Scapes, Hellgate: London’s Community Manager, posted this announcement yesterday evening, on the official boards:
The Hellgate: London live servers, Shulgoth (US) and Sydonai (EU), will be updating to Patch 1.1 tomorrow. Shulgoth (US) will go down at 6:00 AM PST (9:00 AM EST) and Sydonai (EU) will go down later in the day (this server status entry will be updated with the time when it is set).
The update will take about an hour. The patch notes for 1.1 will be posted on the website tomorrow and can be found on the forums here.
– Scapes
It did not take long
UPDATE: Sydonai (EU) will be doing down tonight at 9:00 PM PST (5:00 AM GMT).
The Founders Offer allows you to pay a one-time payment of 150 USD for a lifetime subscription to Hellgate: London instead of monthly payments. The offer ends at 11:59pm, 31st of January, 2008 so place your orders now!!
Please keep in mind you don’t need to subscribe for online play, but if you’re interested in the perks of subscription and on-going content, then this is definitely worth looking into.
Missed out on the Founders Offer? You can still get yours with a pre-order from bGosu.com.
You can grab the Pre-Order from the site which includes a Founders Offer eligibility offer where you can pay for the founders offer and attain a wasp dye kit for all of your characters.
Details:
The wasp dye kit can’t be traded and will always be with your character(s) even if you make a brand new character they will obtain a wasp dye kit in their inventory.
Only those who with a pre-order registered account are viable to the limited-time founders offer.
You can add a ‘pre-order’ badge to your account from the hellgatelondon.com website into your account there after signing in at anytime.
Also, if you just wanted the wasp dye kit and didn’t want founders offer you can get that too. You can add all 4 different pre-order dye kits to 1 account. It’s certainly a great looking dye kit for those of you with bland colors. Metalic black with gold pipe lining and patterns make for a kickass scheme.
Be sure to check out bGosu.com if you’re interested.
Update: Scapes has just posted on the official forums stating that the offer ends on the 31st of January.
Hellgate Guru is pleased to announce that the Elemental Power Cost Calculator, designed by Dunkz, is now hosted on our site. Collaborating with many players, Dunkz put in a lot of work to make the formulas all work together so that a working Power Cost Calculator could be established.
“Due to misleading skill descriptions, the Elemental Power Costs, along with the Master of the Elements skill, left many Summoners wondering exactly how much Power they would need to support all these minions. I began collecting data on this because I saw many posts about the 41 Elemental army and wondered if it was even possible. The Hellgate Guru community helped immensely in this project, providing me with accurate Patch 1.0 information, as well as in game communications with players.
Many of the aspects of the Excel format is locked, for security reasons. I do hope we could get a dedicated Java Script coder to help with the process of actually making it a stand-alone feature on Hellgate Guru. I hope my efforts at least help a couple of new and old players see what their Summoner is truly capable of, keeping the limits of Power into consideration.”
One of the nominated companies was The9, which we know to be the Chinese publisher for Hellgate London. The awards that The9 received were:
– Top Ten Game Operators in China: The9 Limited
– Most Influential Figure in China’s Game Industry: Mr. Jun Zhu, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of The9 Limited
– Top Ten Most Popular Online Games in China: World of Warcraft(R)
– 2008 Most Anticipated Online Game in China: Ragnarok Online 2
– 2008 Most Anticipated Online Game in China: Hellgate: London
The actual list for the Most Anticipated Online Games was:
1. Cangtian
2. Chibi
3. Xianjian Online
4. RO2
5. Lord of Rings Online
6. Hellgate London
7. Heroes of Might and Magic Online
8. Giant
9. Dungeon & Fighter
10. Skyward Sword and Dragon-kill Falchion
GamerPro has published their annual report on MMOs, choosing to concentrate on three games; Tabula Rasa, Hellgate London and Fury. While they give Hellgate London a “D” grade and don’t have much nice things to say about it, they give a couple of lines that I found interesting.
Basically, Hellgate seems like it’s still trying to recover from its launch. This would explain the slow clip at which content is being delivered to subscribers, and the game’s puzzling lack of essential MMO features (i.e. an auction house and a robust PvP system.) Unfortunately the developers aren’t very forthcoming regarding plans for the game down the line. Indeed, the fact that Hellgate isn’t an MMORPG by the strictest definition of the term is a valid point, but that doesn’t excuse the game’s shortcomings. It’s as if the designers pretend that nothing’s happened since Diablo 2 launched. Hellgate exists in a void and the only people who aren’t crying foul are the purists. But even these people have to admit that content-wise, Hellgate has a long way to go before it can approach the quality of its spiritual predecessor.
Is it silly to have faith in Hellgate? Probably not. While Flagship may have damaged the cred attached to its legacy the company still has enough juice to continue building the game. In the meantime Flagship needs to do something to stoke the good faith of its community. At this point there really isn’t much reason to be a subscriber.
This is the outlook that I’ve had on Hellgate so far and in my opinion FSS has taken the right steps to bring the Faith back.
HGG user The_Wolf has pointed out that a new review of the Stonehenge Chronicles has been published by GameSpy.
The article talks of the Stonehenge area and gives a description of how it works, as well as the other added features such as the duel arena which GameSpy says is a great way to blow off steam in between your game sessions.
While the rewards for plowing through the new content were satisfying, we are a bit concerned about how the community will take to the new boss fights. As we already mentioned, it takes hours to collect all the essences to unlock these fights, but the bosses themselves can be defeated in under a minute by many of the most popular class builds. Moloch in particular was a pushover, while Ash gave us far more of a challenge, assaulting us from above with very painful attacks. Errgoth was difficult to a certain degree, until we decided to play the safe tactic and let our bots do the dirty work while we ran away from his nasty ranged attack. While we’re not sure if more difficult bosses would have been the best design choice, the return on your time investment seems pretty small, at least in terms of time played.
The new areas are a nice addition to the game content, with spooky outdoor sections and ominous cathedral-like structures introducing a nice change of pace from the usual mix of trashed London subway stations and ravaged streets. We’d like to see some of this architecture introduced into the regular game, since it does much for a game that can tend to get repetitive despite the strengths of its map randomization.
GameSpy also briefly mention what they hope for this game to do in the future and how they hope there are enough subscribers to let the team develop the game into it’s full potential.
Since release, Hellgate: London has steadily rolled out expanded content for its subscribers, and made changes to the original game to address the issues it had with what can’t be called anything but a premature release. In its current state, the game can be great fun, but it still suffers from a handful of bugs and network issues that impede what would otherwise be one of the more entertaining role-playing experiences around. The concept is brilliantly original, and the gameplay can be great fun. But the frequent disconnects and lag are troubling, as is the completely broken state of the nightmare-level endgame. We’re hoping that there are enough subscribers out there to keep the game improving. Until then, you can find us in the London underground, fighting the good fight.
IAH, the SEA (South East Asia) publisher for Hellgate London posted up an interview that their members got to conduct with Phil Shenk, who is the Art Director of Flagship Studios.
There is questions about items, level variations and the map designs. Here is a snippet, head to our forum to read the rest of the questions which provide some interesting information on what’s to come in future patches.
5) Are there any plans for set items and if so, would they unique designs/models/textures to them or would they just be rehashed normal items?
Yes, set items are on the list. They are something we always wanted to do, and we just ran out of time. Expect to see them in one of the next Chronicle updates.
We’re talking right now about what we can do to make them look different and special. Ideally, we’d make new models for everything, but that takes a lot of time. Haha, ALL the art in Hellgate takes a lot of time because we shot for the “next gen” normal-mapped look. Sometimes I wish we had gone the “hand-painted” look and then we could make more stuff!
But anyway, for set items, we’d have to make something for each gender of each faction at least… and ideally for each class. That’s a lot of stuff! And we don’t want people to have to wait too long to see them.
So, we might mix it up. We can do fancier, special textures for them, or at least color sets. Maybe a few pieces will have special models. We’ll do what we can. Is having unique models super important to you? Even if it meant waiting longer to see them?
MythosGuru has interviewed Programmer/Quest Designer/Etc., Marsh Lefler, much like the previous interview with Jason Beck.
Next week — whenever next week occurs (could be three weeks from now!) — either Particle Programmer, etc. John Dunbar or Environment Artist Kevin Green is on the bubble.
Be sure you check it out, the Devs are somewhat interesting people.
If you missed the interview with Grimby from a few weeks ago, you can find it here.
After a rather big Patch 1.0 last Tuesday, Patch 1.1 is already upon us ! The Stonehenge Chronicles brought a lot of content and changes, and the first post-1.0 update corrects lots of the still-active bugs, along with a few other problems. As mentioned in Scapes’ announcement, this patch is very community-oriented, a major part of it being fixes directly asked on the official boards. This will satisfy some grumpy people
And now, a few highlights from this patch:
Thanks to everyone who has posted issues and suggestions. And in fact, you’ll notice that a lot of the fixes and features in this patch are linked to posts in our forums. When we’ve addressed something you’ve brought up, we want to acknowledge your contribution to the betterment of the game!
Fixed a bug causing additional Skill Retrainers to spawn when they shouldn’t have. Duplicate Skill Retrainers should now be removed.
This patch is currently on the Test Center (since yesterday if I’m not mistaken), we can assume it will be installed on Shulgoth and Sydonai this week or the next.
Alessandro Baldasseroni created the Hunter model. He tells all on CGSociety. Baldasseroni is one of the most prolific artists in the industry, submitting works since the original Character Modeling d’artiste title, and the original ELEMENTAL Autodesk book. Alessandro submitted the Hellgate: London ‘Hunter’ image to Ballistic Publishing’s ‘EXOTIQUE 3’ last year. The Hunter model was made for the Hellgate:London cinematic, made by Blur Studio Inc. The Hellgate: London game was created and developed by Flagship Studio.
The guide shows the steps that were taken to make the hunter along with a number of concept illustrations. It is three pages long and is a great read for any 3D modelling enthusiast.
Hellgate Guru was founded in mid-2005 and has ever since been one of the most popular fan sites and forums devoted to Hellgate: London, catering to a wide range of interests, as well as having a dedicated team of staff members who keep the website full of constant updates, news and generate activity and hype around the game. More
