Community Manager Scapes has posted updated notes for Patch 1.2 and it is HUGE. Apart from bug fixes, changes to the Marksman class and a slew of other upgrades, here are some of the new features listed in these patch notes:
In-Game Mail
Characters can now send and receive mail from any other character, including characters within the same account. Mail consists of text messages, and one item of any size and any amount of Palladium can be attached for delivery. Here are some of the features of the mail system.
Changes to Stonehenge
Moloch drops the following additional, extra-rare loot for “head-holders” only:
1% chance to drop a Respec Attribute Token. This item allows a character to “zero out” all points put into attributes (Accuracy, Strength, Stamina, and Willpower) and freely reassign them. These tokens are tradable.
5% chance to drop one of a new class of dye kits that have intrinsic properties. These properties scale with the level of the item, so one gained from Moloch at level 50 will be better than one gained from Moloch at level 30. These dye kits are tradable. In order of least rare to most rare:
Earth Core Dye Kit: Health regeneration
Dark Vengeance Dye Kit: + to luck
Indigo Fire Dye Kit: Electricity “thorns damage” effect
Copper Sky Dye Kit: + to all Elemental special effect defense
Ivory Haze Dye Kit: + to Shields
Vanquish Dye Kit: +1 level of Sprint skill (this does not scale)
Cold Steel Dye Kit: + to Armor
Black Knight Dye Kit: + to all attributes
Champion monsters in all Wild zones have a 1-in-250 chance to drop one of six new, Unique weapons. These weapons scale with the level of the champion dropping the weapon. These weapons are tradable.
Convulsor – a Sniper Rifle
The Exterminator – a Heavy Rifle
Novastorm – a Nova Gun
The Unyielding Moon – a Sword
Slipnaught – a Focus Item
Alucard’s Continuum – a Dart Pistol
A new boss monster, The Desiccator, has a 25% chance of appearing in The Deepest Wild zone. He should be extremely hard to kill, particularly solo or in small parties. As his health constantly regenerates, there is no guarantee a party will ever be able to kill him.
When defeated, The Desiccator has a 20% chance to drop a “Mysterious Egg.”
When placed in the Transmogrifying Cube, a Mysterious Egg will hatch into one of three new “pets with abilities”. These new pets and the Mysterious Egg are not tradable. These pets are:
Nautilus – occasionally heals all friends in range
Revenant – occasionally fires a spectral missile at enemies
Heap Raptor – breaks all those pesky crates for you
These listed changes are but a few of the many, many huge changes being made to Stonehenge. Just as well, many major changes have been made to the preexisting game, including heavily adjusted difficulty for Nightmare mode.
Be sure to check out the full patch notes in this thread for all the details.
In light of recent reports that the whole PC gaming scene was “dying”, Max Schaefer responds and shares his thoughts on the state of PC Gaming in CVG’s latest article, with a positive, but concerned outlook about the scene. Here’s a snippet:
“I think it’s cyclical and transitional”, Schaefer told CVG of the PC gaming scene, which has been blighted by ‘PC gaming is dying’ headlines in recent months.
He continued, “PC gaming isn’t going anywhere until people stop having PCs. It’s up to developers and publishers to keep it fresh and keep bringing creative, entertaining games to market.
“PC still is the only platform with decent chatting ability and people are by necessity in front of their PCs for many hours a day.
“We have a captive audience, we just need to do a better job of reaching out to them.”
Community Manager Scapes had this to communicate on the official forum regarding the Single Player patch for EU/US.
Hellgaters,
I have made a number of misinterpretations in my time — some real quality errors in communication. This, however, is the first I’ve made as Flagship Studios’ Community Manager and let me tell you: I feel rather awful about it.
So…
We are currently preparing to release Hellgate: London in Japan. This means we’re in the middle of a large localization effort. We’ve also just commercialized our Korean SKU and we’re simultaneously working on builds for China. Busy, busy.
So… (Again)
I relayed information that a new singleplayer patch was going through QA; however, I mistook it to be for the US/EU build. I learned I was wrong during a production meeting: it is actually only for our Japanese launch.
Now here we are. The SP patch in QA is not for US/EU.
Due to the nature of Japanese localization, their SP patch is not directly transferable and cannot be localized for US/EU. I did confirm that a US/EU singleplayer patch is planned but the timetable is not as imminent as the build for Japan. To be more precise, the estimate is weeks rather than days.
This will no doubt cause disappointment, frustration, even anger for our many singleplayer users. I am so sorry for it. Got a little mixed up, is all. If you feel the need, please jab me repeatedly with pointy implements of your choosing or make me wear a face-loving Oracle for a few hours. Seriously though, I’m sincerely apologetic for the misinformation.
So there you have it, it’ll only be available in some weeks time. Hang in there, Single Players.
SingTel recently had their Red Portal Hellgate London event at one of their stores. People got to come down, play Hellgate London, get prizes and just have a great day out!
PlayHGL has posted up their report on the event and has provided a large selection of pictures from the event, which included a lot of Cosplay characters, including an awesome templar.
At the event, visitors could take part in a quest event that when completed, will enable them to walk away with another exclusive dye kit code. There was also a first to level up to level 5 contest and a cosplay contest were also held where winners would walk away with various prizes ranging from a Chimei LCD monitor, Microsoft gaming peripherals.
There is a lot more pictures available at their gallery.
CVG has a snippet of an interview with Bill Roper which will be published on February 28th in the PC Zone magazine.
In the article Bill Roper talks about people’s high expectations of Hellgate London and the fact that FSS did not live up to those. He talks of some of the reasons as well as what FSS plans to do in the future to rectify these.
“…we simply tried to do too much with the game”, Roper says in retrospect. “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.”
Rather than try to shove responsibility for the rough launch onto others, the CEO says Flagship will take the blame for not getting enough testing done while working towards its committed ship date for Hellgate.
Bill also adds that a lot of the problems with a lack of testing were due to limited ability, likely due to pressure from publishers and investors.
“The challenges of an independent game studio are drastically different than those owned by a publisher,” he continues. “We’re fortunate that the online nature of the game has allowed us to continue to fix bugs, add content, and respond directly to our players’ wants and needs.
“We’ll keep pushing on all fronts with Hellgate: London”, Roper promises in conclusion.
Hopefully someone can get their hands on the full article for us, but for now head over to CVG to see the small preview of it.
Just a small update from Scapes on the official forums regarding the consignment house that we know is coming in Patch 2.
As mentioned in the “Lowdown” thread, The Abyss Chronicles will introduce a new feature: the Consignment House. Now, Wikipedia tells us that “consignment is the act of consigning”. After that nugget of truth, it goes on to explain that consigning “is placing a person or thing in the hand of another, but retaining ownership until the goods are sold or person is transferred.”
To elaborate on what it means for Hellgate: London, you will be able to post items up for buyout by other players (no bidding involved). Think eBay’s “Buy It Now” option. So, strictly speaking, “auction house” would be a misnomer. Hence, Consignment House.
Bidding is being considered as a future aspect of the Consignment House.
– Scapes
I’m speculating a bit here but this could mean that the Consignment House will be hit up more often than an Auction House would, what with folks checking what new items have been put up for purchase (and to not miss deals and steals).
(I love auction housing so this feature is very dear to me.)
– Scapes
Kaiser is back once again with another video tutorial. This time he previews the Blademaster.
To go with the video, there is also another moment of Zen just as last time, to provide you with the wonderful and weird world of youtube and Hellgate London!
Kaiser also mentions news of new positions for work at FSS as well as the Washington Post article that we have also mentioned at our forums, with the not so Hellgate-ish picture ;).
Today we’ve got another little tutorial video for you. Like before, this is intended for newer players who are still getting used to the game. (Really, you’d be surprised how many people find stuff like this helpful.) I mention in the video that this is only one way to go about playing the Blademaster class, and I really want to emphasize the “one way” part. There are so many ways to play the game – the video just shows how I personally like to level up to 10 when playing a Blademaster. Check it out in the video player below.
In completely unrelated news, we’re looking to fill a number of positions here at Flagship, as well as Ping0 upstairs. Check out our job listings (Ping0’s can be found here) and get in touch if you’re interested!
In more completely unrelated news, the Washington Post has, er, posted a nice story on Hellgate: London. What’s really awesome is the secret image they show of a new, unannounced class in the game. (A screen capture of the page has been archived in case they change it.)
What an announcement-full week ! After the many updates on upcoming multiplayer patches, here is a news that will make our Single Player population more than happy: Scapes has announced that the next SP Patch is going through QA as we speak, and that it will include all fixes up to 1.1b !
Back to the online component of Hellgate. Yet another Scapes announcement, which speaks for itself:
Test Center will be updating to Patch 1.2 in about 25 minutes at 4:00 PM PST. Note that this build is not final (so when you find the NPCs colored blue and on fire, you won’t be surprised).
The update should take about 30 minutes, after which the Test Center will resume service.
UPDATE:
Test Center has finished patching to 1.2. The door is open.
You know what to do know. Hop onto the Test Center (remember that on this server, you get double XP andaSkill retrainerevery time you connect) and help Flagship squash all the bugs. The more people playing, the faster the patch will be released!
Finally, some of you may have wondered why Flagship has not revealed how much Hellgate sold. I wonder too, because according to this page from VE3D, Hellgate ranks was the 13th best-selling PC game in January. Mind you, this was way before this week’s numerous announcements, which are bound to make the sales rise.
All I can say is that the sun shines bright on Hellgate: London’s future.
Scapes has posted up an updated list of patch 1.2 notes which are more detailed this time. They go into detail about various character fixes, ingame mail and general fixes.
In-Game Mail
Characters can now send and receive mail from any other character, including characters within the same account. Mail consists of text messages, and one item of any size and any amount of Palladium can be attached for delivery. Here are some of the features of the mail system.
Mail can be read anywhere in the game via the Mail panel. This can be accessed using the Z key or using the Mail icon located underneath the chat panel.
Items and Palladium can only be attached or removed from mail while the character is in a Station.
Mail can be sent to any player whose name is known, regardless of whether they are online or not. You can only send mail to one character at a time or to your entire guild.
There is no cap on the number of messages that can be sent or received, but mail is only stored for a certain amount of time. The mail panel shows how long each message has left before it is automatically deleted. Different types of mail (such as those with attachments or unread mail) may stay in your inbox for longer or shorter periods of time.
While you can send mail to character in a different mode (Hardcore, Elite, and Hardcore Elite) you cannot attach items or Palladium in a cross-mode email. This follows the same rules as trading items.
You can’t mail quest items or non-tradable items (such as Dye Kits or a Skill Retrainer).
For a full list of the patch notes go to this thread in our forums.
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