Scapes has posted the following update on the forums, so my guess this has now gone live.
Patch 1.3a Notes
April 28, 2008
Patch 1.3a addresses some significant issues experienced in Patch 1.3. It also brings minor changes to the Buddy List as well as translation corrections. Additionally, the target amount for the Donation feature has been adjusted.
See you online!
The Hellgate: London Team
— General
The Donation goal has been reduced.
The Buddy List font size and colors have been adjusted for readability.
Fixes
Fixed Rank experience not saving when switching instances.
Fixed weapon mods being unequipped on load. This bug occurred when retrieving modded weapons from Shared Stash, switching battle sets, mailing modded weapons, and other instances of loading.
Mods will no longer work when the weapon they are attached to is upgraded past the mods’ level range.
Fixed several skill description translations for European languages.
Added code to track in-game mail and help determine what is causing it to lag and items to not be sent.
Patch Notes Disclaimer: While we make every effort to include all upcoming changes in our patch notes, please be aware that occasionally some changes are unintentionally omitted.
The 1.3 Patch that we reported on yesterday is now up on the live server.
Greetings, Hellgaters, and welcome to Hellgate: London Patch 1.3!
Patch 1.3 is a beast of a update, offering no less than eight new features to the game including Shared Stash, a Premium Item Merchant, Donation Collectors and Global Buffs, Ranks and the Expertise system, and lots more. This content update also fixes a number of pesky item, skill, and interface bugs and makes a few tweaks to partying and monster scaling in Stonehenge.
Interacting with your fellow players has been enhanced with the introduction of optional chat bubbles that appear when players talk and performable emotes that your characters now have at their disposal. In Patch 1.3, players can also easily browse lists of chat and emote commands using the two according buttons in the chat pane.
A very sincere thank you to the many players who tested the many builds of Patch 1.3 uploaded to our Test Center server and helped report on the new patch’s balance, performance, and stability.
See you online!
The Hellgate: London Team — Click here to read the full patch notes for Patch 1.3!
Hellgate: London’s Patch 1.3 has grown from an intermediary between Patch 1.2 and the Abyss Chronicles to a giant in its own right. With features coming out its ears, this content update is sure to wow and to please. A release candidate of Patch 1.3 is slated for Test Center release later today where it’ll receive its final round of testing by QA and Hellgaters. Information on the estimated downtime will be posted before the Test Center server goes down for the update. For those players who sample the release candidate and want to report problems or bugs, please use the Test Center Feedback forum.
After the final Patch 1.3 build spends the night on Test Center, the live servers will be updated around noon tomorrow, barring any unforeseen difficulties. Information on downtimes will be posted to the Server Status page and the forums beforehand. While the final patch notes will be posted tomorrow, ones based off of the Test Center build can be found here.
Patch 1.3 introduces a host of new elements to Hellgate: London, including a Shared Stash system, a Premium Item Merchant, optional chat bubbles, a number of emotes your characters can perform, the abilities to hide your helmet and inspect other characters’ equipment, and a Donation Collector NPC who grants global buffs. Additionally, a new set of passive skills called Expertise have been introduced, gained by earning Ranks. For more details, check out the latest patch notes from Test Center.
You can see the Test Centre patch notes over at our forums.
As many of you fellow Guru-ers reported yesterday, the launcher can now be used to update your Single Player version to the final 1.2 Patch.
Scapes posted the following on the official Hellgate London website.
After about two weeks in public beta testing, the Hellgate: London Single Player Patch 1.2 update is ready to be finally be released. The release candidate published last week has been poked, prodded, and otherwise fully tested and has been retitled sans “beta”. Those users who have already applied the release candidate version of this patch need to take no additional action as the update has not changed since.
The reason for the lengthy patch release was due largely in part to an issues players were experiencing where they couldn’t make Elite Mode characters. This problem has been fixed and is listed in the compendium that is the Single Player Patch 1.2 notes, available here. The patch can be downloaded from the same link or by loading up Hellgate: London and clicking the Update Available button. Clicking the Details button under Single Player yields the patch notes, clicking Update will apply the patch.
Many thanks to those Hellgaters who helped out by testing preliminary Single Player Patch 1.2 versions!
Scapes has just posted this news piece on the Hellgate London front page:
Announced about a month ago, the Hellgate: London official soundtrack is available for purchase. However, the album can now be found on iTunes as well in the form of direct-download tracks. Click here to check it out. The link will load iTunes and display the album in the iTunes Store pane. Short samples of the thirteen tunes can be found by clicking “See All”.
The Hellgate: London soundtrack is composed by Sonic Mayhem, made up of industry veterans Cris Velasco and Sascha Dikiciyan. The album is released under the London Green Studios label.
GameMeca once again has early concept art from the new Abyss chronicles. The text that goes along with them just says that they are concept art from what Google translator comes up with.
For two weeks now, Fridays have been “new build” days for Single Player Patch 1.2 Beta and Test Center Patch 1.3. These patches are both early “test” versions of their final iterations and are used to fix issues, bugs, rebalances, and other tweaks with every build. These fixes culminate and become the finished patch notes.
Single Player Patch 1.2 Beta is rapidly closing in on its final build with just a few remaining issues left to fix. The most vital of these is an issue which prevents players from creating new Elite Mode characters. This past Friday’s build solved two bugs: one that caused characters not to load properly and another which prevented Skill Retrainers from being given to characters which required them. A new SP 1.2 Beta build is estimated to be out tomorrow which will fix the Elite Mode bug.
Multiplayer Patch 1.3 is having its kinks worked out and quickly on the Test Center server. The patch notes have doubled in length in the ten short days Patch 1.3 has been on Test Center, half of them being new feature and new details on those features. The patch’s list of known issues has shrunk from a dozen plus to two, many of them fixed in the build uploaded to Test Center this past Friday and this afternoon. While an estimate for release is still a little ways off, it shouldn’t be too long now.
The “Reconnaissance Mission” Screenshot Contest was announced late last month and the results are now in!
We saw an impressive number of offerings despite a few hiccups with the email address set up to receive them. In the end, all submissions were received and reviewed. Allow me to say something here: JUDGING IS HARD! However, we embraced the difficult task, soliciting the help of Ivan Sulic, Hellgate: London’s game writer, when I found myself wanting to choose too many. The winners are (in no particular order):
The People of Holborn Station have just received all of the submitted images and I believe they wish to communicate their thanks. Incoming transmission!
“WOW!
…oh, sorry, that must have been loud: Wow! Wow wow wow! Thank you Hellgaters for these amazing shots of Stonehenge! Just look at these shots! A brave Templar standing proudly over fallen Moloch, a 100-page publication all about the Stonehenge frontier, a fantastically-composed image of warriors on the hunt in the Wilds, and a comprehensive postcard of all the lands we hope one day to visit ourselves! Wait a tic…why is Techsmith 101 holding the magazine sideways…
…a centerfold of Desiccator along with its turn-ons and what it looks for in a victim. Well that’ll keep Techsmith 101 occupied for a spell. There he goes, running off with it. Not sure if we’re going to want it back after he’s done with it.
Well, noble champions, you have done this humble station a good turn. The People of Holborn Station would like to provide something additional to fully convey our thanks, Scapes has the details. FOR THE LIVING!”
As some folks know, this was my first official contest. As such, I’d like to personally add a small token of thanks. In addition to signed Hellgate: London posters, each of the four winners will receive Hellgate: London t-shirts as well.
I would like to thank everyone who participated in this contest. I’ll be posting up some very close runner-up submissions in this thread on the forums later on. I’ve already got ideas for upcoming contests and look forward to presenting them soon!
Joystiq, VideoGamer.com and a few other sites have an article up that talks about how Hellgate London did in Korea in tems of sales and accounts that signed up for it.
Bill Roper and company have announced that in the two weeks since the Korean launch of the Hellgate beta more than a million accounts have been registered. According to Flagship, this makes the MMO the most successful online game launch in Korea in the past three years.
Hellgate’s beta officially kicked off in Korea on January 15, and according to Korean online game tracking service Gametrics, the game quickly found an audiences with gamers in PC Cafes, ranking ninth among online games, fifth among RPGs, and was the most popular beta being played. This was followed by a commercial release on February 22, a launch that Flagship boasts achieved “record sales”
UPDATE: Kotaku also has the news up, but they follow it with an official press release:
Flagship Studios’ HellgateTM: London Celebrates The Most Successful Online Korean Launch In Three Years
San Francisco, CA (April 11th, 2008) - Flagship Studios today announced that its action role-playing game Hellgate: London has become the most successful online video game launch in Korea of the past three years with over 1 million accounts registered within the first two weeks of its open beta test. Hellgate: London is the first online game in over three years to use a monthly subscription business model.
After launching the open beta on January 15th, Hellgate: London quickly rose to the ninth most played online game, fifth most popular RPG and most popular online beta game in PC Cafes*, with over 1 million accounts. Hellgate: London was released commercially on February 22nd, and achieved record sales in its first week of presales.
“To become the most successful launch in Korea for over three years is an incredible achievement,” said Bill Roper, CEO of Flagship Studios. “This milestone wouldn’t have been possible for us to achieve without the incredible support of our publishing partner, Hanbitsoft, and our dedicated community in Korea. We look forward to expanding the Hellgate universe and building upon this success in the future.”
“Flagship Studios are well aware of how the Asian market operates very differently to the Western territories” said Alex Kim, CEO of HanbitSoft, “By listening to players’ feedback and through constant updates to the game, Hellgate: London will continue to be an incredible success throughout Asia.”
Hellgate: London combines the depth of role-playing games and the action of first-person shooter titles, while offering infinite playability with dynamically generated levels, items, enemies, and events. Whether online or off, a player creates a heroic character, completes quests, and battles through innumerable hordes of demons to advance through experience levels and branching skill paths. A robust, flexible skill and spell system, highly customizable appearances, and a massive variety of randomly generated equipment allow players to create their own unique hero.
For more information please visit the official Hellgate: London site at www.hellgatelondon.com
*According to Gametrics and Game Report
If you visit the Gamestop’s PC section of their website, you will notice that down the bottom of it they have a Best Seller list.
Currently, Hellgate is sitting at number five on that list, even after all this time (It was number one for the first month of it coming out). Wonder why it’s so high on the list, yet the player numbers on the servers don’t seem to reflect that.
Are all people just buying it because of the lower price and playing Single Player, or is the /who command (which apparently doesn’t work anymore) actually giving a wrong number. What are your thoughts on this?
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
