It really was a strong game mechanically. And if you’ll forgive me throwing out the F-word, fun.
I’ve only played with the fan-made reincarnations of Hellgate’s servers but I’ve really, really enjoyed my time with it. Very excited to see this.
There were six classes?! My PC at the time didn’t run it very well so I never progressed very far on its release. I remember only a few classes though but probably because I didn’t get a chance to play much.
I think you started as one of the archetypes and then branched out at a later level. Lots of games tried that in the early 2000s before everybody realized it was a bad idea.
I’ll always not-so-fondly remember Hellgate: London as the game where you could headshot an enemy at point-blank range and have the game tell you you missed.
Its greatest failing was that it wanted to have its cake and eat it too with the approach to FPS/RPG hybrid that it took, and did damage calculations like an RPG while still expecting you to play it like an FPS. The marksman class had the absolute worst time of things because of this, but the other classes got to deal with it as well any time they wanted to use ranged attacks that cared about headshots or other critical-hit locations. The only ways to get around it were to just not care that sometimes the game would tell you your precision didn’t matter, or grind to outlevel whatever stuff you came across so that the damage calculations stopped mattering, at which point it just felt like a somewhat clunky FPS.
That said, I still have my disc copy of the game handy, and wouldn’t be opposed to playing this Steam release if it’s got any relevant updates or changes to improve play, but I think it’s just the F2P MMO version that’s been in service for years in Asia finally getting an English release. I’m probably better off just playing the disc release and trying one of the private servers.
Day one purchase for me. I agree with much of the criticism, but it was still a wonderful game despite its flaws.
That stuff only really felt bad as a Marksman, because the other classes didn’t truly pretend to be shooters.
I agree the marksman was a real misstep, design-wise. It’s tough to get shooting to feel right.
As a Marksman player, this game was absolutely awful. The other characters were better feeling, but the game still looked awful (IMO) and the bugs were numerous.
It was not a pretty game, even for 10 years ago. Randomly generated 3D gamespaces are, I imagine, not a trivial problem.
Think I just played as a marksman too. The guns didn’t handle well, contributing to the blandness of the moment-to-moment gameplay.
I was hyped for HG:L too, after reading the pre-release coverage. It tops my list for the most disappointing game.
I played the engineer, really fun pet class. I liked this game. Not sure how it will hold up but as mentioned it had that fun thing, for me anyway.
I played an engineer also, and had a great time with it.
Like I said earlier, the marksman was a serious misstep.
I still have a Hellgate: London t-shirt I wear at the gym. It’s getting kinda ratty though.
This is great news, I always wanted to return to the game, because the original launch was buggy as hell and incomplete, but also very promising and exactly my thing.
Wishlisted immediately.
I’m not as sure as y’all are on this, I’ll have to wait and see what folks say about it. I don’t have the best of memories when it comes to Hellgate: London but it’s quite possible it’s an entirely different game now, especially in single player instead of that MMO crap.
But wow, that Steam description sure isn’t doing the game any favours. They need a better translater; hope the text in game doesn’t reflect it.
You could always play Hellgate single player. I liked the concept, but ultimately the execution wasn’t very good.
I just threw away my Hellgate London colector’s edition box in a move a few months back. Maybe I shoulda held on to that comic.
What I remember most about Hellgate: London was milling about in the hub/subway station place, and dying a lot in other subway tunnels. But I think I had fun. Maybe.
I remember enjoying it a lot until I hit that damn RTS level. That pissed me off because I sucked at it and remember quitting soon after.
In honor of this thread, I got out my disc and a DVD-ROM drive and installed the game last night, along with a fanmade patch/mod that adds a bunch of multiplayer content to the single-player game, rebalances some stuff, and attempts to fix some other stuff. I only played for a little bit, so I can’t speak for the gameplay yet, but: man, this game looks and sounds ugly. It’s kind of hard to believe this game came out within a couple of months of both Portal and BioShock.