Let's play... Hellgate: London !

Yes indeed folks, its time for another "another Let's Play thread". Today we have Flagship Studios' first game, Hellgate: London. It's set in a post-apocalyptic London where demons have invaded and every has gone to shits. Flagship promised this would be a great game with lots of arpg goodness, so I can't wait! Hey, its from the developers of Diablo, what could possibly go wrong?

Fasten your seatbelts!

...


Chapter 1: The birth of an hero

Backs straight, men! You are in the presence of a man who will change the future of this planet, our only home. He is but a humble sitedesigner/blademaster who got caught up in the hell that is the invasion of demonic forces. He is destined to become a man of great deeds.

The game starts off by plopping our hero into an alleyway. There's no explanation how he got there, what he is doing there or anything else really. There's a bunch of lulzy tutorial text from the developers who really want to get to the level of their customers ("Remember what your quest was? Neither do we! Thank god we have that L button!" Durr.) There's only one way out of the alleyway and its filled with zombies. Nevermind, when a hero is called he answers, no questions asked. Suddendly our hero gets a message on his... messaging device:



Aha! Another poor soul in need of help. Fear not, for the Baron of Pepsi leaves no one behind. It will be a long and perilous journey, but the Baron will stop at no lengths to save the people. We will have to travel many days- Wait. He is actually at the end of the alley. Seriously, he is literally 20 meters away from you. You'd think he'd be able to shout that distance but no, he has to use his fancy messaging device. I guess he is fucking loaded, the bastard!

Poor or not, the Baron follows through.



Murmur? MURMUR? What a fucking retard. Especially considering the fact that to get to the end of the alleyway where you start you'd have had to have run past him. Guess he isn't a fast typer. Anyhow, Murmur says that a templar (paladins) squad got ambushed and he needs to be escorted to the nearest train station (that's a safe place!). The obvious danger is the zombies in the way.

Well actually, they aren't that dangerous, mostly because they don't attack you. You can go right up to them and they don't give a shit. But because we are xp whores we kill them anyway. They die from one hit btw.



Alrighty then. The Pepsi Baron makes it to the train station, a safe haven that demons cannot enter because as we all know demons hate trains. There are a few people with a big ! above their heads, which means that they are questgivers. The Baron loves children, so he goes up to little Joey first. It seems that Joey lost his prosthetic leg to a demon and wants it back. Makes sense, its not like they could make a new one for him.

Also, please pay attention to the fantastic in-game advertising. It seems that the HG:L comic book was all the rage in 2027, along with Alienware.



George wants the Baron to kill 10 zombies. He is willing to pay for it. It's not like the Baron would kill zombies without payment, am I right? It might be the apocalypse, but a man needs his gold. Also, money is now replaced with the element palladium. Palladium is damaging to the demon hordes, which is why every demon carries it around.

Anywho, The Baron get a level up!



Two more levels and the Baron of Pepsi gets to dual-wield, wohoo!

The Baron goes back to the streets and starts chopping down those zombies. As you can see there is a reminder to tell us how many we need to kill in case we forget.



The Baron finds a huge monstrosity of gruesome flesh called "Tantorus". In this screenshot he has been hit and everything turns grey for a split-second.



After a horrendous battle lasting 20 seconds the monster collapses. The Baron searches the corpse - What is this? Oh my, it's the prosthetic leg! The kid was hanging around this demon? Talk about retardation.



"You examine the horrid corpse to find Joey's leg. What the demon was doing with it, you don't want to know..." Doing with it? It's a prosthetic leg! I thought he was just hoarding it for the lulz but now it appears he has been sticking it up his orifices and whatnot.

Here you go kid! Have your shit encrusted orgasminator back.



Baron gets Wart's peg leg as a reward. Hurhur, geddit? Wart, as in Wirt the peg-legged boy in Diablo. This game is just filled with great humour. Its like watching an episode of "The npcs say the dardnest things." The healer chick says "Want a cookie?" and the shopkeeper "I shall cherish this conversation till the day I die in horrible agony." Hurhur, moar plox!

I should also add that none of the brits sounds british. Not a single one. It sounds more like they have a big potato in their mouths and are trying to impersonate an elephant. It is ridiculously shitty.

To end this chapter I'll take a pic of the Baron of Pepsi with "VanityCam". Enjoy.



Yea that's Wart's leg. Till next time!

Awesome let's play thread so far. It saves me the time of playing it AND the cynical remarks are probably funnier than the ones I'd make.

Very nice, this sounds craptacular!

How's the main focus areas of the game, i.e. killing and atmosphere? Is it actually fun to play?

Awful game. Looking forward to you tearing it apart like it deserves, the piece of shit.

Awesome, Kingston! Truly a real let's play-thread if I ever saw one. Play this sucker so we won't have to! :D

The Baron continues his journeys:



After helping the little boy, George gives us another quest:



Oh goody!

After slaying these horrendous creatures, Murmur wants to talk to the Baron again. It seems that Murmur gave the Baron an encrypted disc from a doctor named Fawkes, and they need to get it to a man named Lann at the next station. Funnily though, Murmur says he doesn't need any help getting there.

So the Baron sets off through the now unsealed gate to Covenant Garden Approach, which oddly looks like one of those portals from Stårgate.



On the way lots of monsters spawn out of nowhere. The Baron fights them off with great justice!



The Baron makes it to the Covenant Garden station (Murmur is there before us, even though we set off right away through the only path to the station... He sure is sneaky!). We give the Fawkes thingy to Lann and buy a cool-ass fire sword.
Hey, Look at all those quests! How they managed to write all these quests amaze me.



Let's see what they are, shall we?



It appears that all of the templars, cabalists and hunters have gathered here to smoke pot. They don't seem to do shit to protect the area or save mankind, instead they just send newbs to do their work for them while they lean on walls.

Well, the message has been decrypted and its a cry for help.The Baron is sent by Lann to find Fawkes. It seems rather odd that he would send a total newb to find a super-researcher, doesn't he realize that?



Oh... Apparently he still sends the Baron on this quest because he feels like he owes the Baron for saving Murmur and retrieving the message. Oh yea, that's a great way to show gratitude, sending him to the streets to fight a horde of demons on his own.

HG: L appears to have some sort of cult following 20 years later because WETA is still selling merchandise based on it. Maybe it had a sequel???



Ok, so we do a sidequest first and go kill some demons. Should be an easy task- HOLY FUCK!





The Baron died! Luckily he can restart as a ghost. I wonder what that is like, maybe you have to go to hell and threaten Satan to get you back or something. No wait, its just a WoW ripoff. You run to your corpse and you respawn there. Now, I'd get this in Multiplayer where you'd be all in a hurry to get back to fight with your friends, but here it seems totally pointless. Why can't I just have a "respawn here without pointless running or paying" button? Or just get rid of the ghost for singleplayer.

We kill them, we get loot, we sell loot. Now we rush to find Fawkes.



Aha! The demons took him to a hellrift, lets go there!

Oh yea... DUAL-WIELDING, BITCH!



Hellz yea!
The Baron makes it to the Hellrift/Oblivion portal. Let's enter!



Inside we find SHULGOTH !! Braawwwrr!



After spamming health pots (sorry, "injectors") and power pots (mana is called power now, because its 2027 and mana just wouldn't fit in this next-gen world) we slay the beast.



NINTENDO SIXTY-FOOOOOOOOOUR!!! Phat loot! YAY!

We get this "Sword of Nightmares". Oh yea, the professor is dead. But I don't think anyone gives a shit.

Covenant Garden

Click to expand...

That's Covent Garden, savage. Not everything has to relate back to Halo some way.

In any case, moar. I'm enjoying this a lot more than I enjoyed my own experience with the game.

As amusing as your smart-ass snarky commentary is, so far, I have yet to see anything TRULY horrible. Sure, it's trite and cliched, but where's the true depths of awfulness?

It amazes me how sucky the quests in HG:L are. Why couldn't they make it like in diablo, where the quests actually had some meaning, a backstory and relevance to the storyline.

Here it's just like in a generic MMO - kill 10 zombies and bring back their rotten balls, etc.
They could've at least made some sort of background for quests, for example an NPC giving you a reason why he needed rotten zombie balls or why Joey needed his leg back so badly, since his entire miserable existence consists of standing on the same spot and not moving.

Is the way MMOs handle quests these days considered next-gen, or something?

As amusing as your smart-ass snarky commentary is, so far, I have yet to see anything TRULY horrible. Sure, it's trite and cliched, but where's the true depths of awfulness?

Click to expand...

You should know by now that the Codex has its bar set much higher than the norm, and to that end, a mediocre FPS front-end tacked to what seems like a pretty decent random loot generator will always be frowned upon because it fails to transcend either of the "genres" it blends.

In that same respect Titan Quest, objectively speaking, is quite a reasonable game, and it succeeds at everything it sets out to do. It's just that it's completely redundant. Hellgate is only marginally more appealing because it is fairly unique in being a simple FPS/Roguelike hybrid, but unless you really have a hard-on for that particular mix, then you're better off playing an FPS or Roguelike from 10-20 years ago.

Well, yes, I've been around long enough that I'm familiar with the general disfavor that the Codex holds all "action" RPGs in. But the thing is, even the mainstream panned this game. I expected more mercilessness here! The presentation here is supposed to make me physically ill, not wondering if the mainstream was too harsh! Like you said with Titan Quest, it did what it set out to do. It received good reviews in the mainstream. Naturally, it was disliked here, as is expected. HGL has received unflattering reviews in the mainstream. It is everything the Codex should hate. Where's the hate? I don't see enough bile and vitriol here. It is disturbing. Is this game going to get worse as it goes on, and the beginning is the good part? That cannot be right...

So far it hasn't been as terrible as I imagined. I guess the multiplayer is what all the reviewers have been playing, and apparently its bugged to fuck. The setting is completely devoid of atmosphere or coherence, which sucks a lot, because Diablo was very atmospheric.

I'm quite enjoying Hellgate, been playing it a good portion of the weekend. In fact I'm enjoying it more than any other action RPG I've played, Diablo 1/2 included. Diablo was far more atmospheric, the quests better presented and the world much more coherant, sure....but I enjoy the core gameplay more. I LIKE the FPS wrapping around the action RPG core. Much more than isometric-view arpgs. And when you fight large monsters they actually feel...large.

Odd really. The demo left me totally disinterested and the mainstream slammed it, so I really expected to dislike it.

These days few FPS games interest me, the plots are shite and the levels are generally corridors. I need something extra. Hellgate fills that void for when I just want mindless action. The skills are actually decent and the guns are fun and varied.

I give it 7/10. By MY scale, not the mainstream media, where 7 = good but not exceptional. With the recent RPG releases to satisfy me on that front, this satisfying the action urge, I'm a happy camper :D

Cool, think I'll take it for a spin. Got way too much free time anyway. Is there a mage class or is it all guns and melee?

Obviously, pure crapola.

Yet another action-heavy, turning, weaving, running clickfest... LOADED with eye candy ..... for that twitchy, shallow, impulsive, quick mechanical fix.

@ Raapys : There is indeed a mage class, I'm playing it (Evoker)

The Evoker is your blaster mage, the Summoner your...summoner mage.

The thing to remember is your guns are kinda your skills, even for the mage. You get "focus" items, which are guns which directly affect your magic. So spectral bolt spell does damage dependant on what focus item you are wearing. The idea is based on the Hellboy movie, in the beginning where Rasputin has this strange mechanical glove which he uses in his ritual to summon Hellboy. You're half mad scientist / half mage.

It actually works well, I have my focus item in one hand and a gun which shoots flaming, exploding nails in the other. The role of "generic bolt spell" that most mage classes get is filled by the guns.

Just remember to patch it. Apparently there were issues with it, crappy I know, but not unusual these days (cough witcher cough). I patched it and have had no problems.

@ Keldorn : Different strokes for different folks. I'm thoroughly enjoying Mask of the Betrayer for it's great storyline/dialogue/characters and roleplaying. And the Witcher for similar reasons. Hellgate is for when I feel like running and gunning and popping monsters like pinatas to see what candy comes out. And the FPS view makes it feel a bit different from the other aRPGs, for me at least.

Well, yes, I've been around long enough that I'm familiar with the general disfavor that the Codex holds all "action" RPGs in. But the thing is, even the mainstream panned this game.

Click to expand...

Well, the way I see it, is that the mainstream wants "look and feel", with little else. And in those respects, Hellgate is pretty dismal. The graphics are underwhelming, the art direction is utilitarian and boring, and from watching my housemate play it, it looks as though most artist man hours have been invested into modeling loot, which is gratifying for the treasure-hunter type of player and the cosplaying online poseurs, but pretty much misses the mark for anyone else playing a first-person shooter. Oops.

Also, I haven't really seen any "showcasing" of locations or bosses. There are none of those "awe-inspiring" moments like cresting a hilltop and looking across a panoramic vista of the valley below, or flying past a capital ship in space. Nor are there little set-pieces of a monster bursting through a wall the first time you encounter it, or cutscenes where you see a boss monster tearing apart cannon fodder before turning on the player.

Basically, all of those little things that aren't necessarily desirable in games because they're largely non-interactive and are more at home in film than games. As far as the mainstream is concerned though, that's a-okay because they don't actually want a game or a challenge, they want a cinematic experience where they're the playing the lead role.

In terms of the "feel", there seems to be precious little in the way of aesthetic substitution for other senses - many games succeed fairly admirably in giving the player the impression that the gun they're firing has a monster recoil, or that the smack in the chops they just received was painful.

And it's really dead simple. Screen shakes, sounds, red flashes, blood sprays and all of that stuff is very conspicuous in its absence, simply because it's become commonplace. It's like watching a film that hasn't been scored yet - music is so important in setting tone.

So even though the bread and butter FPS gameplay of Hellgate is a notch above say Oblivion, it lacks one thing that Oblivion actually did exceptionally well - the bells and whistles that make the player feel as though they're locked in mortal combat. That's why Hellgate missed the mark with the mainstream, who would willingly buy a turd in a box if it had bullet time and screen shakes.

Well, the way I see it, is that the mainstream wants "look and feel", with little else. And in those respects, Hellgate is pretty dismal. The graphics are underwhelming, the art direction is utilitarian and boring, and from watching my housemate play it, it looks as though most artist man hours have been invested into modeling loot, which is gratifying for the treasure-hunter type of player and the cosplaying online poseurs, but pretty much misses the mark for anyone else playing a first-person shooter. Oops.

Click to expand...

Nice theory. Doesn't explain why FEAR was so popular though. The levels were dismally repetitive and boring in that game. It still did well with the FPS crowd. Because the FPS crowd likes gameplay too.

And although I can definitely see where complaints about the graphics come from, I enjoyed the underground tunnels, even the streets. Sure I haven't played the game to death, only this weekend, but wandering through the streets of london with demons everywhere and the burned out shells of tanks littered about...or through a ruined piccadilly square with it's neon billboards...it's not bad. They could have done better, but visually I enjoyed it MUCH more that FEARs environments.

In terms of the "feel", there seems to be precious little in the way of aesthetic substitution for other senses - many games succeed fairly admirably in giving the player the impression that the gun they're firing has a monster recoil, or that the smack in the chops they just received was painful.

Click to expand...

Meh, dunno what you are talking about. I fire a nail into a zombie, it sizzles for a bit and then explodes, with the body going flying with physics and whatnot. It's satisfying. In fact the guns are far more interesting than the usual drab guns we get in shooters. I have guns which fire sizzling spectral bolts, which lay down a carpet of napalm, which fire swarms of mutant wasps...much better than the usual machine gun/shotgun/rocket launcher combo.

Thanks for playing this for us, Kingston!

For the record I didn't play FEAR

That being said, wasn't it pretty much a poster child for cinematic in the vein Section 8 describes?
From what I heard the game sounded like a movie with some poor FPS combat thrown in.

Locue said:

Awesome, Kingston! Truly a real let's play-thread if I ever saw one. Play this sucker so we won't have to! :D

Click to expand...

Hehehe. My sentiments exactly.

Kingston said:

Also, money is now replaced with the element palladium. Palladium is damaging to the demon hordes, which is why every demon carries it around.

Click to expand...

This is really retarded. If there's going to be a certain mechanic in the game, at least make sure it makes sense with the setting. Stupid devs.

Also, what's with the quest names? Strange brew, hung over, bad doggy, mopping up and some are bigger... Sounds like a nasty orgy. Actually, the game would likely be much better if it were. I'd play that.

Also, money is now replaced with the element palladium. Palladium is damaging to the demon hordes, which is why every demon carries it around.

Click to expand...

Fucking genius. They must carry the palladium in bags of notdemonhurtium, right?

Baron gets Wart's peg leg as a reward. Hurhur, geddit? Wart, as in Wirt the peg-legged boy in Diablo. This game is just filled with great humour. Its like watching an episode of "The npcs say the dardnest things." The healer chick says "Want a cookie?" and the shopkeeper "I shall cherish this conversation till the day I die in horrible agony." Hurhur, moar plox!

Click to expand...

HEEHEE LOOK A REFRBNCE ARENT WE FUNNEY. I'd have a better laugh seeing a zombie named Bub.

And, Kingston, you better do something about these screenshots. I don't feel like clicking a load of thumbnails all the time, y'know.

No problem, comrades.

The Baron of Pepsi is currently level 5.



After bringing back the corpse of our late doctor (he's gone from researcher to professor to doctor) the Baron decided to do some more of those exciting quests. The first one consisted of killing a thing called "Bag o' Bones".



Bag o' Bones was an easy kill for the blademaster. The next quests consisted of killing things in the upper kingsway sewers and the lower kingsway sewers (which is underneath the upper one, surprisingly).

Here you can see the random level generator in action, the first screenshot has been taken in the higher kingsway sewers and the second one in the lower sewers:




That's almost spooky.

Now, I'm not an expert on sewers or architechture or water canals, but it seems to me like those are pretty odd sewers. There are no pipes leading water anywhere, just stairs going downwards. No wonder London is flooding nowadays.

Baron of Pepsi goes back to town (using the free "recall" skill, there are also personal relocation devices that work like tps from diablo. It's odd that a commoner has a portable teleportation device, and yet all the scientists haven't figured to use them more often, instead sending out people like Fawkes with a Templar squadron to be butchered.)

Baron found himself a better sword, so he uses the de-modificator to get back weapon mods from his old swords (sockets and runes/gems in d2).



Lann tells us that they found a device on Fawkes' body cleverly called "The Fawkes device". Apparently it does something to Hellrifts, but we don't know what. So he sends out this newb to a hellrift, on his own, carrying a device that could perhaps save all of mankind. Lann is obviously clever because he chose none other than the Baron for this task. And the Baron of Pepsi never fails.

Apparently there is a hellrift at the British Museum. So off we go!
On the way we meet a huge creature of potential doom:



Fortunately these things, huge and demonic though they are, pose about as much threat as a garbage can.

The Baron makes it to the British Museum:



Fuck me! That's changed a bit since the last time I saw it. It used to look like this:



Not only has the structure been teleported into the corner of a street and resized, it's also been put underground.

Well the interior looks somewhat authentic (obviously with the exception of huge demon hordes):



The Baron locates the Hellrift. What are all those statues though? Nevermind, let's go.



Zomg! There's loads of demons and they all want to kill me! The little ones actually stay on the lower floor, but the big guy is after Baron! Whatever will Baron do? Not much, because Sekworm has not mastered the art of walking on elevated planes and gets stuck on the stairs.



We place the Fawkes device on the altar in the center and a countdown starts! Such a long distance and only 30 seconds to run it in!



Remember those stone statues? They come to life and try to butcher the Baron. And they obviously fail... in epic proportions.



Amidst picking up the loot the Baron is suddendly teleported into a room with some chick in it. The chick talks about crying and blah blah and I didn't take a screenshot because she was so boring. Then there's a cutscene with a book and a crappy fake english accent spewing some nonsensical bollocks:



We go back to the station where Lann tells us to find some librarian who might know more.



Emo.

Cthulhu no can do. People on lower resolutions will have their text going all the way across if I show the image directly, and I sure aint gonna go through the process of resizing them. Also the performance is a little shitty. With 10 enemies on screen and a few explosions my framerates got to stutter level even with my new comp (dualcore 2.6ghz, 2gb ram and Geforce 8800GTS 640mb, so its understandable that it would lag more than crysis on ultra high details).

Till next time!

Nice theory. Doesn't explain why FEAR was so popular though. The levels were dismally repetitive and boring in that game. It still did well with the FPS crowd. Because the FPS crowd likes gameplay too.

Click to expand...

I don't know if that's entirely true. FEARs environments were distinct from one another (I remember industrial area, offices, tenements and the end game bit) and every single one was populated with more landmarks than I saw in all of the Hellgate demo. Some of them were even pretty awesome, like rooms where nearly every surface had been covered in blood, elevator shafts filled with several storeys worth of corpses, etc.

And in terms of the "feel", it had a lot going for it - a shotgun that would turn body parts to a fine paste at close range, a gun that shot steel spikes and nailed enemies to walls, a laser that would dissolve flesh and leave a skeleton. The player felt the "pain" as well, with functions like the classic temporary deafness and ringing whine when a grenade goes off nearby.

On top of that, there were significant portions of the game where there was no shooting involved, purely narrative exploration. Like astargoth said, it's pretty much the poster child for games with a cinematic focus. In terms of graphical tech, it still looks pretty impressive a couple of years on, the art direction was solid and the entire narrative was basically parroted from the "far more sophisticated" Japanese film horror.

I can see why you might think the environments are boring and repetitive, but that's the nature of the beast. Pumping stations and corporate offices aren't the most exciting locations, but I think enough was done with the horror elements to spice up the otherwise boring locales.

Hellgate on the other hand is supposedly set in one of the world's oldest cities, full of mysteries, architectural quirks and ultimately more complex than a single office/apartment complex/industrial plant by many orders of magnitude, and the graphics a level algorithms fail to reflect this.

And although I can definitely see where complaints about the graphics come from, I enjoyed the underground tunnels, even the streets. Sure I haven't played the game to death, only this weekend, but wandering through the streets of london with demons everywhere and the burned out shells of tanks littered about...or through a ruined piccadilly square with it's neon billboards...it's not bad. They could have done better, but visually I enjoyed it MUCH more that FEARs environments.

Click to expand...

To each their own I guess, but even my friends who actually like the game concede that the environments are just a means to an end. My housemate even damned the environments by comparing it to Dwarf Fortress, something like: "It's like that crazy-arse Dwarf game you play. It doesn't matter that a wall is just a couple of grey lines, you just have to know it's a wall, and after a while you stop looking closely and just playing the game."

Meh, dunno what you are talking about. I fire a nail into a zombie, it sizzles for a bit and then explodes, with the body going flying with physics and whatnot. It's satisfying. In fact the guns are far more interesting than the usual drab guns we get in shooters. I have guns which fire sizzling spectral bolts, which lay down a carpet of napalm, which fire swarms of mutant wasps...much better than the usual machine gun/shotgun/rocket launcher combo.

Click to expand...

From my own experience (the only way to truly "get the feel") I felt more as though I was manipulating a cursor and holding it over a charging enemy, a la Diablo, rather than the feeling I was aiming and shooting a weapon. The only weapon I found in the demo that was more exotic than a machine gun was a rocket launcher which simply spawned a field of fairly sparse fires that looked to be completely lacking in intensity. Given that it's been over ten years since Duke 3D obsolutely nailed bass-thumping, ground shaking explosives, I just feel as though Hellgate isn't up to speed.

Maybe the classes in the full game are slightly more exciting than the two vanilla flavours of the demo (they'd have to be, right?) but it just didn't do it for me.
_________________

well if people ever get to buy this game, Do not subscribe. It is advisable to hold your money off till they patch the online game, don't give them the encouragement yet.