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HellGate London To Be For-Pay Online Experience
The long-in-development HellGate: London, which finally has a release date, has been announced as a for-pay MMOG-style game. From the article: "Drawing similarities to ArenaNet's Guild Wars, Hellgate's online is heavily instanced. Group and solo PvE is the game's main focus; PvP will exist in a small scale form, but is not a major element of the initial launch. It will also feature a Hardcore mode similar to that found in Blizzard's Diablo II, a game on which many members of the Hellgate team worked. Hellgate's multiplayer will contain all of the missions and story from the single-player aspect of the game, as well as exclusive gameplay modes and content. Like the single-player game, it will be comprised of dynamically generated areas and items. Further content will be continually added over time by a dedicated Flagship team."
My interest just dropped to zero.
I've been really looking forward to this, but the prospect of another 'mmo' honestly just angries up my blood.
As in "play-for-pay"? How much are they going to pay me to play?
The ball's still in the air on whether or not it's going to be pay to play. ShackNews is wrong.
Against stupidity the Gods themselves contend in vain.
They keep on harkening it to D/DII and Guild Wars.
both games that are specificly "buy once, play online for free" because they ARE instanced.....
I will withhold judgment untill some actual solid news is out.
Do Or Do Not, There Is No Spoon, There Is Only Zuul. Everything in the above post is probably opinion.
I love MMOs. But with WoW as the leader, Everquest and GuildWars close behind, Runescape using remote power to make its mark, and 50 bajillion others, I don't think the market has enough space. Honest. I like unique takes on RPGs, but this looks like its treading into alful deep water. It might be good, but, as the devils advocate, it won't fit in unless it does something REALLY cool. Sorry, folks.
"Update: Since posting our original news item on the matter, Shacknews has been contacted by Electronic Arts, which is co-publishing the game along with Namco Bandai. EA noted that there has not in fact been any final decision made as to Hellgate: London's online pricing model, be it subscription-based or otherwise. We respect this situation, while maintaining that have reported fairly on statements we received. A full interview is forthcoming."
I first thought of what Will Wright once said about his corporate bosses at EA (and I paraphrase): "if you want your project to be noticed, just tell the execs that it's like World of Warcraft."
I only bring this up because it's so typical for management to play copycat instead of trailblazer (look no further than the early 2000s deluge of crappy "Tycoon" games). And EA is among the worst when it comes to this. Perhaps this mentality - the only MMO is one like WoW - is why the market, by and large, is incapable of advancing beyond the tried-and-true "level grind/quest/exp" model.
In any event, I don't feel like paying more money just to enjoy my goddamn game. What's a gamer to do, between "booster packs," episodic content, microdownloads, and online play fees.
...and I talked to the rep from Hellgate and they do not have any plans yet. Weather it be a subscription or otherwise there are still no definitive plans on how they will structure their business model on the online portion.
If they decide to go through with this, I think it would be a big mistake. Although the game looks great from the screenshots I've seen, they'd be in trouble if they made online play cost extra. Traditional MMOs justify ongoing payments by having servers support thousands of people all together at once. The other big selling 'heavily instanced' games out there have set the precedent on this one: Diablo (1 and 2) and Guild Wars. Neither of these two games have made you pay anything more than the price of the box (and subsequent expansions). If they want to buck this trend they'd better have something pretty impressive up their sleeve, or people will stay away from this game like the plague.
Paying monthly doesn't appeal to me. You can say I'm cheap or whatever, but I still believe in and enjoy a free multiplayer experience. Granted higher quality content will be brought to the table via the pay-to-play scheme, the joys of free online play like Diablo and Diablo II offered outweighs the MMO concept, in my opinion. What would be great if they could develop a free online system for Hellgate London as well. I don't know a lot about the game, but since it has a single player element, it seems applying the same style of gameplay to a Diablo-esque online experience would work fantastic. Basically, either you can pay to play with new content or you can play free with standard content. Seems a good compromise to me since I will not be a subscriber.
...And it was already fantastic then. I'm not even a Diablo fan, but I found the gameplay quite compelling - it felt considerably more action-oriented and immersive, while retaining the addicting collect-a-thon aspects of the earlier hellspawn-slaying games. It even looked polished - a full year before release.
I came away from the demo impressed enough to put the game on my "To Buy at Release" list (which is rare for me for PC games). However, if they're going to release it under a subscription model, I'm going to scrap those plans. I don't buy into the whole "$50 for the client + $X / month for game play" thing. Its not worth it to me. Either release the client for FREE + subscription (in which case, I'll still likely pass - I just don't have time to play a game whose commitment is measured in months). Or, even better, copy Guild Wars entirely (which is to say, the traditional retail model++) and just sell the client + account for $50.
D.
We already pay two subscriptions in this house, for world of warcraft. It would take a very impressive game for us to switch. (and the other half would take a lot of convincing to pay an additional subscription for an online game.) I assume that this would be the same for at least half the 7.5 million subscribers.
With burning crusade Xpac round the corner, a lot of people will be reactivating accounts also. I don't see many switching anytime soon.
Awesome.
For those who don't know, this is the mode where if your character is killed, that's it, he's gone forever. In my last days of playing Diablo II I played this mode pretty much exclusively. When I first got Diablo II this mode didn't appeal to me at all, after all, why play for hours and hours only to lose your character to a monster who was a little too tough?
One thing you learn after playing Diablo II for long enough, and coming to the point where beating normal difficulty becomes a normal occurrence for your characters, is that you have two choices with regards to character planning. One, you pick some skills you like, have some fun levelling them up, then come to find out once you hit mid-nightmare to hell that your strategy, while fun for a while, doesn't pan out. You are left with a character which is ineffective and boring to play, but you still don't want to delete him for all the work you put into him. The second choice is to snoop around on the Internet, identify one of a few "cookie cutter characters", or sets of skills which are particularly effective, and play your way through the entire game focussing on skills which you may not be particularly interested in.
Then, Blizzard released patch 1.10, which added a ridiculous amount of new features and content considering how old the game was by then. One of these new features was in the form of skill synergies, which meant that many skills gave bonuses to related skills when you put points into them. I remember hearing that this was supposed to increase the variety of skills that people would learn, since they would not be completely wasted points even if the player rarely used the skill. However, in the same patch Blizzard drastically increased the difficulty of both nightmare and (especially) hell difficulties. In my experience, the combination of these two changes only tightened the grip these cookie cutter characters had on the players, since now not only did you need certain skills, but you also needed all the other specific skills which had synergies which boosted those few main skills.
Enter Hardcore mode. Recall what I said about what happened when you picked your skills based on personal preference, that you would end up reaching a point in the game where your character was no longer effective, and that you could no longer progress in the game. In Hardcore mode, this is no longer a problem. Once your character ceases to be a head above the monsters in the game, chances are that it will die and you start a new character, trying some completely different strategy. All of a sudden, the game opened up for me, it was no longer about leveling endlessly to create as strong a cookie cutter character as possible and accumulating wealth, it became about trying new things. No longer was Diablo II a long-term work-reward cycle, it was just about playing. Every character was a new experience, and tons of fun. For those of you who have played Diablo II, think sorceresses who threw level 30+ (after +skills) infernos past the edge of the screen, think arctic blast druids. Hardcore is only risky if you put a lot of value into your individual characters, instead of the play itself.
So, I thank the developers at flagship studios. Good choice =).
Mr. Period: Nine is the one that's right by ten!
Nine: One day I will kill him. Then, I will be Ten.
To be honest, saying that the online multiplayer portion of the game may include exclusive content is making me want to puke blood. One of the biggest things that shat me to tears about Diablo 2 was that additional content was available to brittlenet players, leaving us poor LAN monkeys wondering why we bothered investing the massive time into getting out characters geared, when not everything is available to us (then we remembered the black walls of death, and sat thinking about the pretty items we would never see). Item gathering & character development addicted people have lottle-to-nothing against throwing hours of their lives doing the same shit over & over again, but after WoW i'll be arsed if I'm paying for the ability to do so, especually with 'exclusive' content provided to keep you forking over dollars.
"PvP will exist in a small scale form, but is not a major element of the initial launch"
Well then, let me know when it is and I'll actually take a look at your game then. No way I'm signing on for another PvE MMO crapfest.
Waiting for Warhammer Online.
A lot of people seem to be confused with the difference between MMO-style games like WoW, and MMOish-style games like Guild Wars. When you think about it, Guild Wars isn't really an MMO, it's just an online-only game with "virtual" chat rooms. It definitely compares to D2 online, which had many chat rooms, but the actual, instanced game was separate. I'm leaning towards the "pay-once" idea.
Blerg.
I think the following points can not be stressed enough.
1) Hellgate has an offline single-player mode.
2) It is not yet decided whether online will be pay-for-play or not, despite what the article claims.
Thunderclone: ONE MAN ENTERS! TWO MEN LEAVE! ONE MAN ENTERS! TWO MEN LEAVE!
Support Guild Wars. It's the only player-friendly pricing model for online role-playing games. The only sure-fire way to encourage publishers and developers to treat their customers fairly is for Arena.net and NCSoft to make a killing from Guild Wars. Plus you get to play a genuinely fun game.
Complexity Happens