Hellgate: London Multiplayer Rises from the Dead

Flagship Studios’ Hellgate: London has a checkered past to say the least, but it’s an action RPG that ranks among my favorites of all time, and has therefore been near-and-dear to my heart for a very long time. With the closing of the original servers and T3Fun’s own Hellgate Global servers, though, we have had no means of playing the game’s excellent Stonehenge and Abyss content or go on any party-based boss runs. As entertaining as the loot game could be in the single player version – particularly with a mod or two installed – it just hasn’t been the same without these additions.

But it appears that will be changing soon, as the relaunched revival project we told you about back in September has been moving along at a promising clip. So much, in fact, that they now have a working multiplayer server and have started a developer diary series and an FAQ to tell us more about where things stand. This video demonstrating the functioning multiplayer is certainly promising:

And here’s a bit from the first developer diary:

As seen above, we have a working Hellgate: London multiplayer server running. At this point, Hellgate multiplayer WILL be returning to the community. It has taken months of work, dedication, blood, sweat, and tears to get to this point, but we are at a point where development is accelerating and we are able to actually debug a running MP server.

We currently have 4-5 developers actively working on this project; myself, MMan, and MarCNeT being the principal developers at this point. Things are still at a very tentative stage where bugs are both discovered and squashed daily (sometimes hourly). See below for a rough list of what works and what doesn’t:

What Works

• Logging in
• Character Creation
• Multiple Players
• Combat
• Monsters/Bosses
• Quests/NPCs/Merchants
• Treasure, including items with effects
• Mail system, including attachments/money
• Stash/shared stash
• Party System*
• Portals Between Dungeons/Stations/Station Terminal*
• PvP Arena*
• Chat System
• Augmentrix, nano forge, etc
• Pretty much anything else that isn’t listed below

* Working… most of the time, see items below

What Is Being Worked On/What Doesn’t Work

• Making data structures in the code match data found in the files the server loads; this is painstakingly being done by hand, but will correct many issues
• Power does not regenerate/powerpacks do not work
• Shields do not regenerate
• Auction House is somewhat broken
• Health data is not correctly shared with party members
• Occasionally moving between zones will crash the server
• Some skills do not have the correct effects/do not work
• Some boss encounters cause some glitches
• Subscriber status is buggy
• item linking in chat is broken
• Random issues with monsters/bosses pausing the server due to data errors (see first item)