I Have Entered The Hellgate

I have been investing time into the newly rereleased game of Hellgate: London. It was been quite sometime since Flagship Studios released the first version of the game. Unfortunately for that company, it was rushed to release in an essentially unfinished state, and it killed the game the first time around. Does Hanbitsoft know what they are doing with the game? This is a small but brief tale of what happened to that game, and a wee bit of a description.

Flagship Studios. The name makes certain gamers cringe. What happened to that studio was both unfair and was more than likely unforeseen. The studio was comprised of developers from Blizzard North, the original team behind Diablo. It seems liked a winning combo: new development studio, new game.

Hellgate: London was released ahead of schedule. More than likely due to pressure from EA, whom was helping them publish and do marketing done for the game. The other portion of the deal was server support for Namco Bandai, with additional publishing from them as well. I was one of the many that hoped the game would be something great and plopped down the fee for the Lifetime subscription.

Not only did the game have an offline single player game, but it also featured an online multiplayer mode. In many ways this functioned like a MMO, having but a free online mode and subscriber models. The game played very much like a 3rd/1st person Diablo game with multiple classes and loot for you to collect.

Unfortunately for Flagship Studios, nobody subscribed, or bought the game. Poor reviews and numerous reports the game was essentially left in a broken state forced the company’s hand. They filed for bankruptcy before they could even prove themselves.

The IP for Hellgate was sold to Hanbitsoft, who promptly took the multiplayer component of the game and made it a free to play MMO in Asia, where it remained, gaining new content as updates. On June of this year, Hanbitsoft made the move to release it here under the same model, and it appears to be back and stronger than ever.

A great deal of time has been put into this version of the game, and I am excited to see that the game made it back somehow. I am hoping I can get farther than I did the first time around, perhaps even beat it. Here is hoping they don’t shutdown the servers prematurely before the game had a chance to shine.