Hellgate: London retrospective

Prior to its release, I'd been downright jubilant about Hellgate: London for a long time, and rambled on at great length. I had the Collector's Edition preordered long ahead of time, and even sprung for the Founder's offer (a lifetime online subscription) before I'd given the game a chance to prove itself one way or another. I'm not yet willing to say that that last part was a mistake, but I've definitely had second thoughts.

In a word, Hellgate is disappointing. In a few more words, it's disappointing and still remarkably fun, but unfortunately the thing that stuck with me the most after all my early, pre-beta fanboying and endless hours cruising the forums up to two years before the game came out, is that the game could and should have been so much more. I'm aware that I pretty much set myself up for this disappointment, but in a way that makes me all the more qualified to talk about it. In another way, it makes me less qualified, but we'll ignore that for the time being since all of three people will probably ever read this.

Hellgate: London promised to be Diablo 3, or at least its "spiritual successor," a term bandied about so often for classic games that all you can be really sure it means is "will be remarkably similar to..." Flagship Studies, of course, had a little more weight behind their claims than others, given that the core of their team was, in fact, the core of the Blizzard North teams and a slew of other qualified individuals. It looked like the perfect storm: practically the same people behind the game, an interesting new setting and set of conflicts, and the same addictive style of loot-based play that made every Carver Demon in Diablo II look like a tiny, shrill piñata. It sounded pretty much foolproof.

The problem with spiritual successors is that all too often, they don't change enough from the classic game to keep pace with modern expectation. I'm not even talking about graphics; I'm mostly referring to current, established user interface conventions, level design, and certain minimum expectations for what constitutes online play. While classic games by definition got lots of things right, certain aspects of gaming have unilaterally advanced for the better, and in Hellgate, many of these lessons weren't quite learned.

Hellgate: London's graphics are decent, and the support for DX10 will give them some longevity. Most of the enemies look quite good, as do most of the player models (excepting some gaps in the graphics between pieces of armor). For some reason, however, other players' characters can only be viewed with low-res textures, which at the moment prevents much of the showiness that makes gear acquisition in multiplayer games so compelling. The game's sound is solid, with good explosions, slashing noises, and decent music, though the latter falls into Half Life 2's trap of only playing sporadically and at seemingly random times.

Hellgate's gameplay is undoubtedly one of its strong points. It follows the same basic formula of Diablo: fairly simplistic hack 'n' slash combined with loot lust of the most basic and fulfilling sort. You kill large numbers of mildly-threatening beasties and wait for the satisfying sound of coins, gear, and magic items hitting the floor. Flagship Studios got this aspect pretty perfectly, as I see it. It hits some snags when bosses just take heinously long periods of time to kill, an issue endemic to hack 'n' slash games. Boss fights are made challenging mostly by giving them obscenely large health pools, health oceans, really, rather than by giving them any unique or interesting abilities that actually make them difficult, rather than just tedious, to kill. But the majority of the time, the enemies appear in droves and drop with pleasant alacrity, speeding your movement towards the all-important loot. In this respect, the interface has improved considerably over its predecessors: the WoW-like skill bar allows effective use of most of your skills without interrupting the action.

The only real bumps in Hellgate's gameplay come in the form of the mission-based minigames sprinkled throughout the storyline. These have you doing such things as manning an AA gun to shoot down a giant demonic airship, playing capture the grimoire, and using RTS-style controls to lead a squad of friendly soldiers to safety. All of these sound good in theory, and FSS's attempts to spice up the gameplay with a little variety is laudable. However, all of these minigames are plagued by flawed design. Shooting down the demonic dirigible takes little more than holding down the trigger for five minutes straight, capture the grimoire is needlessly easy, and the squad command game is needless difficult and has no explanation of the controls. Thankfully, these minigames are the exception to the gameplay, and are just a good idea, poorly shoehorned into an otherwise smooth game. In general, however, the gameplay-related aspects of Hellgate's UI have been vastly improved over older titles', right down to a button that just vacuums up all the loot around you. The gameplay can only be described as "classic" which, while it might have negative connotations for some, is a great boon for Hellgate. Yes, it sticks to a very old formula, but in regards to gameplay it added just the right amount of innovation to keep it fun and still flow smoothly.

The UI's friendliness is mostly confined to shooting and looting, however. Inventory Tetris is back with a vengeance, though the pain it causes is mitigated by the ability to break down any item into components (used for crafting) without having to go to town and back just to clear your bags. The break-down feature is a life-saver, considering the scads of loot you'll see, and is one of Hellgate's best innovations. The in-game cursor is unusually laggy (though only for the cursor itself, and thankfully not for aiming) and I've been unable to correct for it, which makes a lot of the repetetive gear- and NPC-related clicking a nuisance. The crafting and item upgrade screens still need lots of tweaking to make them more user-friendly, though recent patches have made some improvements in this area. NPC dialogue, if you bother to read it, has been parsed into far too many individual screens of conversation, for no apparent reason.

The UI for chatting was abysmal at launch, and is only slightly better now. The commands need to be streamlined and, like most games, should just take a page out of WoW's sterling chat interface. More fixes for the chat UI are coming in the next patch, however, and to be fair they'd have been fairly useless before this point because the need for them simply hasn't existed. Being able to hot-link an item description directly into chat doesn't mean a whole lot when there's no real player-driven economy to speak of. So the fact that both hot-linking and an escrow house will be introduced in the same patch is a sign of good planning, even if both of these features should have been available from the get-go.

Thankfully, FSS has been releasing patches fairly frequently that have made great strides towards fixing the bug-laden, feature-light game released last Halloween. System stability, connection and graphical errors, and lost items have mostly disappeared in recent patches, and the aforementioned escrow house and improved trade are slated for release in the near future, along with PvP and new adventure areas. Stonehenge has already hit the servers and added several new tilesets, enemies, and bosses to the game. While FSS may have released a premature game with many issues, they're certainly taking customer support and their promise of new content for subscribers seriously. While early subscriber content consisted only of annoying, inventory-clogging holidays items with no real use and little of the kitschy quality that makes Christmas in Orgrimmar bearable, they've so far put those aside in favor of more pressing and substantial bonuses for the subscriber base. Whether a long-term investment like the Founder's offer will be worth it remains to be seen, but despite the above criticisms, I'm actually pretty hopeful that the game will eventually blossom into a more worthy specimen of the Diablo style.

Unfortunately, the one single, most disappointing thing about Hellgate: London is effectively unpatchable. Gameplay issues and bugs can all be removed with a little time, and ignored with a little patience. But Hellgate: London built itself up on a gritty, despairing and truly post-apocalyptic vision of a future overrun with hellspawn, and then fell flat on its face. All of the pre-release media, from the excellent E3 videos to the fanfic and silly, if fun, comics, painted a grim picture of a culture reduced to despair and violence against terrible odds. It had the makings of a compelling, if somewhat formulaic, story, and solid narrative and atmosphere can save a game from many other failings. Hellgate had all the makings of that kind of mood and atmosphere, and it fell flat on its face.

Media about even the most dire of circumstances need to have some kind of comic relief, even just a tiny bit. This is necessary to keep things from becoming overwhelmingly dreary, and it also humanizes things to some extent. But somewhere in the design process, Flagship Studios decided that comic relief wasn't enough, and seems to have retooled every quest and NPC in the game for comic overload. Worse, most of it isn't even that funny. Thankfully, the main storyline quests are much more in keeping with what you'd expect in a scorched world on the brink of destruction. And while the side-quests are a nice addition to the Diablo model, the tedious grinding is replaced by annoying NPCs with out-of-place attitudes. Almost every NPC is either flippant, a hyperbolic coward, or curiously upbeat about their grueling task du jour. Aside from destroying any sense of enjoyable and expressive mood in the game, it's just completely illogical. Unless the Cabalists are putting something in the water, there's no reason that 80% of the NPCs literally jump for joy when you complete their missions. Their world is a scorched husk, their civilization lies in ruins, and in all likelihood their entire families are dead. Why the fuck is everyone jumping for joy?

Some of the humor is genuinely funny and welcome - there's an admittedly clever reference to Joss Whedon's Angel that I even missed the first time, and the Scottish Marksman whose mission dialogue is complete gibberish is reminiscent of the wit that brought us the "You know this because you are telepathic" quest text from WoW. But for the most part, the game's humor just shoots itself in the foot. Most of it's not funny, almost none of it is appropriate, and it's the top reason the game fell short of its potential. Instead of gritty you get goofy, and instead of distracting from other, less important flaws, it just accentuates them.

Contrary to what many have said, and to what the majority of this largely negative review may indicate, the game is entirely playable. It's not stellar, and parts of it are downright annoying. But the gameplay is dead-on, and a worthy successor to the level-grinding, loot-hoarding, horde-slaughtering hole in our brains previously filled by Diablo and its clones. Hellgate: London even does enough things differently and promises enough in the future that it's not simply a Diablo clone. Tragically, though, its atmosphere and the flavor of the plotline is forgettable enough that I played through the entire game listening to podcasts and didn't really miss anything. The converse of that statement is that it's easy and casual enough that you can get into an out of it quickly, and it's a fun thing to do while listening to podcasts or DVD commentaries.