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Hellgate: London Subscriptions Set, Explained
1up is reporting on a letter directly from Bill Roper to Hellgate: London fans on what the subscription fee is all about. The letter, reprinted by the site Hellgate Guru, suggests that the premium content unlocked by the subscription fee is meant to give players options on how to play the game. " Hellgate: London is completely free to play online, out of the box. Anyone who buys the game can not only play through the fully randomized, storyline-driven gameplay offline, but they can also go online and share that experience with millions of players from around the world. We're excited to be able to bring gamers an amazing, free online experience that is included with their single player game ... Gamers also want choices, and we have so many great ideas for Hellgate: London, and the concept is so extendable, that we know we can keep adding to this game for a long time. We want to continue moving Hellgate: London forward in some really exciting directions, and to support ongoing development we've created a subscription service to give players access to new content as we go along. This commitment to our gamers was also a part of our plans for Hellgate: London from the very beginning."
Will this be similar to Bethesda's "Official Plugins" you have to pay to get for Oblivion, only on a monthly pay schedule?
AccountKiller
I'll believe it when I see it. I don't even know what this game is, but the idea of paying a subscription fee for content that will be available "as we go along" has got to be the stupidest idea I've ever heard, from a customer point of view. Even paying per addon is better than this, because at least then you'll know what you're getting and when. Though just waiting for the expansion pack is the only real safe bet.
Maybe they'll surprise me and put out regular content updates, but I wouldn't count on it.
The Farewell Tour II
But what's the price?
Gamespy's interview seemed to be more detailed:. html
http://pc.gamespy.com/pc/hellgate-london/786714p1
It's made by Flagship Studios, comprised almost entirely of ex-Blizzard North people. Bill Roper himself leads the team. As the Diablo series of games is one that stole the lives of many nerds, another game by the same people is newsworthy.
Secondly, Hellgate is the first Guild Wars style MMO to charge any fee whatsoever, even if it isn't mandantory.
Thunderclone: ONE MAN ENTERS! TWO MEN LEAVE! ONE MAN ENTERS! TWO MEN LEAVE!
I can see in a few years we'll have subscription sets to whole development houses/publishers - "My Ubi-key gets me the latest titles as soon as they're out!". 90% of them are terrible games that get rushed out of the door, and you end up paying for more than you use, but that's the ideal scenario right? For them, yes.
The great games IMO are the ones that are solid from the outset and where extra content is easy to make by the fans. Then you have a review system to easily sort away the crap stuff. Some of the best fun I've had has been on custom maps/levels/mods from the community.
It all stinks of lack of confidence in their product to me. Why do I need monthly expansion packs? Didn't you make the game rich enough for me? I have titles (and I'm sure we all do) that are still massively fun today. If the company feels they have more to offer, MAKE A NEW GAME instead of giving the player a world with a financially tinged divide in it's player base. It seems the only need here for a subscription-based update system is to secure funding for the devs, which means their dev house isn't giving them confidence/funding for the extra goodies they want to produce until they see substantial investment and response. I don't think signing up a drip-feed from clients' wallets is the way to do that.
Launchy.net changed my world.
Here is a catalog of all of those gates:
http://www.entrances2hell.co.uk/
So we're basically paying for patches...
Well content patches... are we going to play a MMO? nope...
Are we paying for the servers? nope...
We're supposed to pay for a promise of more content... and that could be a lot of horse armor...
This is the team that created Diablo II for Blizzard back in the day, so I'll give them a chance to prove that this can work. If done correctly, it could draw in fans from many different gaming demographics. Personally, I've come to expect a monthly subscription with my online games, so as long as they are able to provide a good reason to pay, I will gladly do so. The game itself looks solid from what I've seen of it so far. Similar business models are quite common among Asian MMOs. Distributing the game for free, or for a one-time purchase, while making the bulk of their money through in-game "purchases" has proved to be a very effective strategy for many other games. It also helps to squelch the RMT market when similar services are provided by the company itself. A monthly subscription plan can work just as well, as long as they make it worth the customer's money each month.
It's $9.99 a month. Content updates are guaranteed every 3 months according to other interviews. Subscribers also get access to things like alternate game modes (whatever those may be), more characters, more item storage, more comprehensive guild support (like guild housing) and more. I like this more than dropping 50 bucks on an expansion a year later because while the cost is about the same in the end, it's nice to be able to have a constantly expanding game rather than the possibility of getting into a position of waiting, bored, for an expansion to show up. People also seem to get all hot and bothered over this issue as if they were getting a gimped package. You get the whole game when you buy it, but if you toss them some cash every month it allows them the funds to continue working to provide you with more content as time passes. If you don't want to pay money, then play online anyway. Maybe a year later they'll release all of the subscriber content in a retail box for some kind of cost and then it really makes no difference to those complaining about the subscription cost anyway. They'd have had to wait regardless if there was no subscription fee and the only extra content was expansions.
Of course, the guns/weapons/items/etc in the subscriber premium content will be hugely powerful compared to the stock standard non-subscriber gear, presumably so that only paying customers can compete (please don't tell me MMO's aren't competitive).
I am government man, come from the government. The government has sent me. -- G.I.R.
It looks like there is a lot more than just "as-we-go" content for the 9.99 price tag.
Well, that depends on how you look at it. They will be providing the extra content for a monthly fee, instead of selling expansions, no? So It's the same thing GW is doing, but just collecting the money a little differently.
;)
If someone could be bothered to do monthly content right, I'd be happy. So far, it's mostly been pretty lame. Asheron's Call 2 had a system where they actually had plot each month, and all the new quests related to that plot... It was neat, but I always completed the new stuff in a couple days and was bored for the rest of the month.
Of course, I haven't managed to define 'do it right' either, because if I had, I'd have sold the idea to someone that could make it work.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
I was interested in Hellgate: London, but if there's some sort of subscription fee to get the good stuff, I'm not interested. I wonder how many other folks will think the same way as me?
Not quite...
You can either:
A. Buy the game, play single player & online ala Diablo 2 for the cost of buying the box. No problems. (and free online players share the server/s with paying customers)
OR
B. Buy the game, play single player & pay $9.95 for ENHANCED ONLINE content, I.E. particiate in the MMO portion. You get updates, more character slots, fancyer looking items (it has been stated the Elite players items only look different, not statistically different to a free players items.) and a few other things.
We all have played Diablo 2 ?? Most of us have played WoW or some MMO game online and paid for it ?? So I fail to see the pain in buying the game off the shelf and getting free MMO-Style play, with paying players getting more content (admittedly, but that costs to make over time) and some different looks.
Bill Roper has stated himself he wants to expand the game for the next few years, and possibly even explore the rest of the world. It sounds like a good proposition to me all told, long as you can cancel your sub and not loose your items (maybee they just loose their skin, and regain it if you sub again ?) only the perks.
Actually, they had better be putting out a HELL OF A LOT more content than Guild Wars for that price. You'd normally pay 20-30 bucks for an expansion, and see maybe one or two of them a year normally. You'll be paying 120 bucks a year for Hellgate. Are they really gonna give you three to four times as much new content? Good quality stuff? I'll believe that when I see it.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
If someone could be bothered to do monthly content right, I'd be happy. So far, it's mostly been pretty lame. Asheron's Call 2 had a system where they actually had plot each month, and all the new quests related to that plot... It was neat, but I always completed the new stuff in a couple days and was bored for the rest of the month.
Of course, I haven't managed to define 'do it right' either, because if I had, I'd have sold the idea to someone that could make it work.
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".
Anyone ever play Myth: The Fallen Lords, or Myth 2?
If you didn't already know: Bungie, the developer of these games, ran bungie.net, a multiplayer game server with game lobbies and chat rooms similar to GameSpy or the like, but exclusively designed to give people a place to organize/host games and chat. The servers also tracked game stats and scores (there were both ranked and unranked "rooms" to play in).
Bungie kept the bungie.net Myth server running for years. The first game launched in late 1997, and finally closed in November 2001 after the server machine died (at this point Bungie had been bought by Microsoft so I imagine that has a lot to do with the server not being replaced with a new one). The Myth 2 "bnet" server was launched December 1998 and ran through until March 2002.
The thing that makes this significant is that during all of the years these servers were running, you didn't pay a subscription fee to use them. They kept these extremely high-traffic servers running for 4 years with only the retail box price covering the cost this whole time. Not only was this a service equivalent to the game-tracking and chatroom functionality of GameSpy, the service also, as I mentioned above, tracked game stats and gave you a little ranking symbol based on your skills/stats in comparison to other users.
I realize a lot of recent games still offer free multiplayer, but not only are most of them supported by in-game advertising, many recent games have their multiplayer services cancelled after only a year (or less).
Anyway, I just wanted to take the opportunity to point out this comparison between companies and their ideals. Some are more concerned about giving the damn best gameplay experience they can offer, and, not surprisingly, some are a little more bent on maximizing profits at the user's expense (literally).
Wow. And I thought people complained alot about the contents of and time between WoW patches. Imagine if you weren't paying to play the game at all, but were rather paying 100% of your subscription fee ONLY to download and install said patches...
> Actually, they had better be putting out a HELL OF A LOT more content than Guild Wars for that
> price. You'd normally pay 20-30 bucks for an expansion, and see maybe one or two of them a year
> normally.
The stated goal for Guild Wars was two new campaigns a year, each for the price of a full game (which you also got, as they could be played without the original campaign). That's US$100 per year.
Of course reality was a bit different, we only got two campaigns (plus the original), and the promise of an ordinary expansion (cheaper, can't be played without one of the old campaigns) next year.
There is already something similar:
The "Station Pass" of Sony Online Entertainment (SOE) that gives you access to several MMORPGs with one subscription. And yes, they have a reputation for making terrible games.
C - the footgun of programming languages
http://www.penny-arcade.com/images/2007/20070511.j pg
So do you just wait a year, buy the game for a budget price, pay a one month sub fee and get access to a years worth of extra content? Play it for a couple of weeks and then put it back on the shelf.
Indeed you could, in the same fashion as you can go buy WoW now and play with all the extra content that has been added on since the cd's/dvd's were pressed :)
You say that, but does any MMO give you as much content per year (for the subscription price) as GW does with the expansions? AC2 might have come close... I haven't played WoW long enough to tell, but from what I see, there's just about no monthly content at all. DragonRealms (MUD, not MMO) never came close, though they do have quite a few GM-run events. Myst Online: Uru Live claims major content quarterly... So far, the new content sucks. It's far worse than the original game.
So why would I expect this to be any different?
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
I beta'd AC1 and it was fun for like a month or 2, and then I just couldn't get into it. I found AC2 to be a lot more enjoyable, and lasted around 6 months in that, and came back for a month later.
Of course, during beta, there wasn't any monthly events, and I didn't beta AC2, but played retail... That may make all the difference.
My main objection to AC1 was the spell system... The more people that knew the spell, the weaker it was. (I think they eventually changed that once everyone ignored their warnings and posted all the spell ingredients online.)
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
sounds like an interesting business model... It seems to almost sort of follow some of the ideas in Project Entropia and Second Life but on a cheaper scale....
I'm in the same boat. Directly paying the company to get a better character than those that do not pay... pretty lame tactic to score some extra bucks. I hope the rest of the gaming industry does not take lessons from this.
Waiting for Warhammer Online.
"go online and share that experience with millions of players from around the world." They seem pretty optimistic that the game is going to be a hit. On all the sites that I went people are just bitching about the game saying that they won't buy it. I am pretty sure that it is going to be a good game but I wonder if it is going to be a hit or not. People who knows about the game are all mostly hardcore gamers that follow gaming news a lot. Most people don't know at all that the game was created by the people who did the Diablo games and they will probably never know. I wonder if they are allowed to put a "From the creator of Diablo" seal on the box. Not having a Blizzard logo on the box sure does not help either. My thought is that they should have made a name for themselves before trying to put some monthly fees. They heard the reaction before when they announced it but it was not official yet and should have learned from that. Maybe it was already too late though. And lastly, as for myself, I will probably not pay monthly but will probably try the game anyways and maybe play coop with my girlfriend over Lan or with some friend online for free. I just doubt they will sell millions (with an "S") copies of the game, or even 1 million.
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/ Paying Player vs Free Player
Bungie kept the bungie.net Myth server running for years. The first game launched in late 1997, and finally closed in November 2001
Blizzard too via the Battle.net online service; beginning with Diablo in 1996, and then adding Starcraft, Diablo II, and Warcraft III. They even took the old DOS version of Warcraft II and ported it to Windows and Battle.net. These games and Battle.net are still supported today.
These fees, and a growing trend aswell. It's a pretty sneaky strategy, and I can see the logic in a small fee not being a problem - well until everything has a small fee of course - which is where we're heading.
I liked the Hellgate concept, but I'm certainly not going to be their consumer whore, so I'll just skip it instead.
I played a lot of Diablo 2 when it came out. On Blizzard's official message boards, a portion of the player base used to beg Blizzard for the chance to pay a monthly fee for things like more bag space, the ability to share bags between characters, enhanced guild functionality, etc.
Flagship does indeed have many great talents from the former Blizzard North, but it wouldn't be entirely accurate to represent it as 'the Diablo team'. Stieg Hedlund (lead designer), Rick Seis (lead programmer), artists like Michio Okamura, Kelly Johnson, MIke Dashow, Anthony Rivero, Cheeming Boey, the entire sound/music team, and, perhaps most importantly, the Blizzard testing/feedback crew, are all not involved in this title.