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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.
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.
"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.
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.