Hellgate: London Preview

AtomicGamer went back to preview Hellgate: London for a second time, based on the game’s ongoing beta test. They also released an exclusive HD video with a minute of game footage.

This led many players and even a few editors, some of which got their first taste of the game completely spoiled by staring at a “Loading” screen that wouldn’t go away until the three finger salute and subsequent closure in Task Manager, to doubt whether Hellgate: London would be even remotely playable on its Halloween release date. Many online games in this state don’t launch well, and even now that another patch has gone through to fix these issues and the servers are in better shape, doubt remains in everyone’s minds if this game will not simply self-destruct when hundreds of thousands of people start to play.

And I think part of the problem is that maybe even Flagship don’t quite understand what made Diablo 2 so addictive, and may not even know what it is about Hellgate itself that keeps people coming back, and it’s starting to seem like even the game’s developers weren’t sure of what a runaway success this game may be. Hype is getting to its highest levels for this game as card-carrying D2 fanatics are coming back more impressed than they have with any game in years, and tons of people are pre-ordering the game in order to jump into the current beta test. I’m going to try and move around the connection and server issues for the remainder of this preview and talk about the game as it is when everything’s working right; by no means am I going to promise or even presume that serious connection issues won’t happen once Hellgate is in stores, but hey, issues like this happened in Blizzard’s own games – most notably, the original Diablo II and World of Warcraft releases – and they were mostly related to runaway success and eventually got fixed, if maybe a little later than most players would’ve liked. Let’s hope that Flagship can pick up the pace and really bust their butts to get this game running smoothly from here on out.