So, Guy Somberg, a programmer for Flagship Studios working on Hellgate: London posted a now-removed blog entry last month about the game’s epic fail. Its failure to keep its staff, that is. He completely overlooked what a terrible conglomeration of shitty code the darn thing is.

Please, cry more about the community who assaulted your team with their ridiculous demands.

Demands for a playable game.

Completely ignore the possibility that if the game didn’t have such a surprising amount of problems, the playerbase would actually be spreading some positive word-of-mouth about it.

By the by, I still love and regularly play Hellgate: London. I admit my love, defend its strengths, and can point out all its deficiencies alongside its worst critics. Hellgate: London appeals to me.

But people over there at good ol’ Flagship need to recognize that the entire thing is a failure of coding.

Their homegrown engine is a great concept, and I could see it possibly being used by other games that also wish to have the basic functions of Hellgate – random maps, and the like. But it will still accidentally create maps with no portals that require a logout (or teleport into another player’s instance if in Multiplayer) to mend. Either way, both options have you erasing the epic waste-laying you inflicted upon the demonic inhabitants of the zone.

My XPS gaming laptop can’t handle it. The stations take 5 minutes, quite literally, to load and so I am stuck playing it only on my desktop. I am so bored on my lunch break…

The memory leak from Beta is still rampant, even if slightly tamed.

Some players have said issues still exist with flying/jumping monsters, though I haven’t experienced it myself.

It is still quite common to randomly teleport to another side of the map after getting stuck on an object or in a wall.

The game will not recognize a quad-core processor. It whines, instead, about how you really should consider upgrading from 0Mhz to something a little speedier, and how it supposes that will begrudgingly still allow you to try and play should you decide not to take its advice.

Even dual core processors are ignored, with only one core being utilized during gameplay. Though, with a dual core, the program at least understands you actually do have that vital piece of hardware in your rig.

Yeah, your DX10 shit is impressive, but let’s get real here.

So many of these issues have existed since the beta. If you fixed these things, holy shit! You’d actually be able to concentrate on the gameplay and story!

What a concept.

That all said, I still play. I love the game. I love playing the game, and I will play it despite the issues, though because of those issues I can only handle it in small doses.

It pains me that they’re ditching it. No expansion for me, now. No killing Murmur’s sorry ass for manipulating my good-hearted, dabbling Cabalist. No discovering the identity of The First. No possibility of traveling to new countries with (temporarily) new scenery.

Stonehenge was an awesome ending to this game. About as awesome an ending as The Sunwell is for The Burning Crusade.

Especially where awesome means dick-suckingly bad.

But The Sunwell is another topic for a different day.

RIP Hellgate: London and Flagship Studios. I’m not surprised at the jumpers, you sunk with your very first release. Good game.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 11th, 2008 at 8:52 pm and is filed under Game Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.