Branloch

Only a noob would bring a knife to a gun fight... j/k... The way of the Phrogg is deadly indeed...

Ditto, seeing it tommorrow. I'm a pirate movie buff so I'm sure I like it. I've learned not to trust critics these days...

Ohhh... that's the pic you guys are talking about. I have a high-res copy of it at home. Sneaky's right, it is an official pic.

Grats, mate. This is where reality starts to sink in...

Impact's video link is the official cinematic trailer. It leads up to the beginning of the game. There's a 4 part comic from Dark Horse that tells the story before the cinematic.

I posted a reply in the SC2 thread about the pricing but I removed that, so I'll post here that way it's in the right place. The reason why they are doing a monthly subscription is so they don't have to do full expansions. It's makes it easier on them to release for one, and also players don't have to wait for a huge install (via download, patch, or on CD). You're going to pay for the new content one way or the other. They just made it a bit easier on the fundage. Sure, the paying customers get stuff first. But what business doesn't work that way? None that I can think of. I'm sure they may add some sort of expansion option for those that don't want to pay a montly fee. But, to be honest, $9.95 US is very reasonable. I used to pay close to that when I had a Gamespy/Fileplanet subscription. I for one will be buying the collector's edition and paying the monthly fee for several reasons. 1) I want to support them and any future product. 2) They are creating a free game already called Mythos and those servers have to be supported too. 3) Someone's got to help pay for the servers that the free players are going to play on.

It's not money grubbing, it's network maintenance. They don't have Blizzard's endless supply of cash and server tech backing them up. Someone has to pay for the servers. The fact that they are even adding a free online option should be a good thing. [The rest of this reply has been moved to the proper thread.] Anyways, I'm getting off topic. On topic though, the videos I've seen for SC2 do look nice. I never really got into SC much though, just when I go together with some mates and played a few multi rounds. Didn't get far into the single-player storyline either.

I just can't see them doing another Diablo. He's dead now a million times over. What are they going to do? Ressurect him? That's like beating a dead horse... Heh. I've been watching HG:L since it was first announced. I'm definitely getting the game because it looks great and is going to have some really nice gamplay features that will keep me playing for a long time. Replayability has always been a strong point with me and HG:L is promising just that. FSS has taken everything they've learned with the Diablo series and applying that knowledge to HG:L. Maybe you read a bad preview?

Then Blizzard would have to compete with Flagship's Hellgate: London. They were smart to focus on Starcraft instead of going up against Diablo's original creators. Blizzard has stated that WoW is the only MMO they'll be working on for now. Besides, I believe there's a Firefly MMO in the works somewhere. I remember reading it in one of my Gamespy newsletters.

If anyone's interested in an Alpha invite for Mythos, send me a PM. As I earn invites, I can hand them out to people who will help test. It's only up during specific (and limited) test times until we have all the memory leaks, crashes, etc fixed. I've used the invites I want for now, I've gotten some of my mates IRL in the game with me. We have a private Vent server we use to coordinate with since not all of them know of TAC.

Not true, ever seen those job search/placement ads on TV? The ones where they are in the jungle. They've got armor they pieced together from office supplies. You just need to be creative.

Warhammer Online will kick the butt off any MMO out if the devs really do pull off everything they have planned. I can see all the hardcore PvP'ers in WoW leaving for Warhammer. It's a game built around PvP but also not ignoring the PvE aspect. As a matter of fact, the 2 are intertwined. What happens in one will affect the other, possibly even worldwide. They are even planning the game where you can lay siege to each race's capital and eventually take it out. A nigh impossible task, but it can be done. And some of the siege equipment looks downright sick. Especially the Waaagh! siege tower. Personally, I'm playing with the Mythos Alpha and will hang with this for awhile. My plans are to grab Hellgate this summer and stick with these for awhile. 2 years of WoW has me pretty MMO'd out for now.

Must still be going on, I can't get online...

Yeah, that's it! I haven't followed up in the game in awhile so a good bit of my stuff is a bit fuzzy. The physics of the game really intrigued me when they were talking about the stuff they already had working and the stuff they were putting into the game. Even some of the early vids looked promising. Alas, I'm on a tight budget atm so I can get it. That and I'm spending most of my free time landscaping my yard while the weather is nice.

LoL! There are things much worse than that in the game. Some of them you won't see until it's too late...

Don't forget to try and avoid those freak pockets of "reality-changers", they can be a bit nasty. I can't remember their exact names. Heh. I started following Stalker when it first was announced. After about 2 years, I got bored and moved on to other things.

It will support both Vista and DX10, but they are not required in order for the game to run. :thumbsup: Hmm, sounds like you haven't been in an end-game raiding guild. When you have 60+ people in the guild, you're bound to have some tools who only care about themselves and whatever gets them phat loot for minimal effort. They usually get weeded out after a few runs, but it's after they've screwed up... heh. I just don't care about WoW anymore. It was claimed to be different than every other MMO on the market and in reality it isn't. Don't get me wrong, I had a blast leveling my 3 chars to level 60. But end-game really blows. I hate having to run the same dungeon with the same layout for 4+ months praying that I get something out of the run after having to spend 6+ hours straight in it... I can't stand repetition, it's why I don't care for grindfest MMO's (think DAoC, Shadowbane, etc). I want to explore, I want challenges not boredom.

Yep, it does.

Thus why I hate WoW and stopped playing it. I do not like being forced into doing something in order to progress in the game. I want to play like I want to play not how someone else thinks I should play. I also hate having to put my trust in 39 other people only to waste a multitude of hours because some moron wants to be a noob and screw up the raid everytime I turn around. Same applies to small groups. The best thing about Hellgate and the online model is that if I want to play by myself, I can do that and still progress through the game. If I want to party with some mates, I have that option too. Best of all, the dungeons scale according to how many people are there so if I join up with some friends late, the mobs will beef up when I enter the dungeon. There are so many other features they've added that I like, but there's not enough time to talk about them all.

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif., (March 22, 2007) Ping0, LLC, a joint-venture between Flagship Studios and HanbitSoft, Inc., today revealed details on Mythos the highly anticipated massively multiplayer online role-playing game developed by Flagship Studios Seattle. The announcement coincides with the expansion of the Mythos alpha test. "For Mythos, we started with the revolutionary style of gameplay we pioneered in the Diablo franchise. Then, by offering it free to download and play, we make it even more accessible to players. By designing the Mythos world from the ground-up to be an ever-changing place, we can quickly and seamlessly implement new ideas from a variety of inspirations," said Phil Shenk, Creative Director of Mythos and founding member of Flagship Studios, "Through the continued support of the Flagship community, we are striving to create what will be one of the most innovative role-playing games of recent years." Mythos is an online, action role-playing game that is free to download and free to play. Set in the land of Uld, a fantasy world arising from the ashes of an epoch-long war of darkness. players assume the roles of fantasy heroes as they explore, adventure, and quest through entirely randomized dungeons and environments. With an elegant point-and-click interface and an accessible "isometric" perspective, Mythos is poised to have near-universal appeal. The game allows thousands of players to interact within the same world while using mostly "Instanced"? dungeons to create unique gaming experiences suited for both solo and group-minded players. As players journey into Mythos ever-expanding universe, they select one of three races (Human, Elves, or Gremlins) and opt to play as a particular character class using a huge variety of skills and items. Through heroic quests players search for gold, gems, armor, and weapons, while unlocking the secrets of Uld. Mythos presents a constantly expanding, continuously updated world where something new lurks around every corner. Mythos is an online role-playing game developed by Flagship Seattle, a subsidiary of Flagship Studios. Mythos is currently exercising the online technology and services behind the multiplayer component of the highly-anticipated action role-playing game Hellgate: London. Mythos will be digitally distributed in North America and Europe in 2007 by Ping0. HanbitSoft, Flagship Studios? partner in Ping0, will be responsible for distributing Mythos in Asia.

I've been watching this game since it was first announced. LoL! I've uploaded some images to the gallery. Do a search on the keyword "Hellgate" and you'll find them.

Bill Roper (English) [continued] Hellgate: London Joerg: Hellgate: London is a PC only game. So why is that, and what do you think games will look like in a couple of years, and on what machines will they run on? Will there still be "consoles" and "PCs", or will there be just internet clients where everything runs on? Bill Roper: Every console manufacturer, Sony, Nintendo, Microsoft, they all have their own visions about what entertainment should look like, so there will always be diversity in the machines which are designed to run around the television. Games get made for the PC for some different reasons. One, it’s an evolving machine. Ed Fries said a handful of years ago: "Consoles are snapshots of the best the PC has to offer at that time." And six months later, the PC is in the front again. This generation of consoles might last longer than the traditional three or four years. We’ll see. That would be fine with me, I think we designers didn’t even get everything out of the PS2. The PC always had the lead in terms of online play. And I think another huge advantage is the controls. The fact that you have a mouse and a keyboard offer you a lot of variety compared to what the consoles can do with their controllers. And the console controllers have become much more complex that they used to be remember the one-button-pad? On the PC the challenge is to not make your controls too complicated, but to make use of the fact that you have some very precise tools at your disposal. Joerg: That doesn’t sound like you’re planning to do a console game very soon. Bill Roper: Well, we always play console games. And certainly with EA as publishing partner, we have talked about what we could do with the Hellgate universe in the console space. I think of all the games we have ever worked on, Hellgate is the most portable. I don’t like the term "portable", because you would have to completely redesign the interface and rethink the game balance, so that it becomes a fun console game. I also think that there is a lot of room within the Hellgate universe to create a completely new console game. That is what we wanted to do: To create a world we could take to other platforms and to other media. That’s why we are so excited about the comic books and the novel and the collectible figures. Hellgate really has translated across to other media. Joerg: Will you finish Hellgate in time? Bill Roper: We were shooting for the summer, and we are on target. We don’t like to announce release windows, we’re not really good with them. Joerg: But by the end of summer 2007, Hellgate will be out? Bill Roper: That is the dream and the goal we’re working 18 hours a day for.

Bill Roper (English) Hellgate: London Bill Roper played a leading part in every big Blizzard franchise prior to World of WarCraft. In 2003, he founded Flagship Studios. Their first product is supposed to ship in summer 2007 - and to beat Diablo 2 in every single aspect. I talked to Bill about Hellgate: London, Blizzard, Vivendi and the PC as the gaming platform of the future. Joerg: Bill, you've started working in the industry and for Blizzard in 1994 as the composer for Blackthorne. Bill Roper: Yes, on the PC side. Joerg: I remember reviewing Blackthorne for PC Player. Nobody knew about Blizzard, then. Since then, you've been working, mostly as the producer, on the WarCraft, StarCraft and Diablo franchises. That's quite a career! Bill Roper: It's been good so far, I've been having a good time. Joerg: So why on earth did you decide to leave Blizzard in 2003? Bill Roper: We weren't really looking to leave, to be honest, we were more interested in trying to find a way to work within the structure at Blizzard. There was a lot going on at that time, rumours about the sale of Blizzard. It was totally unclear what was going to occur, we were getting mixed signals. Our guys would come to us and say: "We've heard that we are gonna bought by Microsoft". Or "we will be sold on the stock market". We basically approached Vivendi and said: We need to know what's going on! The problem was that we were getting nothing back, so finally, in an effort to show how serious we were about this, we send in letters of resignation: "We will resign if you do not include us in that process!". And all we wanted to was to be able talk to someone in France! But they decided not to tell us. Joerg: We would be Blizzard North at that time? Bill Roper: It happened to everyone, but those of us who sent word were Dave Brevik, Erich and Max Schaefer and myself, bascially the management of Blizzard North at that time. Joerg: What was the answer of Vivendi? Bill Roper: We never got one directly from Vivendi, that was part of the problem. So even with the resignations, the answer came back through the usual channels. So we heard from Mike Morheim down south that he had been told by the guys from New York who had been told by the guys in France. Joerg: That really gives you the impression that you're important for the company. Bill Roper: That's always the challenge for a multi-national company. At that time, Vivendi Universal Games was not doing anywhere near as well as it is now. They didn't know about their own future four years ago. things today are obviously very different, they had a lot of personnel changes there. But at that time the owners of the companies didn't really know what to do with them, and that was extremely difficult for teams like us that wanted to focus on producing good games. It ended like this: they kept the resignations, we left, and the next day, we started Flagship. Joerg: Blizzard is now a very settled, very successful company, World of WarCraft might be the most successful game in existence. Do you have second thoughts about leaving, today? Bill Roper: Not at all. We're glad how things developed. We never had any doubts about Blizzard's ability to make great games. It definitely didn't come as any surprise to us that they would have a smashing success with World of WarCraft. Well, I think everybody's surprised exactly how big it got. But that's also something which was part of the history of Blizzard: We were always doing internal projections, but the games always did go over the top. But no, we never had any second thoughts, we did what we did. For the last three and a half years, we were having a fantastic time here at Flagship, we're making a product which we would never had been making at Blizzard, we love having a smaller company, we love "being masters of the ship" again. It's great! Joerg: Apart from Flagship obviously being smaller, what else is different? Bill Roper: At Blizzard, they have three great franchises that they, right now, find very difficult to service. Obviously World of WarCraft is an amazing product, so that is were the vast majority of their attention goes toward. But they also have the StarCraft franchise and the Diablo franchise, and both are fantastic. But it is difficult to really put a lot of focus near the places. With us, it's nice to be able to focus on one or two things again. It's nice to come in in the morning and to know exactly what you're going to be working on. Joerg: And it's one game, and not 10 at the same time. Bill Roper: Yeah. Otherwise, you start to feel guilty as a developer: We've got all these fans, and these other things we've done, and we're not giving them anything right now. You're also starting to feel a little locked in. World of WarCraft was great it took the WarCraft franchise and broke it out from being real time strategy. But now, those guys have been working probably close to 6 or 8 years now. Joerg: Maybe for all their professional life. Bill Roper: Yes. There are guys who have been at Blizzard for five years and they've probably never worked on anything else. From a creative standpoint, that can be fantastic. To be able to constantly evolve things, to play with stuff. But at the same time, there is something really rejuvenating about being able to do something else from scratch. To create new characters and new mythologies and all that. So that's what's really exciting for us, too: to launch a new franchise with Hellgate. Joerg: But let's be honest: If Hellgate will be the success you hope it will be, you will make a second part, a third, add-ons, and so on, so you will be in the same scheme again. Bill Roper: Yes, that's right, and that's our hope, too: that you get a game good enough that people want to have more. One of the challenges is that, at Blizzard, everything we did was a giant AAA game, a huge product. That's great, and that's what we're trying to achieve with Hellgate, but we're also looking on other projects, like casual games, to do things a little smaller. These products can be really great for gamers, you're reaching out to a broader base with different game ideas. And these products usually take between 12 to 18 months to finish. It will be really nice - if everything works out - when, even as we will serve Hellgate for years and years and years, people can break off from the team to work on something completely different for six months. To recharge their batteries. Because, when you're working on a game for 3 or 4 years, that's a long time before you actually see a result. And before you are able to share it with people. Of course, internally we see a lot. The challenge comes to me when I'm talking to my friends and they say: "Well, we want to see your game." And I have to say: I'm doing something, it's just gonna take a while. Joerg: When critics say that Hellgate is just another Diablo clone with different graphics and a different szenario - what is your answer, apart from perhaps hitting them? Bill Roper: It's okay if people compare what we're doing at the core with Diablo - Diablo is a fantastic game. A lot of the core gameplay concepts are definitely part of what Hellgate is. The massive amounts of randomization, tons of loot, collectability, rarity levels. So in this respect, we are very happy with comparisons. Beyond that, we're doing so much more that it's difficult to even quantify it. We've added the concept of randomizing to almost every single aspect in the game. This allows us to increase the enjoyability of the game, and to add more and more and more content after the game is released. We've actually added randomization to rarity locations the game uses to create your game level. For example, you might have been various times to the Underground tubes beneath London. But this time you're going through, you find an access code which opens a doorway which you never have seen before. And later, when you continue through the level, you find a boss monster which drops a key card which opens that doorway. You go through and find a mini dungeon which has a special reward in it. Joerg: And this could happen the third time you'll explore that kind of level? Bill Roper: It could happen the first time or the nth time. It's a "rarity level", it's like item drops, whether or not they have mod slots or are magical or epic or legendary or a set. We have all these kinds of rarity with items, same thing happens with levels. You might have been in an outdoor park type of setting a bunch of times, but this time you notice the sky is red and fiery, and every time the monsters drop a rare item, it has fire attribute statistics, because you are in a fire rarity version of the level. We have tried to build on our experiences from Diablo and to have more randomization, but which feels less random. Our levels really feel like they are supposed to be that way. We have probably the most experience with randomization in the whole industry. And on top of that we add rarity levels. So for example, this time to you go through an area, you get a message from a wounded templar, and he is marked on your automap. And when you find him, he has a side quest for you. So our aim is that even when you feel like you've gone through that type of level many times before, there is always something new which could happen, which is more than just a new level layout or the exact kind of monsters you encounter. And this is something which you really miss in an MMO: Once you've explored an area. Joerg: you never really need to come back, or it's even pointless to come back because you no longer get experience from there. Bill Roper: Exactly, and that's "level grinding" to me. When you have to repeat a repetitive function and there's no surprise to it. Like having to kill these spiders in this swamp area so that I become level 25 so that I can go on to the next area. There's no exploration, there's nothing new. And that's great in Hellgate: If I go to a new area and I feel it's too hard, I can go back into that area and it will be randomized differently. New monsters, new layouts, new treasure. So you are always exploring, even if you're repeating an area. Joerg: What other differences are there to Diablo? Bill Roper: The way the classes work and interact. When you play Hellgate in multiplayer mode, it feels like and MMO and not like a "lobby". It's a huge difference. In Diablo 2 you would go online and have a chat room, and then you would go out with your friends and play the game. In Hellgate, you meet people and trade and form groups and you're the character you've created all the time. Today, we couldn't launch a Battle.Net anymore, because the expectations from the players are so much higher in terms of interactivity. Joerg: So it's the "old" multiplayer mode, but with lots of additions and new graphics? Bill Roper: It really is much more, it really is an MMO experience. It's client-server-based, it 24/7 customer service, you're buying and selling items, you go to auction houses, you're forming guilds. All those things you would expect from an MMO environment. Another huge difference between Hellgate and Diablo 2 is that we constructed Hellgate to provide "continuous content". We expect many of the players to feel very dedicated to the game, they will probably play it for months and years. And we want to be able on our end to add content for them, like new areas and new boss monsters and classes, and to grow the game all the time. We already had this desire when we made Diablo 2, but we didn't have the tools for it. Joerg: You mentioned repetitive actions, but of course Diablo (and presumably Hellgate) is all about repetitive action: clicking, killing, clicking, collecting and so on. And still, there is some kind of strange magic "flow" which keeps you going. How can you develop this in a planned way, what's the trick? Or does it just come from endless testing? Bill Roper: It's all of that. We have formulas we use. It all comes down to that you want to set different goals. Kill a monster - that's a goal, it takes 5 or 7 seconds to achieve this goal. You have the goal of gaining your next level, that takes much longer. Joerg: But how do you get those timings right? Bill Roper: You need to have a goal that just keeps you playing for the next couple of minutes. Hey, I am almost level X! Hey, there's an item I want to identify! A new area! A new quest! There's always something that's just that step away. "I'll just do that. And I'll just do that. And that. But planning those timings only gets you so far. Beyond that, we play the game constantly. And as we get into alpha and then into beta, and start to get feedback from players, there a lot of fine tuning going on of the overall pace of the game. There always has to be a goal, but that goal needs to change all the time or it gets boring. Of course, the most time you're killing monsters, but you are also completing quests, follow the story line, get skill points for your character. And, as a big difference to MMO games, we don't really see Hellgate as a race to the level cap. We haven't really set a level cap for Hellgate yet. If treated correctly, it's just another goal, it shouldn't be the main goal. Because when it's "I gotta hit 50!", the problem is, that after making it to level 50, they feel like they're done. We want to be the level cap to be just one major goal, but not as the end of the game. Joerg: Let's come to the "flow" in your own workdays. You're CEO of Flagship studios - what are the things you like best and what things do you not like at all? Bill Roper: The thing I enjoy most is the diversity. A couple of days ago I was in a producer meeting where we talked about all the areas in the game, about timelines to get them down and milestones coming up. That was more a strategic planning session. Last week I was very involved in the creative process. At GDC I spend a lot of time with other game developers in the industry. We show the game to the press. Next Friday, I am doing some voice recording for some the Hellgate characters. Joerg: That's something which you've always did, starting in the old WarCraft times. Bill Roper: Yes, that's something I enjoy doing. So every day has a new challenge, and that's what I like the most about my job.

E3 06: Hellgate: London Updated Hands-on We get our hands on the upcoming action role-playing game from the creators of Diablo at E3 2006. Posted May 11, 2006 8:34 pm PT LOS ANGELES--Hellgate: London, the hybrid first-person/third-person-shooter-plus-action-role-playing game from the original creators of Diablo (now at Flagship Studios), is on display here at E3 2006. We had a chance to try out the updated version of the game, as well as to get a production update from Flagship CEO Bill Roper. At this point in time, both the templar (a kind of high-tech holy warrior) and cabalist (a sorcerer that specializes in black magic) character classes are in the game and playable in a demo version that includes several different areas. Hellgate seems just as easy as ever to get into; by default, it uses the typical first-person shooter control setup of W, A, S, and D to move and your left and right mouse buttons to attack with the weapons in your left and right hands, respectively. Apparently, the game will also have context-sensitive shortcuts that will let you map multiple functions to a single key so that you won't have to use multiple shortcuts if you don't care to. In a private press demonstration, Roper showed how he mapped his character's sprint ability, overhead bash attack, and spinning whirlwind attack to the Shift key to automatically move quickly when far away from enemies, then switch to different attacks depending on whether his character was standing in front of a single enemy or mobbed by multiples. The CEO also showed off an interesting new cosmetic detail, armor "theming," which automatically grants your armor pieces a uniform color and visual theme depending on whether you're wearing multiple pieces of the same set (as opposed to wearing different pieces of armor from different sets--a common occurrence in online role-playing games that makes your characters look ridiculous because they're wearing armor pieces that are different colors, like orange, purple, and green). We created a cabalist character by adjusting the height, build, face, hair, and features, then played through one of the game's early levels, which began inside a station in London's world-famous "Tube" underground train network (now abandoned and fallen into ruin, since the game takes place in the wake of a near-future demonic invasion). Several characters stood around the station, some willing to speak with us, others claiming they didn't know us well enough to talk. One character who was glad to speak with us was "L'il Joey," a disabled child with a glimmer of hope in his eye and a World of Warcraft-esque yellow exclamation point hovering over his head (this marking indicates that a character has a quest available to give). It seemed that L'il Joey had lost his prosthetic leg above ground, and gave us a quest to retrieve it. We headed topside to fight through the ruined streets of the Big Smoke in search of the dastardly demon what swiped the child's leg, fighting through crowds of small demons with a tractor beam-like energy weapon in one hand and a pulse-firing pistol weapon in the other. We finally came upon the hulking, misshapen miscreant, named The Taint (no snickering, please), a tangled mass of arms and heads that we slaughtered and divested of the embezzled extremity, then returned to the station. We then passed it back to a very grateful L'il Joey, who insisted on becoming our squire, and went so far as to change his name to the original name of King Arthur, Wart. (So in essence, we had just returned Wart's leg...Diablo players should get the reference.) Though the game's release date remains undefined, Roper did share some interesting details about the game's development process that perhaps shed some light on why. The team is constantly working on adding new content to the game; for instance, the "hellrifts" (portals that open into a demonic pocket dimension) were added to the game only recently, even though they will be an important part of the game, since they'll house challenging quests and will be highly hostile environments (you'll be able to survive only a limited amount of time before running out of air through a hellrift, nor will you be able to use the "recall" spell to instantly transport yourself to the nearest friendly station). Apparently, Roper's group also added several additional "chance" events--random mini-quests that may or may not even appear in an average game session. Just this past week, the team added a new chance event (which we were unable to see for ourselves) which Roper refers to as "alone in the dark," a brief mission that takes place in a pitch-black tunnel for which players will have only a light-emitting monocle that acts as a flashlight; the CEO compared the gameplay of this chance event to the "flashlight sequences" in id Software's Doom 3. In the meantime, the team continues to churn out content and expand the game's lore and back-story, such as exploring almost-plausible real-world technology to explain the high-tech weapons and armor in the game (the cabalist's "harp" rifle, for instance, is based on harmonic resonance technology, while many of the templar's items will contain the mysterious metal known as palladium, which modern day scientists, according to Roper, still can't properly identify beyond its unusual capacity to store energy). Hellgate: London looks even better than the last time we saw it, and the fact that the company had produced such a lengthy demo (Flagship staffer Ivan Sulic suggested the E3 version included some four hours of gameplay) suggests that good progress is being made, even if the creative minds at Flagship continue to pull new ideas out of their hats and add them to the game weekly. If you haven't been keeping track, Hellgate: London still has no official release date at this time. But if you happen to track any of the development team members down and ask them, they'll be happy to assure you that the game will be done...when it's done.

It's an action RPG that's played from both the first and third person perspectives. You'll have the option of playing from two different angles, either first person or third person. You can play in first person such as when wielding guns so your view can be similar to a FPS. Melee (wielding swords) will default to third person but you have the option of changing it. It's still a hardcore, old-school RPG like Diablo. It's not a game of skills and tricks, it's a game based on your character's attributes (ala RPG). You're skill (or lack thereof) has no effect on your character's accuracy. Think of it as Diablo except set in a future time and with the extra bonus of being able to play it in first person. WoW can be played in first person if you want, but it's not as fun as it would be with Hellgate. Also, you can dual wield weapons and can be fired by using the respective mouse button like in a FPS game. Something else that is really cool is that they added a mini-game within the game. When you enter a "dungeon" you will see several "greyed out" icons next to your character's portrait on the screen (say in the lower right hand corner of the screen for example). The icons could be anything such as: kill a certain monster, kill a monster using a certain attack, kill a monster with a specific weapon damage type (lighting, fire, acid, etc), or anything else. If you light up all of the icons while you are in that dungeon, the next kill you make will drop a guaranteed higher quality item as opposed to a random loot drop or even trigger a special event. Official website: http://www.hellgatelondon.com/ Popular Hellgate fansite: http://www.hellgateguru.com/ Hellgate Preview Video: http://www.gametrailers.com/player.php?id=10726&type=mov&pl=game E3 2006 Interview with Bill Roper, CEO of FSS (this is the one with the latest test build): http://www.gametrailers.com/player.p...pe=mov&pl=game German Gaming Convention Interview with Ivan Sulic and crew: http://www.hellgatelondon.de/gc-2006/interviews/flagship-studios-lq.php Hellgate Videos: Some additional Hellgate videos including one with some new footage. Keep in mind that the creatures look easy to kill because these are gaming convention demos, FSS made them easier so that people could experience the content. The actual game will be much harder. Also, these are Google videos so the video quality isn't all that great, I've seen actual game footage and it looks really sweet. :thumbsup: This one includes new footage. Shows quite a few weapons and new creature models. Hellgate of Londen 2 other videos worth noting: hellgate london gameplay http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8829666174247489968&q=Hellgate&hl=en Offical Korean Hellgate Site: http://hellgate.hanbiton.com/ Hellgate Cinematic: High Quality: http://resource.london2038.com/videos/hellgate_intro_fss_high.wmv Med Quality: http://resource.london2038.com/videos/hellgate_intro_fss_med.wmv