. Respecccing, do-overs etc allow me to get over that and actually enjoy those additional aspects that make the game fun (and I get to play it more like the creators intended).

Cal

Dalai

11-16-2007, 08:05 PM

I'm not really a fan of respecs. I enjoy starting a new character and trying out an interesting new build (in Diablo 2). You also get to see how that build plays through all the levels of the game, rather than just at whereever your high level character is. Easy respeccing also makes me suspicious that everyone's changing over to the cookie cutter build of the month.

So yeah, if the game's good and fun, why not encourage people to make some alts? I guess it's a problem if the game isn't actually fun and feels like a grind to play again.

Lorini

11-16-2007, 09:01 PM

Well here's the patch notes for next week (note that Tom's respec conspiracy fails :)

We're gearing up to release what we internally refer to as Patch 0.5. We intend this update to resolve many of the issues players are having with Hellgate: London.

In preparation for our 0.5 launch, we'll be...

1) Wiping our Test Center tonight.

2) Placing copies of all US characters into the Test Center tomorrow.

If you'd like to see Patch 0.5 early and help us perfect the update, please login to the Test Center over the weekend. If all goes well, the 0.5 update will be made available to everyone next week.

Curious about what you can expect? Here's a draft of our 0.5 patch notes:

General:
All players now have 24 character slots.
Fixed a known issue with the inventory user interface that caused the client to lock up.
Fixed a bug which caused the Mini-game to sometimes become stuck.
The Mini-game now resets every 15 minutes.
Added a /help command to provide assistance using available / commands.
Some new posters have been added to stations, so check them out!

Connection Issues:
Fixed known issues which sometimes caused players to be disconnected and receive an erroneous network error message.
Fixed an issue where some home routers would disconnect a user due to an inactive connection.
Fixed known bugs which sometimes disconnected players during multiplayer quests.
Fixed problems with NetLimiter 1.30 and some older versions of Norton Antivirus and McAfee Antivirus which would make the user entirely unable to connect to the game.

Chat:
Made several chat interface improvements and the text entry more intuitive:
Chat window is now open by default in multiplayer.
Fixed chat window closing when traveling between zones.
Fixed several cases where the chat window would obstruct other UI components.
Chat context (such as Party and Guild) is now more clearly defined in the text entry window, including a color-coded border.
Chat window is now more transparent.
Added /g command. This is equivalent to /gchat command (guild chat).
Whisper text now shows up on all chat tabs.
Whisper messages and admin announcements auto-open the chat panel.
Auto-switch to the appropriate tab (such as Party and Guild) if you type text to that channel and are not in a tab that shows the text.
PageUp/PageDown cycle through chat tabs when text entry is active.
Chat panel now auto-opens if you type text and press Enter while the panel is closed.
Chat text entry deactivates after entering text.
Chat panel no longer closes if you press Enter on a blank line.
Additional miscellaneous bug fixes.

Items:
Fixed known bugs that caused players to sometimes lose items.
Fixed a bug with the Nanoforge that caused it to inaccurately modify the stats of higher-quality items.
Fixed a bug that sometimes caused Unique items to drop without special properties.

Quests:
Fixed various known issues which prevented players from being able to continue interrupted side-quests.
Quest items should no longer remain in the player inventory after the associated quest has been completed. Players with old quest items (such as Train Parts) associated with quests they’ve already completed or no longer have should find these items removed upon logging in.
Fixed an issue that sometimes prevented players from receiving credit for killing the “5 Lies” in The Hellgate quest. Players should now be able to properly advance in this quest.

Engineers:
Fixed known bugs which prevented Engineer Drones from saving properly.
Fixed a bug which caused Engineers to receive an erroneous “unable to meet requirements” message when entering a new instance with a Drone that has a weapon equipped.

PvP:
Fixed an incorrect modifier causing Special Effect Attack Strengths in PvP situations to be much higher than intended.

World Movement:
Fixed known issues which occasionally prevented characters from being able to load or switch instances.
Fixed several issues with players getting stuck in the world.
Fixed a bug related to St. Paul's Nightmare mode progression.
Portals to party members should now automatically close if the associated party member leaves the game.

World Events:
The Guy Fawkes event has ended. Characters that have completed the NAME Quest that did not receive the Trinket reward should find this item in their inventory.

See you online!
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It does make you wonder though why you would pay the $10 sub? I guess we'll have to see.

mouselock

11-16-2007, 09:04 PM

It does make you wonder though why you would pay the $10 sub? I guess we'll have to see.

Here's hoping they really are hoping to add $30/quarter worth of content then.. I might pay for that actually. (more likely if they give me an indication I'd just pony up the $150 once and be done with it..)

TomChick

11-16-2007, 09:14 PM

All players now have 24 character slots.

Good for them! Although there goes one of the few incentives for people to subscribe. In fact, if I'd signed up for the subscription, I'd be a bit peeved that one of the major advantages (four character slots instead of three) is now entirely moot. :)

I don't think incorporating a respec system fixes a crappy skill system any more than including a no-clipping mode fixes poor level design, or adding a slider that allows you to make combat ridiculously easy (or hard) fixes an unengaging combat system.

Firstly, you're conflating two issues. Issue one: I think Hellgate's skills are tedious, superficial, and poorly thought out. Issue two: I think it's a bad decision that you can't respec your character. They're completely separate issues. Imagine, for example, that I'm critical of the lighting and animation in a game's graphics. You're saying the equivalent of 'Hey, if they fix the lighting, it's not going to make the animation look any better!'

Secondly, what's up with continually misrepresenting the issue? Equating respeccing with "noclip mode" or "making combat ridiculously easy"? Because I'm pretty sure Titan's Quest and Guild Wars -- both excellent examples of how far action RPGs have come -- managed to build respeccing into the gameplay without introducing cheating or removing any sense of challenge.

BTW, I predict Flagship will eventually introduce respeccing, just like they've given everyone 21 extra character slots. If you're going to capitulate, capitulate big!

-Tom

id4698

11-16-2007, 09:30 PM

Good for them! Although there goes one of the few incentives for people to subscribe. In fact, if I'd signed up for the subscription, I'd be a bit peeved that one of the major advantages (four character slots instead of three) is now entirely moot. :)

Firstly, you're conflating two issues. Issue one: I think Hellgate's skills are tedious, superficial, and poorly thought out. Issue two: I think it's a bad decision that you can't respec your character. They're completely separate issues. Imagine, for example, that I'm critical of the lighting and animation in a game's graphics. You're saying the equivalent of 'Hey, if they fix the lighting, it's not going to make the animation look any better!'

Secondly, what's up with continually misrepresenting the issue? Equating respeccing with "noclip mode" or "making combat ridiculously easy"? Because I'm pretty sure Titan's Quest and Guild Wars -- both excellent examples of how far action RPGs have come -- managed to build respeccing into the gameplay without introducing cheating or removing any sense of challenge.

BTW, I predict Flagship will eventually introduce respeccing, just like they've given everyone 21 extra character slots. If you're going to capitulate, capitulate big!

-Tom

I foresee respecs next patch.

Desslock

11-16-2007, 09:35 PM

Firstly, you're conflating two issues. Issue one: I think Hellgate's skills are tedious, superficial, and poorly thought out. Issue two: I think it's a bad decision that you can't respec your character. They're completely separate issues. Imagine, for example, that I'm critical of the lighting and animation in a game's graphics. You're saying the equivalent of 'Hey, if they fix the lighting, it's not going to make the animation look any better!'

But there're not completely independent issues, which is my point, unlike your lighting/animation point. You've said, repeatedly, that you wanted the ability to respec because you felt the skill system was crappy, you didn't think the skills were well explained so you didn't know what you were getting so the choices should be revocable, etc. That's all related, unlike criticizing a game's lighting, as well as a game's animation. One of the things you are complaining about missing, respec, is a bandaid remedy for what you think is a crappy skill system.

Anyway, we've beaten this to death, so I don't see the point in reiterating my statements yet again - obviously you don't find them persuasive, and I similarly don't believe respeccing is an omission or even a desirable feature, because it's fundamentary contrary to what I find appealing about the games I play -- I like the journey, I like meaningful consequences to my choices, and that's cheapened if I can reverse them or skip them altogether in order to get to some apparently desirable "end state" of development that allows you to skip playing the game (or a portion of it).

If I found a game's skill systems, combat systems, or level design etc. so uninteresting or flawed that I felt myself wanting to skip/redo the character development process, or make combat a one-button boom procedure, or to be able to clip through to the end of the level skipping all the stuff in the middle - i.e., to be able to skip actually playing the game -- then I'd never want to continue playing the game in the first place (which is actually consistent with your bottom line conclusion anyway).

'das all.

TomChick

11-16-2007, 10:27 PM

You've said, repeatedly, that you wanted the ability to respec because you felt the skill system was crappy

I've said no such thing, repeatedly or otherwise. I've said a) the skill system is crappy, and b) I want respeccing. I find it curious that you turn this into "I want respeccing because the skill system is crappy". But I will grant you that the lack of respeccing is part of what makes the skill system crappy, so there's that.

But, yeah, we're beating dead horses here and I think I just gave myself a semantic headache. So, uh, how 'bout all those subway tunnels?

BTW, Stefan, if you haven't already, you should really take a look at Titan Quest and Guild Wars for examples of how to do a meaningful, flexible, and compelling skill system (with respeccing, natch).

-Tom

jpinard

11-16-2007, 10:54 PM

What's weird is I didn't find Tom's review pining for HGL to be WoW in the least.

My take is Flagship focused way too much on how they were going to wring as much money out of HGL as possible, and if they'd focused more on making Diablo 3 in P-A London it would/could have been great.

And if Hellgate London fails we'll have to hear Bill Roper go on and on about how it's not their fault and pc gaming is doomed, and therefore he's going to develop exclusively for the Kony PS3 from now on instead. meh

Desslock

11-16-2007, 11:25 PM

BTW, Stefan, if you haven't already, you should really take a look at Titan Quest and Guild Wars for examples of how to do a meaningful, flexible, and compelling skill system (with respeccing, natch).

I played a lot of Guild Wars when initially released - I think a bunch with you, lol (Didn't you have a necro dude?) I don't recall any respec in that game though, or do you just mean the way you can pick your skills each mission? I think they might have added respec/changing classes later - I haven't played it since the initial release (or was it introduced by one of the two standalone expansions)?

Guild Wars hasn't aged well for me, although I liked the art and admired the new MMO model. I didn't really like the skill system, had no interest in multiplayer, didn't really like the combat and the henchmen mechanic didn't work well in the end game, and found the fantasy world was also utterly generic and forgettable to me. I've been meaning to try the latest GW that came out, since I think it addressed a bunch of those complaints. But I much prefer Hellgate in almost every way over Guild Wars - it's just a better single player/small coop game, with much better combat, more interesting monsters, more interesting setting - I actually like Hellgate more than any action/RPG since the original Diablo (unless you count some more obscure stuff like Divine Divinity), including Diablo 2. GW definitely was better polished at release though - it's launch was flawless.

Desslock

11-16-2007, 11:35 PM

What's weird is I didn't find Tom's review pining for HGL to be WoW in the least.

Neither did I. I think Tom's review is very clear and well argued, and the score certainly appropriately reflects his feelings and the text of the review.

I like Hellgate a low more than Tom does (and we've had some fun debating the game in offline exchanges), but I wish all reviews I disagreed with were as well written and argued. It's also kinda fishy the way some of the people jumping into this thread to argue otherwise have a posting history of <10 posts, which seems "planty" to me.

TomChick

11-17-2007, 12:23 AM

Doh, that's right, we did play Guild Wars together. And I do recall us talking about it a fair amount. My bad. My Titan Quest recommendation still stands, though. Iron Lore really "gets" the action RPG genre.

What I meant by bringing Guild Wars into the respec discussion is the way it handled skills by giving you a whole mess and letting you pick eight for any given mission, in addition to letting you allocate points however you like to a "talent" system that affects how those skills work. It's really a brilliant system: malleable, generous, deep, and gratifying.

I think Guild Wars added in some mechanism to change your second class, but I could be wrong. Also, I seem to recall they allowed a fairly small number of character slots, but it wasn't nearly as painful as Hellgate since characters were so malleable.

But I much prefer Hellgate in almost every way over Guild Wars.

Moonbat.

-Tom

PeterK

11-17-2007, 01:23 AM

Agree that if a game does a poor job of just explaining what the hell you're getting, then that's a bad trait, but a different and related point which you could ascribe to almost every RPG that's ever been made -- why can't I "respec" my character in NWN2 - Mask of the Betrayer? Why can't I suddenly turn my eye-sniping rifle-toting character in Fallout into a melee character, or a diplomat? Because that's the entire foundation of the game - making choices that have consequences.

Again, I'm not saying that some people might now like to be able to make those switches in NWN2, or Fallout, but I think it's inappropriate to penalize a game for not permitting those things, when it's fundamental to the genre to make choices of consequences.

I realize you are probably done with the respeccing discussion, but I wanted to point out that NWN2 and Fallout and RPGs like those have save games, so you can alway go back to an earlier save game if you made a mistake or want to see how things would be different if you made another choice. So while it's not as powerful as respeccing, you can still try something out without it being permanent.

Mordrak

11-17-2007, 02:29 AM

I think Guild Wars added in some mechanism to change your second class, but I could be wrong. Also, I seem to recall they allowed a fairly small number of character slots, but it wasn't nearly as painful as Hellgate since characters were so malleable.

It starts out with four, if you buy another campaign it adds 2 (max of 6). Then if you want, you can buy more slots at 10 bucks per slot. That seems steep, but they don't charge a monthly fee.

shang

11-17-2007, 02:36 AM

It starts out with four, if you buy another campaign it adds 2 (max of 6). Then if you want, you can buy more slots at 10 bucks per slot. That seems steep, but they don't charge a monthly fee.

There's no max of 6. Every stand-alone campaign you buy gives you extra slots (first one gives 4 and every additional one gives 2), so for example if you own Prophesies, Factions and Nightfall, you'll have 8 free character slots.

Mordrak

11-17-2007, 02:42 AM

There's no max of 6. Every stand-alone campaign you buy gives you extra slots (first one gives 4 and every additional one gives 2), so for example if you own Prophesies, Factions and Nightfall, you'll have 8 free character slots.
Oh ok. Thanks for the correction.

ravenight

11-17-2007, 03:28 AM

What I meant by bringing Guild Wars into the respec discussion is the way it handled skills by giving you a whole mess and letting you pick eight for any given mission, in addition to letting you allocate points however you like to a "talent" system that affects how those skills work. It's really a brilliant system: malleable, generous, deep, and gratifying.

You can't really respec in GW - you can reallocate the points that power your skills (which are really more like attributes than skills) and swap in and out which skills you take with you, but the list of skills that you have is built up through choices you have to make, which are irreversible (or at least were through factions, I haven't played since there).

That said, I agree with Tom, the system is great and a really impressive adaption of a card game paradigm to an action game. It would be cool if more games tried to make a similar system and iterated on that, and it would have been really cool if HGL had come up with something as innovative. I understand why they stuck to the D2 style (it is safer and they were already changing a bunch of other things), but I also understand people wanting them to do everything - why shouldn't they at least iterate everywhere? They made D2 didn't they? Well, most of them anyway. But I don't think that adding respecs is a substitute for not designing a cooler system. Leaving respecs out means that there is a modern action-rpg without respecs (to go along with all the RPGs that pretty universally don't have them - Bioshock, Oblivion, anything by Bioware, etc), where the journey is the point, not the ending. For those of us who play games looking for a journey (and aren't so bothered by HGLs other flaws), it is nice.

malkav11

11-17-2007, 05:17 AM

You can't really respec in GW - you can reallocate the points that power your skills (which are really more like attributes than skills) and swap in and out which skills you take with you, but the list of skills that you have is built up through choices you have to make, which are irreversible (or at least were through factions, I haven't played since there).

I don't know. I think that's almost exactly respeccing - there used to be some limits on attribute reallocation, but at this point anytime you're in town you can almost entirely rebuild your character from scratch. (And yes, Tom, if you Ascend or do the equivalent for the other campaigns, there's a way to repick your secondary profession.) You do have only a certain number of skill points to get skills in the first place, but I'm not sure there's a hard cap on the number of skill points you can obtain. And at least in the early sections I'm finding that I'm accumulating far more skill points than I can conceivably spend - I don't have every single skill available to me, but the ones I haven't gotten have yet to display the slightest fragment of usefulness. Generally skills that are designed to combo off effects and skills that neither I nor my companions have access to at present.

TheWombat

11-17-2007, 07:16 AM

Interesting patch notes:
http://www.hellgatelondon.com/underground/new-update-coming

Note that all players now will have 24 (!) character slots. Makes it very interesting as to what subscribers will be getting--if they continue to pare away at features they were charging for, they will need to add even more content for people paying a monthly fee.

I certainly hope all the tech fixes manifest themselves.

AndrewM

11-17-2007, 08:16 AM

Pretty odd to octuple the number of character slots so quickly. I wonder what prompted that?

Cronox

11-17-2007, 08:21 AM

I find it kind of funny that one of the listed updates is "Some new posters have been added to stations, so check them out!" Unless I'm missing something they are essentially promoting the fact they have added new ads and asking everyone to look at them.

mouselock

11-17-2007, 08:31 AM

I understand why they stuck to the D2 style (it is safer and they were already changing a bunch of other things), but I also understand people wanting them to do everything - why shouldn't they at least iterate everywhere?

Because "iteration" changes what the game is? Nobody's here saying that, say, Mythos would be great if only they'd iterated the skill setup significantly. Hellgate is firmly a Diablo 2 model. It doesn't seem particularly clear to me given that Blizzard can still sell Diablo 2 + Expansion pack for $40, that sticking to the Diablo model ought to be some huge crutch that indicates the game is unworthy of being played.

Iteration simply for iteration's sake is silly. Maybe they would have hit on pure gold. Or maybe they would have (like Guild Wars and Titan's Quest both) lost some subset of Diablo 2 fans in the process. I could never get into the Guild Wars system, I think at least partially because the skill setup prevents me from being motivated and caring about what's later. I start out with a pool of skills and they're flexible, sure, but there is zero in-game method for me to know what I have to look forward to. Rather than investing in the longer term build process, I simply wander around and use what I have until I find something new that I like more.

Titan's Quest also leaves me somewhat uninvested because if I dabble into the wrong skill or think "Well, I don't really want a pet class but it's a little hard to kill things right now, so I'll pick up this pet and just respect out of it later." I can do so. I suppose given the previous respec discussion most folks consider that masichism. To me it simply binds me more tightly to how I build my character. Does this mean that at times I sit around indecisive because I'm not sure any skills are worthy of the points right now? You betcha. I don't find that to be a partcularly bad thing; quite the opposite. There's something rather fun about not mowing down everything because I'm fully levelled, but having to struggle a bit for a while until the full realization of what I want the character to be has a chance to kick in and be applied.

Equisilus

11-17-2007, 08:43 AM

Pretty odd to octuple the number of character slots so quickly. I wonder what prompted that?

It turned out it was more of a negative than an incentive for people to subscribe, i.e. their subscriber base isn't what they thought it would be? They could have gotten that from feedback before release, but I guess they thought it'd be a good test of what bonuses subscribers would like. Now it's just about drawing in the players at all and hoping that they can entice them to subscribe later with something else.

I think Tom's review is pretty spot on, although from what I experienced up until release I'd probably have tagged the game with a 5.0. Earlier, there was a comment about how 3/4 of the games out there are above average but that makes "average" meaningless (or, at least, mean something other than it should). I think that misses the point that games that are truly 0,1,2 or whatnot, are unplayable technically, vanish quickly if released at all, and are basically not noticed by "the media". A 5.0 to me means exactly what I expect: the reviewer is neutral about it. A 4.0, which Tom gives, suggests that he's negative about the game and that it has serious issues that can make it unplayable. If I ever see a game rated with the low end of the scale, I'm surprised that the reviewer was able to play the game much at all.

Cronox

11-17-2007, 08:44 AM

Or maybe they would have (like Guild Wars and Titan's Quest both) lost some subset of Diablo 2 fans in the process.

I think its safe to say they did lose a subset of D2 fans.

Lorini

11-17-2007, 09:05 AM

Pretty odd to octuple the number of character slots so quickly. I wonder what prompted that?

The logistics of it seemed strange to me. I mean, if you subbed and then made 24 characters and then un-subbed, what would happen to 21 of your characters? I'm assuming you could choose which ones to keep, but who knows? Would they keep them but hide them from you? Delete them? If they were going to delete them, THAT would be a problem for sure. I'm very happy they escaped all this by just giving everyone the same number of characters.

Destarius

11-17-2007, 09:12 AM

HAY GUYZ so every time I load this forum I see this at the top and I read it as "Demon goat rape" and I wonder if I'm on 4chan or something.

Tom, better subject next time plzkthx.

Phew. I thought I was the only one. It really does read Demon Goat Rape.

Jafisob

11-17-2007, 01:42 PM

Both of your examples are narrative rpgs first and foremost. The choices you make in character class and skills play a role in the narrative that in games like Hellgate, Titan Quest, and Diablo they do not. The latter games lend themselves to the abstraction and metagaming because of this and it becomes a much more build focus experience.

QFT. Comparing FO and NWN to HGL may not be a good comparison. And as an aside: I did respec in FO2 via a tool ;-).

All the arguments against respec come down to personal preference. If you do not want to respec then don't but please don't suggest that everybody should not be able to respec. I don't like seafood but I don't suggest that you should not have it or that it should not be allowed in restaurants.

For what is worth: I lowered my graphics ratings substanisally and I am now able to play almost crash free. I don't mean going from very high to high I mean going down to medium or low on most tabs despite having a beefy system with a 640 MB graphics card and 4 gigs of memory(32 bit so it is not all addressable). No weather, no trilinear filtering. **The most important advice for those still crashing _may_ be lowering your texture detail to high or medium. ymmv **

Desslock

11-17-2007, 02:44 PM

All the arguments against respec come down to personal preference. If you do not want to respec then don't but please don't suggest that everybody should not be able to respec. I don't like seafood but I don't suggest that you should not have it or that it should not be allowed in restaurants.

And we weren't suggesting that - we were just saying we didn't consider it important or even desirable, so we didn't consider it a flaw to omit it. To use your analogy, if I go to a chicken wing house, I don't really care if they don't serve seafood, even if other people like seafood and some chicken wing places have seafood

Unicorn McGriddle

11-17-2007, 02:53 PM

If the game's balanced, how can it be a "mistake" to allocate a point?

For this to be true, all points would have to do the same thing. A system of advancement complex enough to be pleasing and create unique characters is going to have some skills that any given individual player will like better than others, something he won't fully appreciate until he's tried them out. Maybe a guy running a Barbarian in D2 thinks Whirlwind is lame and wishes he'd saved his points to upgrade that skill where you grunt next to a corpse and a potion pops out in a shower of gore. There's also the issue of skill synergy, which is unavoidable in a good skill-tree system. Frostamathon isn't a useful power if you're specced for Burnination.

But here's something uglier: a frequently-patched multiplayer game with gradually-built characters who have custom power sets is going to alter the nature of the powers from time to time for balance and feature introduction. On the official WoW forums, players cheer when their class gets an overhaul. They wouldn't be so happy if it meant they had to abandon a now-useless level 70 character and start over from scratch. A lot of the pull of these games is the way you gradually gain power over the game world through your developing character. Without respecs, that gradual gain is called into question. "Hardcore" is one word for it, I suppose, but I can't applaud a system that makes the powers you unlock in a game as insecure as a real job.

Desslock

11-17-2007, 04:06 PM

Yeah, fair points.

Jab2565

11-17-2007, 04:39 PM

But here's something uglier: a frequently-patched multiplayer game with gradually-built characters who have custom power sets is going to alter the nature of the powers from time to time for balance and feature introduction. On the official WoW forums, players cheer when their class gets an overhaul. They wouldn't be so happy if it meant they had to abandon a now-useless level 70 character and start over from scratch. A lot of the pull of these games is the way you gradually gain power over the game world through your developing character. Without respecs, that gradual gain is called into question. "Hardcore" is one word for it, I suppose, but I can't applaud a system that makes the powers you unlock in a game as insecure as a real job.

Agree about any online game. With single player games the importance of respecing is diluted since you don't have to worry about the skills being changed 2 months in.

I think the type of RPG has a major decision on respecing. With a game like Baldur's Gate or Fallout where the character's development plays a huge role in the story, respecing would be a bit unfair. But with a game like Diablo or Titan Quest where the development has a bigger role on the gameplay , being able to change skills is more important.

I think Titan Quest did it the best, putting points into your masteries are non refundable as they effect your stats and are an indicator of your character getting more powerful, skills however are fair game and being able to change your character is great for seeing all the options open to you.

Jafisob

11-17-2007, 05:30 PM

And we weren't suggesting that - we were just saying we didn't consider it important or even desirable, so we didn't consider it a flaw to omit it. To use your analogy, if I go to a chicken wing house, I don't really care if they don't serve seafood, even if other people like seafood and some chicken wing places have seafood

You should care if the chicken wing house offers fish as you may want to go to the restaurant with a friend who likes fish. Many if not most buffalo wings place offer fish sandwiches or some type of fish. Surprise, they want to appeal to a broad customer base as that helps them stay in business.

If I play a game, I am happy that the game offers respecs(or OptionX) even if I did not want to respec(or use OptionX). I want to game with friends some of whom will want to Respec(or use OptionX). I also want an online game I like to appeal to the most people because that means more people to play with and more money for the developers. More money for the developers usually means more support/content and a longer game life. Stupid developer decisions mean they lose and I lose. Aside from the technical problems, I like HGL. I don't like it when a brilliant team that designs a cool game like this makes stupid decisions.

You are a writer who I have read for years and whose opinions I respect. You seem to be arguing a very illogical point.

Omitting respecs is indeed a flaw and not considering it shows a large McQuaidian disconnect from the player base.**

Most customers want the ability to respec.
The technical aspects of allowing respecs is easy(cheap) to implement and support.
The customers that do not want respecs can choose not to use respecs.
The customers that don't want respecs and won't play the game because respecs are allowed to other players are relatively small amount of the player base ( Many of whom live in their mom's basements).**Unless you have another agenda where you think not allowing respecs means people are more likely to subscribe to your game. This is an interesting tactic but, imo, not one that will likely bear fruit.

The world has changed. Players expect a more friendly game experience. No respecs in online multiplayer games is a thing of the past. Learn and adapt or go out of business.

mouselock

11-17-2007, 06:42 PM

Mordrak

11-17-2007, 06:52 PM

Why is everyone treating respeccing in Hellgate as if it's in any way similar to respeccing in, say, WoW? There's at least an order of magnitude difference between the amount of time involved in building a character. Do people get upset because you can't "respec" in oblivion?

Oblivion isn't a good example because it gives you access to all the skills with one character (up to a pretty reasonable level). I'd also say it falls more closely to the NWN and FO camp than Diablo or Hellgate.

I mean, I get the complaint of "Well that skill didn't do at all what I thought it was going to." IMO that's more of a documentation problem (with the skills not being well described), but I could see a "move 1 skill point every 5 levels" type of limited reallocation. But realistically what would people do at max level shuffling points around from one character to another? This isn't an MMO: There's no endgame raids that require you to maximize your killing power or be left out. If you're not particularly interested in redoing the journey (and seeing how a different spec plays as you build it up from scratch) what exactly is it folks hope to get out of respeccing a high level character? Just to see the other skills?

Except that any description is an abstraction. It can be accurate but only experience will give you a real feel for the meaning of the abstraction, which requires investing points and testing the ability out. Also, I don't understand is how allowing other players to respec ruins your own experience of the game. If you don't like respeccing, then don't respec. The only way I could see this as a negative is if in multiplayer people could see your builds and gave you shit for it.

I think McGriddle's post expresses really good pro-respecing arguments.

TomChick

11-17-2007, 06:59 PM

This isn't an MMO

I don't think Flagship got that memo. :)

You're either too hung up on the WoW comparison or you're conveniently ignoring how other action RPGs that aren't MMOs handle respeccing. Yet you seem to understand the point of respeccing. Skills are content, particularly in the case of Hellgate, where levels and monsters arguably aren't (you've seen all your going to see in about four or five hours). What if we want to see the new content? Flagship should (and I predict will) build in some mechanism for people to see this new content with the game tax they're already paid.

Your stone idea is one approach. Using it as a money sink (a la Titan Quest) or a high level reward (a la Guild Wars) are two other approaches. Someone in this thread (you?) mentioned trading in points for a penalty, although that could be problematic for the way it would weaken the character's total skill points compared to the character's level.

But there are ways to do it, and guys like you and Stefan, arguing about how it would "damage the player experience" or "ruin the journey" or whatever, wouldn't have to use it.

-Tom

Talisker

11-17-2007, 07:10 PM

Lorini

11-17-2007, 07:45 PM

I can have more than three different characters in Oblivion.

As of next week, you'll be able to have 24.

Bill Dungsroman

11-17-2007, 07:48 PM

I can have more than three different characters in Oblivion.
http://img101.imageshack.us/img101/3066/iceburnnx0.gif

Desslock

11-17-2007, 08:05 PM

But there are ways to do it, and guys like you and Stefan, arguing about how it would "damage the player experience" or "ruin the journey" or whatever, wouldn't have to use it.

I think we've beaten this into applesauce at this point. Obviously people feel differently - want different things out of an action/RPG - than I do. I just want the company to nail the action part, and not completely render the RPG part almost meaningless. But very few action/RPGs have any meaningful, or even decent, RPG depth - the ones that have done the best job are the more obscure ones, like Divine Divinity.

Hellgate is about as shallow an RPG as it gets, so I guess I underestimated how important some people feel about stuff that feels artificial and "gamey" to me, like respecs or other "features" that feel like cheat codes to me (it helps if things like Respecs are written into the game in a way that seems to make some sense in the setting - City of Heroes did a great job of that). But I really don't get why anyone is interested in spending a zillion hours playing a game, like WoW, if they want to skip playing it as much as possible - by repetitively doing the most efficient level-grinding task, respecing to avoid playing a character at lower levels, etc. I guess people find the end game and social aspects the most interesting, or they don't actually enjoy the gameplay enough to want to do something they'd feel is a step "backwards".

>>Omitting respecs is indeed a flaw and not considering it shows a large McQuaidian disconnect from the player base.**

I think this is probably true, well argued. People just want to see different skills, etc. without playing the game again, I guess, a lot more than I would have expected.

ravenight

11-17-2007, 08:50 PM

I can have more than three different characters in Oblivion.

You can have more than 3 in Hellgate too, you just can't use them online (until the next patch).

Alistair

11-18-2007, 01:17 AM

Desslock

11-18-2007, 01:26 AM

I can't believe this is news to you Desslock, given that you're Mr RPG. It holds zero interest for me in any way, but most (all?) the Diablo/WoW/etc discussion you see here is about build-polishing & 'efficiency'. As you say, to each his own.

I don't play MMOs for that reason That's really where the build crunching, grinding xp efficiency crap really seems to dominate. God bless Mark Crump for covering MMOs for PCG.

malkav11

11-18-2007, 02:28 AM

I have enough interest to play a given *class* maybe once. So, yes, I'd like to be to able to mix things up if the direction I took with that character doesn't turn out to be one that pleases me. I'm a bit reluctant to grind through the boring low-level stuff again even with other classes (it's what killed off any desire to replay Diablo II after my second or third character), but at least there's a major difference in play that's just not there with the early levels of a different build of the same class.

Jafisob

11-19-2007, 04:59 PM

http://forums.hellgatelondon.com/sho...4&postcount=12
"I don't recall what the final conclusion on how it's going to be implemented is but some form of respec will eventually be added."

Talisker

11-19-2007, 06:18 PM

I also like how the Hellgate uninstaller, after sitting inert for about two minutes, asks for the CD, and soon after pops up a half-dozen error dialogs on its way to crashing out.

I'll probably re-install and give the game another shot sometime in a few months.

jpinard

11-20-2007, 10:47 PM

Fugitive

11-20-2007, 11:20 PM

The 0.5 patch is out now (for multiplayer at least), and in a pleasant surprise, the posters they said to look out for turned out not to be more ads, but shout-outs to some of the bigger guilds.

My engineer's drone is still 'broken', though. I no longer get the 'requirements not met' message, but he still often doesn't spawn with the right weapons and I still have to go into his inventory, unequip, and re-equip them.

This patch doesn't say anything specifically about stability due to graphics options, but prior to the patch I had turned mine down to medium as suggested in this thread, and it's been a lot more stable. A lot uglier, though; even the mini-map looks blurry.

Njal

11-22-2007, 08:27 AM

I haven't crashed since the .5 patch. That's with the graphics set to a mix of high and medium.

Sam Jones

11-22-2007, 08:44 AM

Most importantly for me, they fixed the Nanoforge so you're no longer paying it to nerf your weapons. I just upgraded my legendary Falchion of the Fiend five times in a row.

Njal

11-22-2007, 09:05 AM

The only thing I'm unhappy with is the quality of the mod drops I've gotten since the patch. All I want is some nice rare or better batteries with +shield pen and a tech with +crit. Is that too much to ask you gd rng?

Fugitive

11-29-2007, 02:00 PM

Patch 0.6 (http://www.hellgatelondon.com/underground/patch-0-6-0) is out now and is supposed to finally fix the invisible party member bug, plus some chat stuff. They mention a texture memory leak that's been fixed, though it's not clear if it's the one that causes problems when you run with high settings.

I finally finished the normal difficulty a few days ago and...MILD SPOILERS:

The final battle on the Hellplain is really disappointing. Dense monster spawns keep it active, but otherwise it didn't feel like there was anything particularly special about taking all the big guys down. The five Lies didn't have their own particular 'feel' to them like, say Diablo's generals or the waves before Baal. The trials a couple stations before that were more interesting, and even they had their frustrating quirks.

I was surprised to bring up my Xfire profile and see that I'd logged 52 hours in the game already. A run through on Nightmare can wait until some more patches and content additions, though.

Kunikos

11-29-2007, 02:05 PM

I don't play MMOs for that reason That's really where the build crunching, grinding xp efficiency crap really seems to dominate. God bless Mark Crump for covering MMOs for PCG.

Maybe if you care about "leveling efficiency" and all that nonsense. Some of us just like to play and have fun, even if it is an MMO. Newer MMOs like WoW and EQ2 let you solo through the whole game and if you don't care about the pace then who cares if your build isn't "optimal"? The games change drastically if you are playing to catch-up level-wise to your friends who play on the same server and never group with you (ie it becomes a job).

Helmutt

11-29-2007, 05:28 PM

OK I just logged on to the multiplayer for the first time since early November and the first thing I notice is fricking gold spammers. WTF? Who is buying gold in this game?

Fugitive

11-29-2007, 05:52 PM

Sadly, D2 also devolved to the point where you couldn't pop into a battle.net lobby without being assaulted by item and gold spammers, so it's not really all that surprising. :(

Lorini

11-29-2007, 06:20 PM

OK I just logged on to the multiplayer for the first time since early November and the first thing I notice is fricking gold spammers. WTF? Who is buying gold in this game?

Probably no one, but that little fact wouldn't stop the spammers.

mono

11-29-2007, 06:24 PM

Same here. I logged in today for the 1st time in awhile and actually had a good time, although I'm still just soloing early level missions. 1st thing I noticed though were the gold spammers. I reported 4 user names via the HGL support page in about 5 minutes.

Rob_Merritt

12-02-2007, 10:44 AM

Still playing, still having "fun" and playing all off line. Just finishing act 3. However I'm getting a bit tired of gathering 6 of these, 15 of thoses. I like it when it shacks it up a bit with the different mission. What really drives me up the walls with Hellgate's style is all the working electric lights. I understand that in a station everything would be work. However in the sewers there are working lights everywhere and on the streets there are portible light generations on every corner. How? The war has been going on for 20 years. Those lights would have been burned out years ago. Are the invading hords from hell changing the light bulbs and providing power? I didn't think undead zombies were afraid of the dark.

John Reynolds

12-02-2007, 10:49 AM

That actually bothers you? Do you also get annoyed by shooters that let you carry around 10 weapons, some of them rather large and heavy, and thousands of rounds of ammo too?

Marcus

12-02-2007, 11:01 AM

Well I wouldn't say it bothers me but it is really weird when you actually think about it. I mean I dunno it just seems odd.

Desslock

12-03-2007, 12:25 PM

Yeah, I thought that was weird - same with the burning vehicles, etc., 30 years after the war. That'd be like finding burning Shermans in 1980.

mono

12-03-2007, 01:05 PM

Man, its the underground resistance that keeps hooking up the lights, to aid their future reconnaissance. Each time they head out on an Operation Lightbulb jaunt, they get in minor skirmishes w/ fiery demons, resulting in various new burning vehicle husks.

Sheesh, do I have to explain everything?

Brendan

12-04-2007, 10:37 PM

I'm enjoying the single player campaign in this. It's comfortingly old fashioned gameplay that doesn't seem to be trying too hard.

Helmutt

12-05-2007, 12:49 AM

I'm enjoying the single player campaign in this. It's comfortingly old fashioned gameplay that doesn't seem to be trying too hard.

I for one would have appreciated it if the gameplay tried a little harder...

Fugitive

12-19-2007, 11:05 AM

espressojim

12-19-2007, 11:17 AM

Patch 0.7 is live now for multiplayer, the major highlights being:
- Finally nailing the major memory leaks. Really. For sure this time!
- Everyone gets a one-time one-use skill reset item
- Nightmare difficulty and advancement rebalanced. I was finding that xp really started to slow down a ton once you hit the mid-30s.

And some subscriber stuff:
- Added the Horad^H^H^H^H^HTransmogrifying Cube. So far it seems to be mainly for recombining injectors, powerpacks, and all the other consumables nobody actually uses. And as storage space, if you weren't already sick of cube juggling in D2...
- A dozen or so new unique items and what sounds like a new pet or something

Looks like the major content push that was supposed to come out this month is delayed until January, though.

That sounds like it's worth the subscriber fee! Hell, they should push the content to febuary! I'll still gladly fork over my money for a while even if they release no new content. I mean, their initial estimates of new content every month were even more overpromising than their idea of a relatively bug free game, so why not make them money hats to keep them warm this winter?

</sarcasm>

McBain

12-19-2007, 11:31 AM

Probably no one, but that little fact wouldn't stop the spammers.

SALES REVENUES ARE DOWN

SALES REVENUES DO NOT EXIST

FUCK

PEOPLE OBVIOUSLY DO NOT KNOW ABOUT OUR PRODUCT

WE MUST ANNOY THE SHIT OUT OF THEM SO THAT THEY REMEMBER OUR PRODUCT

Jason Cross

12-19-2007, 11:58 AM

Everyone gets a one-time one-use skill reset item

FAIL.

God damnit devs, when are you going to learn?

Okay your skill trees are a matter of experimentation and trial and error to begin with. You got to spend the points to find out if the spec you think you want is really any good, or does what you expect it to, during real gameplay.

Then, on top of that, you freaking change them all the time as you re-balance the classes. So you make a skill that used to suck not suck anymore...well that's not just good for people who took it, it's bad for people who wanted to take it, but avoided it because it sucked. Now they want it again, but passed it by.

And you give us no respec? Or a one-time, one-use item? For the love of god, why? On what universe is it considered fun to play a character up to nearly max level just to figure out what you should do when you start over and take your real talent spec?

Plus, it's a perfect excuse for keeping your economy from going out of whack! It's low hanging fruit on the "how do we pull money back out of the ever-growing economy" tree!

And to the players that like to be all hardcore and say "no talent respecs! That makes easy mode!" then you get to say "well then just don't respec YOUR character, and you'll have more money than the people who do it a few times, smart ass!"

Jesus!