Hellgate London Preview

"Beta NDA Lifted

The NDA period for the general Beta test is officially over! THANK YOU all for being as good as you have been on this. Feel free to post, email, phone call, and alert your local news station about your play experiences!

How Our Beta Process Works
We wanted to take a few minutes to talk about how we run our Beta tests, the differences of and timing for getting builds out to the testers, and basically let you in on what makes our test tick.

Our development path is quite different from that of the vast majority of game developers. We utilize what we call an organic process, which is basically shorthand for our way of constantly iterating, tweaking, tuning, and making changes that are difficult to set months or years ahead of time in a traditional design document. When we get into the last 6 - 9 months of development time, this process really kicks into high-gear. We are making an immense amount of changes, both large and small, and if we tried to push these out to our Beta testing community, we’d literally be giving you new code up to a dozen times a day. Obviously, this isn’t going to be of any great benefit, so we wait until we have done a lot of internal testing and can batch changes into larger, meaningful updates.

We have a core team of testers on-site dedicated to working with our programmers and designers to give immediate feedback and address bugs in a focused manner. We also have a massive amount of testers at EA that work on builds that have been promoted as release candidates. When we get a patch release candidate that we feel is solid, we then promote that to being a Published candidate, and it undergoes patch testing. When we get something here that we like, we push it to you, the Beta testers.

What this means is that we are, at a MINIMUM, 2 weeks further down the road on the game than the testers see. Commonly, this time gap can be upwards of 4 weeks. We push hot fixes as quickly as possible, but please remember that we have also been working on numerous language builds, the single-player gold master, and of course, the fixes and features for our first day online – what we call Patch 0.

We know that it can be frustrating at times to hear that things are different in our internal builds than what you have, but it is just how timing has to work in order for us to meet all of our deadlines and make sure that the testing time we get with you is as beneficial as possible. Thank you all for the hard work, the hours of testing, and your continued support and excitement for the game."Hellgate Guru.

This is great news... Hellgate London is a really great game. The gameplay systems that bear a very strong resemblance to Diablo, work very effectively in their new context.

The game starts out with the player picking his/her avatar from among different classes: Templars: Blademaster or Guardian, Cabalist: Evoker or Summoner, and Hunter(or Ranger): Engineer or Marksman. These can be boiled down into their base abilities: Templars are basically sword wielding warrior types, Cabalists are basically magic users, and Hunters or Rangers are basically centered around the FPS mechanic in the game where the player can shoot enemies from a first person perspective. Using these characters the player enters into a post apocalyptic world where demons have taken over and a few humans that remain struggle to survive against them.

The player begins with basic armor and weapons. Most of the time the player can pick up a descent sword or gun between the 1st-3rd encounter. The real power of the game comes from augmenting the weapons and armor found using raw materials gleaned from destroying weapons and armor that the player's class cannot use. Most of the time this, coupled with the straight augmentation that must be paid for, will give the player much more powerful weapons and armor than anything randomly picked up in a dungeon. From time to time as the player moves higher in levels they find some good armor or weapons. This results in the player rarely really needing to buy any weapons or armor from vendors. This isn't immediately understandable by the beginning player due to slow flow of armor and weapons in the beginning. This was the case in the beta build I played, this could change in later builds or in the final game.

All of the classes in the game are well balanced and have interesting traits and skills. The weaknesses as far as exciting skills lie most with the Guardian who has defensive and offensive auras which allow the player to regenerate health or do more damage in combat. The higher levels of the Guardian have some interesting skills but the lower levels are not quite as fun to play as the Blademaster. This too could be changed by the time the game reaches the final build.

This game has had so many changes over the builds that I've seen, it is conceivable that the final retail build of the game will be different from the builds in the Alpha or Beta to the point of them being unrecognizable. The enemies in the game are many and most act like those in popular MMOs like World of Warcraft. They respond to Aggro and can be debuffed into destruction. The beta could have benefited from more varied enemies but the idea that the enemies live in these locations and that is why they are so plentiful is a good reason. For the player however, beating the same zombies or variants on those zombies over and over again can get a little annoying. However, this is a very small point.

Being a Blademaster normally makes the player feel the most powerful because even with enemies all around the player just tapping a couple of skills and attacking with double blades can take down all most anything. The other very satisfying class is the Summoner who can summon elementals by the handful and bigger demons that act like battle pets. These battle pet demons can be very helpful and it is certainly worth dropping lots of skill points into them to yield a really powerful ally.

The story in the game is pretty good. But it should be taken with a grain of salt that everyone in the game has been seriously mentally affected by the invasion of the demons and are teetering on the edge of madness. Many times people will be so jovial about horrible occurrences partly because this is an MMO and people don't like to read dramatic overly dark stuff and because everyone is all most insane. Bearing this in mind makes the game more understandable and even funny. Hopefully some of the quests could be a little more serious; considering EA's own fiction about the game is very serious and dramatic. It would be like having Ken Burns Civil War and then making a game where all the soldiers are wise cracking as their compatriots are dying all around them. While a little battle fatigue and shell shock is understandable but sometimes this is taken too far and makes the story less impactful. Hopefully this will be juiced up for the final retail.

I loved the time I spent with Hellgate London Beta(about 20 hours, maybe a little more). But I am REALLY looking forward to the final build, because the resolution of all issues will make the game a hot property this year. See you online on Halloween!