14 DAY TRIAL // Last year was a year full of promising and hyped up releases of MMOs. Amongst them, names like Tabula Rasa, City Of Villains, Burning Crusade. Some delivered both financially and critically, while other busted. Recently, there have been reports that NCsoft's Tabula Rasa is in bad financial shape. And now, Hellgate London comes under scrutiny from the most unlikely of sources.
Flagship boss Bill Roper is the one doing the scrutinizing and it doesn't look too good to him. He says that the expectations that the players had for Hellgate, developed by some of the Diablo series veteran designers, were just too high and that no one could have fulfilled them. He also admitted that the team was much too ambitious in its aims. They wanted "Vista, DirectX 10, being both a single-player boxed product and a multiplayer online game, a simultaneous launch in seven languages across Europe, the US and South East Asia, and creating our own fully-featured online destination on top of all that". It proved to be too much for the developers and, with a fixed release date in place, there just wasn't enough time to fully test everything that needed to be tested.
It's a real shame, too, because basically Hellgate got a whole array of things right. It had instanced dungeons, which means that you're basically alone with the bad monsters you're fighting, without other players having the chance to kill you or profit from your work. It had some adrenalin pumping action, with interesting classes and cool quests involving a demonic invasion of London. Yet, for all the things it got right, Hellgate: London had, on launch, some big game-stopping bugs. And players quickly renounced playing the game, even if most of the problems are now fixed. Sadly for Hellgate, the MMO market is one in which it is very hard to convince players to give a game a second chance.
Nonetheless, Bill Roper stated that Flagship would continue to fix bugs, add new content and plan expansions for Hellgate: London, promising to make the game a late success rather than an early bust.