Comments | clothedmonkeys: Hellgate: London demo

clothedmonkeys

Hellgate: London demo

Oct 19, 2007 00:32

Here you go Andrew...

Hellgate London is a Sack of FailThis demo is simply terrible. To be clear, I'm not even talking about the game yet, I'm talking about the demo providing the things one expects from a demo. This 1.4 gig download ultimately provides you a maximum of 5 character levels, which is not enough to even get a sense of the skill ( Read more... )

Comments 7

clothedmonkeys October 19 2007, 10:04:26 UTC

Addendum: I pulled another blade master through the game, because I wanted to figure out what the deal with the two sword thing is. It turns out there's a skill you can buy at level 5 that let's you equip the second weapon.

Although the sword swings remain stale with the single basic attack, I was able to get a little more going on focusing on footwork, and buying a different skill lineup. However, this basically makes the character an even more insane killer. It's possible this would be interesting if the game gets harder, but sadly the demo is far too short to tell.

So, there may be a little interest in the melee character if the full game has fights that require the footwork.

Going along the lines of how random the loot is, this time I have a weapon that is about 40% better than what I had last time.

ssaiscps October 19 2007, 17:24:15 UTC

That was more than I was expecting. Thanks for the review, though. The demo at least sounds really awful. There are some more classes in the full game. From what little has dribbled out past the NDA it sounds like they have the basic framework of things implemented, but haven't finished balancing classes or skill trees or anything, which this demo also sounds like. Maybe the actual game will eventually be good, but that's probably not going to happen for another 6 months or so.

This reminds me a little of the demo for Evil Genius, where apparently they kicked up the spawn rate to some insane level (relative to the ACTUAL GAME) to make the demo more "exciting", but really just made the game terrible so that I didn't want to buy it.

clothedmonkeys October 20 2007, 11:12:15 UTC

"There are some more classes in the full game. From what little has dribbled out past the NDA it sounds like they have the basic framework of things implemented, but haven't finished balancing classes or skill trees or anything, which this demo also sounds like. Maybe the actual game will eventually be good, but that's probably not going to happen for another 6 months or so."

Yeah. The game is clearly not finished, but they've gone gold and ship in about a week. They're still furiously releasing new beta builds, so I expect the first patch is going to be enormous.

The demo I played does feel like something at least 6 months out. Leaving gameplay aside, the audio is clearly not finished, and the animations don't really seem done either. The UI is pretty clunky as well, with sort of an alpha feel.

ssaiscps October 20 2007, 21:57:57 UTC

Very nice. Maybe it will eventually be a good game.

ssaiscps October 19 2007, 17:32:22 UTC

Also, I find it a little sad that my concern over their crazy subscription model has been totally displaced by concern over whether I would enjoy playing the game.

clothedmonkeys October 20 2007, 11:06:08 UTC

I really don't get where they're coming from with that subscription model. There's a clear pricing system for games of this sort, set down by Battlenet/D2 and GuildWars. You don't get 10 bucks a month for being a match maker and character host. The idea that you don't get all the content unless you pay a monthly fee is ridiculous.

They're trying to get the MMO dollars, without actually making an MMO.

On top of that they're going to be doing the Massive in-game ads for more revenue.

The part that's hilarious to me is that it doesn't even seem to be a good enough game to justify a 50 dollar box price. They could possibly justify the ten bucks a month if the initial game were free, but then they'd probably make about ten dollars per player.

ssaiscps October 20 2007, 22:00:04 UTC

Hey, that money also makes it so you can have your character be automatically deleted! It might be okay if they cranked out content at a ridiculous rate, but can they really kick out an entire expansion worth of content every 5 months? They barely seem capable of kicking out an entire expansion worth of content in the however many years they've been working on it thus far.