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Hellgate: London To Be Closed, Possibly Saved?
Namco Bandai recently announced that Hellgate: London would be shut down on January 31, 2009. They'd been supporting the game's servers since Flagship Studios saw massive layoffs in July. Now, a fansite has located an announcement on the game's Korean site suggesting that it may be picked up by a Taiwanese company called Redbana. The English version of the announcement says, "In the meantime, stay alert: the Hellgate will soon re-open, and your valor will be needed again."
For those wondering if 'redbana' is a portmaneau of 'red' and 'banana'... you're right. In fact the Chinese name of the company, literally translated, is "Red Banana(s)". ... yeah, I've got no idea either. I mean 'redbana' works just as well as 'google' does perhaps, but Red Bananas...? I give up.
Not having purchased or followed this game after release, I was wondering what the state of the in-game advertising is with this announcement? Will the single-player game still be downloading from the ad content servers, or will those go away as well?
I sort of feel bad for those who purchased lifetime subscriptions, but not really.
I browse Slashdot at +3, Funny
Some people play online games, some people post long, ranty posts on /.
Actually, the game assets were put into escrow as assets against investment from other companies. I don't remember if this "Redbana" is the investor, but there's someone that is interested and has a claim against the assets. So, no open sourcing for this game. Plus, consider that open sourcing a project like a game of this scale is not a non-trivial bit of work.
Anyway, the whole situation with Hellgate and Flagship was a pretty fucked up affair. You can see an interview with Bill Roper here: http://www.1up.com/do/feature?pager.offset=0&cId=3169356. I also wrote a book about business and legal issues: Business & Legal Primer for Game Development , which would give you some insight into the business and legal issues in game development.
Brian "Psychochild" Green
MMO developer's blog
Sounds like people should start doing packet dumps of the server so that they can create a clone server. According to the 1UP article it's a bank (Comerica Bank - Dallas,TX) that now owns the rights to Hellgate:London. I don't see a bank doing anything with it other than maybe trying to find a buyer for it. I would doubt that any company seriously would by the rights to it from the bank given that it wasn't a great seller. In fact Metacritic shows it only has a rating of 70% which is pretty average, but a number of people have commented on numerous bugs with the game. So I doubt it would be of much value to a game company since they could create a similar IP without having to pay for it and pick up the negative community opinion due to the company going under.
But of course I could be wrong.
I realise it's pointless to reply to posts like this BUT... the point of playing RPGs, MMO or otherwise, for me is to escape the mundane life that most of us do have in our 30s and 40s. We've done all that stuff you talk about and now we have wives, children and houses (not necessarily multiple of each but you get my drift) and debts, obligations and responsibilities. Some people watch TV, go to movies, play golf, go to their local bar or get a mistress to escape those mundane obligations. In the small amount of free time I do have I play video games. To each their own.
Agreed. I wouldn't go so far as to say I was excited about the game, but it was certainly one I'd been keeping an eye on. After all, the people working on it had quite a track record and it sounded like they had some interesting fiction lined up for the game. Plus, as a Londoner, I love it when my city makes an appearance in games and I was interested to see what they'd do with it.
Within 10 minutes of loading up the game, I was reeling from just how bad it was. Certainly, the intro was great - on a par with anything we've seen come out of Blizzard - and it seemed to promise a decent experience. But the game itself felt so half-hearted and amateurish that I honestly couldn't believe it had been released in this day and age.
The engine felt just hideous, with clipping bugs running rampant. Combat was as dull as ditchwater. NPCs were all created from a few generic templates. Their portraits and voices seemed to have been randomly selected. In most cases, the few stock voice-snippets had absolutely no relation to what an NPC was supposed to be saying (and most of the voices sounded like they'd been recorded by somebody who couldn't even find the UK on a map). The "storyline" behind the missions, such as it was, was loose and disjointed. There was no apparent effort being made to tie together what happened in the game with the darker material seen in the pre-release materials and the intro; rather, it was just a procession of deranged people with silly voices. The game also suffered from numerous technical problems, including crashes and inexplicable slowdowns in sparse areas on a PC that can run Crysis perfectly well.
The locations in the game bore only the very slightest passing resemblance to London. The heavy randomisation used in level design meant that areas that should be immediately recognisable to anybody who's spent a couple of days in London as a tourist were warped beyond all recognition. Even Resistance: Fall of Man, which depicted an alternate world version of a 1940s London in its later missions, did a better job of portraying the city than this.
There were a few small positives. The class selection was quite nice and, had the game been capable of keeping my interest, I can see I would have had fun tweaking characters. The designs of the enemies were pretty decent, although they suffered from being over-used and from AI which basically just had them all run at the player in a straight line.
But overall, the impression I took from the game was of a huge, massive waste of potential. I know that they developers have since said they never really had a clear idea for what the game should be. In my opinion, they should have ditched any pretence of being a "massive" online game. The game would have worked best as a relatively linear action-RPG, focussed on single-player and small-group multiplayer co-op. They should have spent more time on level design and made more out of one of their unique selling points; the London setting. Any randomisation of areas should have been strictly confined to underground areas and sewers. To be honest, I got the impression that nobody involved in developing the game had even visited the city it was set in. Even spending some time online looking at photos would have helped them develop a far more atmospheric game. Getting in some people who know how to actually write plot and dialogue would also have helped. The story concept was awesome, but the execution was woeful.
I've not read them myself, but I have heard from others that the Hellgate novels are actually "not half bad" as video-game conversions go (I know this isn't saying much). It therefore beggars belief that they managed to give us a game with less narrative impact than the original Doom.
Actually, the game assets were put into escrow as assets against investment from other companies. I don't remember if this "Redbana" is the investor, but there's someone that is interested and has a claim against the assets. So, no open sourcing for this game.
There is a bit of precedent for something like this. Blender came to be in a similar situation. When the company failed, their creditors agreed to open source it for a payment of around $100000, which was met by community donations. Now, I doubt that Hellgate: London could get the same level of donations that Blender did, but if the company is looking at a total loss they could possibly be persuaded to let it go relatively cheaply.
Sounds like you should have gone E/Mo instead.
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