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Death of HGL

In late 2007 a very buggy and overly-hyped game called Hellgate: London was released too soon into the world. Developed by ex-blizzard devs (makers of Diablo franchise), it was said to be the next Diablo, and the next great MMO!

I was fortunate enough to be a beta tester, and found that the game wasnt so much different to Diablo. It had pretty much all the same elements, with simply different skills and items, and set in a post-apocolyptic steam-punk future. Even the randomly generated levels, and transmogrifying cube (a la harodric cube) that you could use to craft items, were all elements grabbed straight from the Diablo series. You could say the game was simply a 3D mmo version of Diablo, although some people would add, a worses, more boring, and unoriginal version. I like to think that if the original ‘Donkey Kong’ with mario, were released today as ‘Ladder Climber: Fallen Hell’ or something, it would too be considered boring and lame.

Although I do admit, the game was very buggy at launch, lacked believability in the animations, and at times very tedious. It also lacked the element of suspension-of-disbelief and a ‘massively-multplayed’ world, because of the ‘instance’ system, which made the charm of ‘grinding’ to get your Char XP up, non-existant. One thing that was present though was the dedication of the fans who had faith in the game and could see past all the problems, these players made it not only playable, but also special.

Six months later, fans prayers were answered, with the release of ‘The Stonehenge Chronicles’ patch, which added a new area to the world and one which was actually damned fun! A whole heap of content was also added which made the game feel a little more complete, and almost great. But by this time many players and subscribers had dropped off, with first impressions lasting too long to make them want to come back. With new content being promised every 6 months, this was a game that was supposed to last. Its hard to think, that if hgl was released just a few months later, how different poeple would have responded..

But die-hard fans werent enough to keep this struggle of an mmo alive, and eventually in late 2008, on the brink of releasing its new expansion patch ‘The Abyss Chronicles’ (which was already in test servers), Flagship Studios (the devs) went bankrupt and had to close down and sell all their stuff. Servers remained opened thanks to Namco Bandai but only until early 2009. HGL officially died (in everywhere but Korea) on 31-01-09 (RIP).

EDIT: There’s a nice blog about the last hours of HGL here

The ‘Revival’

“Remember the dead, but fight for the living!” – Jessica Summerisle

When I thought this game was all dead and buried, some Hellgatians chose to fight! I stumbled upon this when feeling nostalgic and looking for a way/hack to possibly play hgl on your own private server i.e. a LAN.

Keen hellgate fans have banded together to keep this game alive and where it should be! The mod is called ‘Hellgate: Revival‘ and that forum is pretty active with modders detailing the stages of development.

Hellgate: Revival plans to:
- Release ‘The Stongehenge Chronicles’ & ‘The Abyss Chronicles’ from patch 2.0 into MP & SP
- Unlock MP play
- Introduce LAN mode
- New weapons and armor
- Continue patching with new content
full list

Currently HGR team have released an SP mod, which already does a lot to help revive HGL:
- added some old features like the zombot creation and Guy Fawkes day stuff
- changed the UI to match that of patch 2.0
- introduced some new items and ‘mutant’ ranked weapons (i.e. in between rare and unique)
- changed the Halloway voice back to ’sexy’ LOL
- added features from new MP patches like dye kits and skill retrainers
- various changes and fixes
full list here(1.0) and here(1.2).

I’d like to see how this one goes, adding awesome features that were missing from the original (lik LAN) and adding awesome features that were made but never officially saw the light of day, may just be enough for this game to reclaim its dignity, and become what it should have been, a great action RPG. But with an estimated release of 2011, who thinks we’ll be playing Diablo III instead?

news: HanbitSoft (owners of the HGL IP in Korea) got the rights to HGL in the US & Europe, and therefore may relaunch servers, like they currently are in Korea. link