Poor Blood Zombie

So, as requested and because I love blabbering on and on about it, there's a lot more to say about Hellgate: London.

The first big issue is the subscription service. A lot of the community isn't happy with this. The question of subscription is actually why I took a long break from keeping up with the community over at Hellgate Guru - I loved it at first but after about six months, there wasn't a lot of new press releases left to discuss so everyone just started fixating on the subscription issue, which got old fast.

Basically, everyone who buys the game gets the full game. Full single-player mode, and the ability to play online on the same servers as everyone else. Basically, you get everything you did with Diablo II, except with supposedly better anti-cheating measures and not having to deal with Bnet. Online, though, is where the subscribers (Elites, I think is the term they're going to use) get extra goodies. For one, free players get only three character slots per account - kind of annoying since there are six classes with more slated for eventual release. Elite players get lots more, not sure how many. Elites also get slightly bigger bank spaces. Someone in the game is going to get communal stashes accessible by all their characters - whether this is going to be everyone or just subscribers is still up in the air, as far as I've read.

Beyond that stuff, I think most of the difference between free players and Elites comes from expanding content. HGL will have expanding content. Eventually they plan on introducing at least three new classes, upping the level cap, introducing new zones, new loot, etc., and only subscribers will have access to this. This seems to be the main advantage of paying monthly, along with "Elite gear", which will supposedly look cooler but not be functionally any better than what everyone else can get.

As far as I can tell, if you don't plan to play online, there's no reason to subscribe. Though if you never play online, it's unknown if you'll ever have access to the post-release content. There's talk of releasing it eventually in expansion-pack-esque products, but that's all hearsay at this point. It's also unknown what will happen if someone subscribes for a long time and then decides to stop for a while - we don't know if you'll lose access to some zones/gear/classes/whatever or not, so how they're going to handle that really needs to be clarified. I'd say this is their main weakness right now - more the vagueness of their subscription model rather than its existence.

The other beef people seem to be having is the level design and randomization - they complain that there isn't a lot of variety. Granted I didn't get to play the beta as long as others but I was actually pretty impressed with the random level generation and the variety of level terrain templates. It's not WoW, but it's about what you'd expect for a game set almost entirely within London - you've got your dank sewers, your dank catacombs, your burned-out cityscapes, and the occasional hell-rift (the walls in hell look phenomenal, by the way; it looks like hot lava cooled around bones and skulls that had been pressed into it). Then there are some great static zones, which I'm pretty sure are the same every time and aren't randomized.

These are the major set pieces of the game, and mirror actual sites in London - seeing the British Museum was really cool, even though I was being chased by Emperor G-something and his hordes of demonic Goro-impersonators. I think there are going to be some cathedral settings too, though I'm not sure which one they'll be modeled after. Anyway, the level randomization is well-executed as far as I can tell (except for one time where I got a map whose only tunnel to the next zone was blocked by a giant flaming subway car), and while you're not seeing the variety of tilesets as you would in a true MMO, the terrain is a lot more varied and interesting than in Diablo II, and I didn't even get to see past Act I in the beta.

So far, I'm extremely excited. I'm not hugely keen on the idea of spending $10/month to get all the eventual content the game will have to offer, but I have to say I like that there will be expanding content. Plus, when the devs post in the fan forums that people should play the game without subscribing for a few months before making the decision, I think they at least have a pretty good attitude about it.