Hellgate London Trying to Get Out of Purgatory

via IGN


The months that lead up to the Halloween launch of Hellgate London left PC gamers in high anticipation. The game was billed as a futuristic MMORPG set in London, that didn't force players to pay a monthly fee(although they could if they wanted additional goodies). In addition, Flagship Studios, the developers of Hellgate London, were branded as an off shoot of Blizzard's development team as it had some key Diablo developers. With this great foundation, what could possibly go wrong? Apparently…a lot.

At the outset of the launch, the game was plagued with bugs that crashed the game, subscribers' accounts were billed multiple times on accident, and early patches only caused frustration by erasing gamers' avatars.

Since then Flagship Studios has made great strides into improving its game, releasing a major patch, titled The Stonehenge Chronicles, which set out to fix all of the game's major problems. However, has Flagship's ship sailed?

According to CVG, Flagship Studio CEO Bill Roper, acknowledged the problems that plagued the games release and hopes gamers reconsider, "I think that people had incredibly high expectations that we simply didn't meet… The game came out with some major bugs and that threw fuel on the fire. We've been killing ourselves addressing all of those issues, and the game is so much better now than it was when it came out. We just hope people will come back and give it a try again."

So how did Hellgate London set itself up for disappointment? Roper cited numerous reasons, "We simply tried to do too much with the game. Vista, DirectX 10, being both a single-player boxed product and a multiplayer online game, a simultaneous launch in seven languages across Europe, the US, and South East Asia, and creating our own fully-featured online destination on top of all that."

"We'll take the blame for not getting enough testing done while working to meet our committed ship date. There were so many issues that came up just before launch that just compounded the things we were working on, right up until the game launched, that we didn't get fixed… The game would certainly have benefited from a couple of more months in the oven, so to speak, but we didn't have the ability to do so. The challenges of an independent game studio are drastically different than those owned by a publisher. We're fortunate that the online nature of the game has allowed us to continue to fix bugs, add content, and respond directly to our player's wants and needs," said Roper.

How difficult would it have been to delay the game? Roper said, "We made a commitment to ship the game on a certain date, and that decision was made jointly between us and our publishing partners. We wanted to stay true to that date because of all the marketing and sales work that had been put into a timed launch... In a different situation, we could have said, 'Let's delay this until we get these last things hammered out.' But that's not as easy as people think when you don't have the hundreds of millions behind you that a publisher's development team does."

Flagship Studio seems sincere about living up to the hype, even after release, "There is this huge misconception that we aren't doing things for our free players…a massive amount of work went into the patches after the game came out, as well as what's in The Stonehenge Chronicles, and that's available to everyone. All of the class rebalances, the PvP duelling arena, the numerous UI changes, group-play balance, quest work, item and mod issues being addressed (as well as a new upgrade system), crafting and more are there for everyone. We're very dedicated to providing updates and a better experience to everyone who plays the game."