Hellgate: London (HGL) is the inaugural game from Flagship Studios, a game development company founded by former Blizzard employees—including Bill Roper, who played intimate roles in the Warcraft, Starcraft, and Diablo franchises. The setting is simple enough (Hell-infested London in the year 2038), but categorizing the game isn't. The game blends elements from first-person shooter (FPS), role-playing (RPG), and real-time strategy (RTS) games. It can be played as a single-player experience or as a multi-player experience, and the latter borrows liberally from massively multi-player online (MMO) games without being just another World of Warcraft (WoW) clone.
HGL is arguably the first game for which Microsoft's DirectX 10 (DX10) graphics API provides substantive value over DX9. As such, I'll first cover the elements common to both and then discuss the DX10-specific differences. I'll conclude with some (sadly negative) comments about performance.
I have never been to London, but from the pictures I've seen and movies I've watched it looks to me as if HGL is true to the basic source material while adding futuristic elements and the demon-taint of Hell. The sense of devastation is palpable wandering down war-torn streets, spelunking through dank and claustrophobic sewers, and of course walking the now-dry bed of the Thames and seeing ferries up-ended in disrepair. For what it's worth, I find the art direction and overall look to be great, despite the exaggerated proportions of the various player models.
The modeling is very good, the textures are nicely detailed, and the graphics engine obviously supports a host of different sorts of special effects. Smoke, steam, spell effects, reflective surfaces, moody lighting, and a host of other great bits come to mind immediately. Advanced features such as anti-aliasing and texture filtering modes are made available for balancing image quality and performance, so you can look forward to the best presentation your system can handle. In short, the game looks great no matter which graphics engine you choose.
If you select DX10, however, things will look even better. Most notable are the differences in lighting, rendering of volumetric smoke/steam, and the ubiquitous depth of field and motion blur effects. DX10 brings a clearly superior set of visuals to the monitor. If you think HGL looks good in DX9, try enabling DX10 when you can; you won't be sorry you tried. In that respect, it's the best looking game of its kind on the market.
Unfortunately, though, it comes at a price. When the game first shipped, it would barely run in DX10 at all. The first couple patches improved the situation dramatically, but even still the performance was terrible compared to DX9. The most recent patch has improved matters even more, but the DX10 version of the game is still a dog compared to DX9. To illustrate, I'm running the game today on an NVIDIA 8800 GT at the native resolution of my monitor (1920 x 1200). When I run in DX9, I can enable medium anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering, and I get great performance everywhere, often pegging the frame rate at the monitor's refresh (60 Hz.).
When I switch to Dx10, however, the game is a slide show unless I get rid of anti-aliasing completely. Thanks to the latest patch I can leave anisotropic filtering enabled, but even then my frame rate rarely gets above 30 FPS in the average station and often dips down in the 5 - 10 FPS range when out in the world fighting demons. The lack of anti-aliasing isn't a deal-breaker because the jaggies aren't as noticeable with the motion blur, but the game is basically unplayable at my monitor's native resolution in DX10. I could turn down the resolution, but then I have the artifacts from monitor scaling.
I filed a support request a few months ago about the issues, but I've never received any response. The support staff have responded to my other inquiries, so I know they're out there, but they have ignored my complaints about performance completely despite my several updates.
The bottom line is simple: HGL looks great in DX9, and it looks even better in DX10, but I suspect you're going to need the next generation of video cards if the latter is a must-have. I just keep playing in DX9, hoping that a new patch or a new video card will someday make it possible for me to use DX10.
The audio is not as compelling to me as the visuals. The music is appropriate enough, but the sound effects and voice work leave room for improvement. As to the sound effects, there just isn't enough variation. My first character was a guardian, essentially a "tank" in heavy armor wielding a huge sword and shield, and I was about ready to tear out my own ears after the first few hours of play.
The very same couple of sword-slashing sound effects are played no matter what manner of creature you're carving. Hit a zombie? Slice! Hit a lesser demon? Slice! Hit a major boss? Slice! Hit skin? Slice! Hit armor? Slice! Hit... Well, you get the idea. It's pretty irritating. The other sound effects aren't as irritatingly repetitive, or at least I don't find them so, but for a game that encourages melee combat some more variety (or less piercing sounds) would really help.
That's a relatively minor complaint. My more substantive complaint with the audio is the schizophrenic approach to the game's "tone". Some of the NPCs you'll meet seem very straight, delivering their dialogue in a serious and dramatic tone. But a surprisingly large fraction of the NPCs are just nuts. And I don't mean just a little eccentric; I mean full-blown, stark, raving, slavering buggo. From George in the first station to Lucius Aldin and Techsmith 314, the "comic" elements are just too over the top to fit in with the rest of the audio.
It's all well performed, well-recorded, and played back at high quality, but the choice of artistic tone is schizophrenic. Whereas the "tone" of the visuals is both consistent and welcome, the goofy audio mars the experience with its inconsistency.
The interface of HGL is simple yet powerful. The player can drag skills down to his bar for use, which have keys bound to them, and there are a couple of special actions that are activated by the shift key or are context activated by the control key. Looking around, running, jumping, attacking, and so forth all work just as you would expect for the most part. The game shifts smoothly from first-person perspective to third-person perspective when switching from ranged to melee weapons. Even when the game is at its weirdest, when operating as an RTS, the interface works smoothly.
For the most part, the interface is great, but I do have a few minor complaints. First, I don't generally like having the chat window visible, but it always shows itself when I play. I've found how to dismiss it, but it doesn't stay dismissed. Every time you log on to play, you'll have to fiddle with the interface. Second, although the player doesn't collect as many skills, items, and such as in the typical MMO, the action bar is still pretty limiting. The shift key and the context-sensitive control key help, as do the 'Q' and 'E' keys, but no matter how you slice it the number of actions available for use at any one time is pretty limited. Most MMOs have "skinning" UIs that allow the player to mold the interface in a variety of ways; HGL doesn't seem to have this ability, and I miss it.
Finally, maybe it's just me, but I don't like having quite so much interface surrounding me. The alt key provides a sort of "mode shift", tying the mouse movements to a cursor instead of the player's view, but what I really want are some options for toggling the interface (or perhaps bits of it) more easily. Perhaps the full interface could re-appear whenever the player hits the alt key? At any rate, the game looks great, but the interface sometimes sucks up too much of the screen for my tastes. This is the most minor of my UI complaints, but it's still a complaint.
This is where the game really shines. HGL has something for almost everybody. You can play it like a pretty straightforward FPS game if you like, relying on ranged weapons of various sorts to blast the enemy to bits. Or you can play it like a pretty straightforward third-person melee-oriented fighting game. Or you can play it much like an RTS-lite game, building/summoning minions to fight your battles for you. You can play it by yourself without an Internet connection as a single-player experience. You can play it online by yourself with an Internet connection as a largely single-player experience. You can play it online with a few buddies through the party system. You can even form a guild and build a huge organization and enjoy the high-end content with dozens and dozens of players at once. As suggested in the introduction, if HGL is anything, it's versatile.
The playing experience is divided into three factions, templar, cabalists, and hunters, each of which has (at the present time) two classes. Templar come in blademaster and guardian flavors, the former being offense oriented and dual-wielding and the latter being more of the traditional defense-heavy knight with sword and shield. Cabalists come in evoker and summoner flavors, the former relying on elemental attacks and curses and the latter commanding demonic minions. And finally, hunters come in marksman and engineer flavors, the former being more of a sniper with long-ranged attacks and area bombardment and the latter relying more on drone minions for aid.
Each of the six classes has its own skill tree, which allows further specialization and customization. As a guardian, for example, all of your skills have something to do with melee attacks, shield usage, and auras, but there are quite a few different balances to strike among them. One guardian might put lots of points into skills for tanking, while another might favor more damage-dealing skills, while still another might prefer to go heavy on group-related auras and healing. Every guardian is going to be a tank to some degree, but not every guardian is going to bring quite the same skill set to the table. HGL does a great job at letting the player differentiate his character.
Subscribers get a respec token to reassign skill points, and I've heard that the v2.0 patch (supposedly due out in the near future) will allow reassignment of attribute points as well. But on the whole I wish HGL were a bit more forgiving in that regard. I've only found it necessary to respec a couple of characters in other MMO games, but with the sort of balance changes that have already occurred in HGL, it seems just as important.
As to the rest of the mechanics, HGL borrows pretty liberally from its Diablo ancestors. The player has health and power, weapons have various types of damage, there are various types of resistances to said types of damage, different sorts of armor provide different sorts of protections, items are grouped into various tiers (enhanced, rare, unique, etc.) and confer various bonuses, and so forth.
But let's be fair: HGL is Diablo on steroids. Many items may be modified through the various types of sockets they possess (and subsequently de-modified). The player may pay to have "properties" added to an item at different tiers for different prices. Items may be reduced to their component parts, which may subsequently be used to craft modifications or other items. And there is a complete, if limited, crafting system to generate additional stuff, as well as a "transmogrifier" cube which operates much like the "Horadric cube" from Diablo II. Put somewhat humorously, it could be said that HGL is a graphics engine wrapped around a loot-generation system.
The player gains experience for leveling through killing demons and completing quests. As he levels, he gains attribute and skill points. The basic character attributes determine the usual sorts of stuff, while the skill trees define what abilities the player will be able to exercise out in the world. Thankfully, the leveling tree seems far more forgiving in HGL than in other MMOs. I can still remember spending months of consistent play in Dark Age of Camelot (DAoC) to get a character less than halfway to the level cap, and I can remember spending about the same number of months to get a character in World of Warcraft (WoW) right up to the level cap. You'll need far less time in HGL, which is good for the casual player and, arguably, benefits the serious player by letting him try more builds.
In summary, the game mechanics function as a consistent, amazing whole. The focus is clearly on action and keeping the fun factor high. And the flexibility of the classes in allowing the player to have such different experiences is laudable. HGL aims high and succeeds. Frankly, it's the mechanics that keep me playing.
The story is a neat, albeit overused, idea. The opening movie tells a variant of the creation myth according to which the very existence of light entails the darkness. The "burn" has already decimated God-alone-knows how many other worlds, and it has now come to London. The opening movie is really quite touching. It's not up to Blizzard standards (I can't help but notice the relatively flat and lifeless expressions on the faces), but you'll be ready to yell "For the living!" and go kick some demon butt by the time it's over.
The story that subsequently unfolds is one interesting piece of the overall tale. It seems pretty obvious to me that Flagship was hoping HGL would be enough of a hit that Hellgate: Insert-Other-Big-City-Here would be a no-brainer sequel. I'm not going to ruin any surprises, but I think the story is worthwhile. It's not going to win any awards, and frankly you can skip it altogether if you just want to focus on the action. But for those who care about such things, it is worthwhile.
The one serious negative comment I can make is that the NPC dialogue is just as inconsistent as their voiced audio bits. The story seems like it ought to be taken seriously, and yet it's marred by all the tongue-in-cheek, over-the-top, and just plain screwy attempts at humor and cultural reference. I wish the developers had just played it straight, or at least mostly straight. As it is, it's pretty hard to immerse yourself in the tale when you're surrounded by goofball NPCs. The Simpsons works because it's a cartoon and nothing more than a cartoon; HGL's credibility and tone fell to their deaths on the banana peel intended for comic effect.
Here is where we reach the achilles heel of the game and introduce the term 'flagshipped'. I will confess that I wasn't originally all that interested in HGL. I liked the premise, and I played the heck out of the Diablo series, but I just wasn't impressed by the in-game footage I was seeing. It looked to me like the game had potential, but it just wasn't an A-list game (i.e., a must-buy). A friend of mine was certain enough about it to pre-order, so after some cajoling on his part I relented and joined him. I bought the collector's edition shortly before the game was released because I got a good deal. And after playing for a while, I decided to take advantage of the lifetime subscriber option, despite the various bugs and issues I had with it. I figured that I could trust Bill Roper and company to deliver the goods.
The problem is that HGL brings a lot of good stuff to the table. It has a great loot system, great classes, great graphics, decent audio, and a lot of other things going for it. But in terms of content, it comes up short. It seems like the developers took so much time to nail down the engine and the game play that they didn't have time to build out the world. I thought the world of DAoC was big; by comparison the world of WoW was enormous; more recently, The Lord of the Rings Online (LotRO) has managed to make both of them look small. In comparison, all of HGL would fit in a couple of the regions of those worlds. To be fair, yes, there's a terrain generation system that re-maps an area from one play-through to the next, but the degree of resulting variation is so small it always feels the same.
I can't even count the number of times I've gone through essentially the same subway system or the same devastated London street. The content is reused heavily enough that the random variation serves only to bring a bit of confusion to remembering where things are. Frankly, I think the Diablo franchise did a better job at generating random terrain. HGL seems like it just doesn't have enough unique stuff to distinguish one London street from the next or sewer tunnel five from sewer tunnel five-hundred. Since it does generate randomly there's obviously plenty of opportunity for improvement through updates, but that hasn't been the developers' focus to date.
Worse, the game shipped badly broken in some significant respects. Lots of people couldn't get the game to run at all, those that did often had significant network issues, it crashed to the desktop frequently, it had a memory leak that prevented anyone from playing more than an hour or so at a time, the subscription web site didn't bill correctly (often double-charging subscribers or worse), and on and on and on. The game was a positive mess when it shipped. I guess Bill and the gang forgot about Blizzard's successes with their when-it's-done approach to releasing games.
Still worse, at least the way some folks see it, the developers changed their minds on what it meant to be a subscriber. Originally there were going to be a number of in-game benefits enjoyed by subscribers, but when it came time to ship the game the developers relented and made almost everything available to all. Those folks who had ponied up the $150 fee for a lifetime subscription suddenly found themselves playing essentially the same game as the non-subscriber. I don't know the politics of it, but given how badly broken the game shipped I'm not inclined to be upset that the developers made more features available to more players. Otherwise, I don't know that the game would have developed anything resembling a player community.
This led to the coining of 'flagshipped', a term which refers essentially to getting screwed, getting the short end of the stick, being the victim of a bait and switch scheme, etc. You can get more of a feeling from its entry in the urban dictionary or by reading a blog by the same name which documents the various failings of HGL and the developer. Suffice it to say that HGL got off to a terrible start and has subsequently traveled a rocky path. I think the game has improved a lot, but it remains to be seen whether my lifetime subscription will ultimately be worthwhile. As it stands, there is some subscriber-only content, but it just doesn't compare to any other subscription-based MMO out there.
Now, I know there are those who don't think it's fair to compare HGL to MMO games. I've read enough postings in the HGL forums to anticipate that reaction. But as my father used to say: if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it's a duck—regardless of what anybody tells you. I argue that HGL should be treated as an MMO for several reasons.
In short, Flagship is aiming HGL at subscribers. That's where they expect to make their money over the long haul, so I can hardly blame them. And as long as they're looking to collect a monthly fee, that changes the nature of the beast. The question is no longer whether HGL is a good FPS game, a good action RPG game, or a good RTS game; the question is whether the content in HGL measures up to what you could get for your subscription dollars elsewhere. It just doesn't have the diversity of environments and play that one finds in DaOC, WoW, LotRO, or other MMOs and, as such, the content falls rather flat.
As noted previously, though, the version 2.0 patch is coming soon, and it supposedly adds a good chunk of subscriber-only content. I don't believe that HGL is ever going to catch up even to the "smallest" MMO on the market, but the important question is whether it will provide enough content to justify the subscription rate generally. I think that's still an open question, but it's heartening that the developer still seems committed to making their past mistakes right. We'll see.
The multi-player aspects of HGL are pretty solid, with a couple of notable exceptions and one fundamental complaint. Regarding the exceptions, the game doesn't seem to handle network glitching and/or lag very well. I've played plenty of MMO games, and one of their great strengths is that they run smoothly despite high player counts. I've seen a number of glitches in HGL, even recently, that just aren't acceptable. Attack animations don't always trigger. On rare occasion, enemies disappear or jump around, sometimes even managing to hit the player while invisible. I've never been killed from such stuff, but it is pretty distracting.
The more fundamental complaint is that the multi-player aspects of the game just don't measure up to the current MMO bar. The game launched with severely anemic grouping/party/guild systems. Chat is more difficult right out of the gate than it needs to be. And it's only with the most recent patch that either email or emotes have been made available. Granted, HGL didn't and doesn't bill itself as a full-blown MMO, but for better or worse that's the territory it actually occupies, and those are the games against which it has to compete for subscriberes. As of this writing, HGL measures up far better than it did at launch, but it's still lacking in its community features compared to MMOs—particularly LotRO, which is a real standout in that respect.
It's a confusing thing trying to give a quick bottom-line for a game like HGL. The hype had built up to such stratospheric levels by launch (Halloween 2007, appropriately enough) that I don't think any game could have lived up to gamers' expectations. Nevertheless, it was a badly broken game at launch, and the developers' attempts to patch the bugs seemed at first to cause more issues than they solved. Today, after almost eight months of additional work, the game is in a much more playable state, but it still falls flat in terms of its content compared to its true competitors.
But none of that really matters for a conclusion, I suppose. There's only one question that really matters here: is the game sufficiently entertaining for your gaming dollar? Right now I see Amazon has it for $18.99, and I see there are copies on EBay for under $10. For that kind of money, anyone who isn't pathologically opposed to the action RPG genre, or FPS games generally, will easily get his money's worth from HGL. As to us poor souls who believed in the developer and forked over the lifetime subscription fee, the verdict isn't clear. Ask me again around Halloween 2008, and I should be able to tell you whether I've been flagshipped.
06/13/2008