Anyone in the Hellgate London Beta?

[astrosfan64]

I'm in the beta. I was pretty excited for the game. It is DX10 and I have a DX10 rig. Well, in DX10 the game runs like arse. I mean almost to the point of unplayability. Overall the game has potential, but runs pretty bad even when I switched it to DX9 mode.

I have a 8800GTS video card. E6600 Dual Core chip and 2 GB of ram. I expected better performance then this.

Other then that it seems like a cross between Diablo2/Battle.net and Guild Wars.

[Brillig]

I just got this downloaded. Since I don't have DX10, I've been running in DX9 mode so far, and it seems to run quite well for me. One thing I've discovered is that it really, really doesn't like being alt-tabbed. Once I tabbed out, my frame rate went to crap until I quit and restarted.

I never played Guild Wars, so I don't really get the comparison there. But it does play a lot like Diablo 2 so far. I tried a Guardian, which seems like a Diablo paladin pretty much, and an Engineer, which seems to have no parallel (it's a pet class). There are only three slots for characters, which is gonna cramp my alt-style a bit.

While the game-play is very Diablo like (go here, do quest, get to next waypoint, various grades of items [blues, greens, etc], random mods on items), this is a first person game rather than the isometric Diablo style.

Anyway, I'm having fun so far...

[astrosfan64]

Yes, its pretty fun. Do you lag pretty bad in the "subway terminals"? I run pretty well in the instances, my issues mostly crop up in the subay terminas aka. the meeting areas.

My friend and I have identical PC's and he is running pretty well, but he didn't goto vista like I did.

[hoopsguy]

I'm planning on getting this game if the reviews are any good. And upgrading my PC when it comes out, as the current system can't run it. So I'm eager to hear what you guys think about the game as you move through the beta, if you are allowed to talk about it.

[Brillig]

I think Vista might explain your problems...recommended memory is 1 GB, 2 GB under Vista, but even under XP, I wouldn't try to run with 1GB, the app was using more than that last night. Plus I think they still have some memory leaks.

I don't seem to have problems in the meeting areas at all, it's the tunnels where I had the frame-rate problems after alt-tabbing. I did have one crash though.

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I guess you'll be getting the game then, hoops, because I can't see this being poorly reviewed. There are some minor technical issues and bugs which might bring the rating down, but even in the current state I'm guessing it'll score in the 7.0-8.0 range. :)

As for the NDA, hmm, I think there was one somewhere in the masses of forms I clicked through before they'd let me into the game ;)

[astrosfan64]

I think Vista might explain your problems...recommended memory is 1 GB, 2 GB under Vista, but even under XP, I wouldn't try to run with 1GB, the app was using more than that last night. Plus I think they still have some memory leaks.

I don't seem to have problems in the meeting areas at all, it's the tunnels where I had the frame-rate problems after alt-tabbing. I did have one crash though.

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I guess you'll be getting the game then, hoops, because I can't see this being poorly reviewed. There are some minor technical issues and bugs which might bring the rating down, but even in the current state I'm guessing it'll score in the 7.0-8.0 range. :)

As for the NDA, hmm, I think there was one somewhere in the masses of forms I clicked through before they'd let me into the game ;)

I think the NDA is lifted, or will be lifted soon. Anyone who preorders gets in the beta now, so it is pretty much a public beta.

[Brillig]

Here's the quick overview. If you have any questions... ask someone who's played more :)


Character Creation

Character creation is very MMORPG-like, you select gender, face, hairstyle, skin color, hair color, etc... It's nowhere near the customizability of CoH, but compares reasonably with games like WoW or LOTRO. The most important choice is character class though. HGL has six character classes, but they are divided into three factions, each with their own distinct equipment list.

Factions

The Templars are the melee faction. Their equipment is very heavy on armor, which reduces the damage taken, but they are mostly restricted to melee weapons. They're not completely without ranged weapons, having access to light pistols, but almost all their skills are based on the use of melee (for reasons unknown, all melee weapons are referred to as Swords.) Their classes are the Guardian and the Blademaster. Both classes have access to auras, not unlike the Diablo paladin class, but each class has their own auras with little overlap. Outside of auras, both classes have numerous melee skills, but the Guardian is unique in having taunt skills as well as shield skills, clearly making them the Tank class of HGL. The Blademaster has access to dual wield melee skills, making them the choice for up front mayhem. If the Templars have a weakness, it's that their equipment is light on Shielding. Not shields, but Shielding - shields are off-hand weapons that add armor and can be used offensively by Guardians. Shielding is a game mechanic - each character has 'Shielding' that acts as a buffer on top of a character's hit points. Shielding takes damage before hit points do, and regenerates very quickly compared to hit points, which don't regenerate at all without special items.

The Hunters are the ranged faction. Their equipment is all techno types and they use only ranged weapons. They have some of the longest ranges in the game, but they have to cope with missile scatter - a game mechanic which reduces the accuracy of ranged weapon fire as the character fires rapidly or moves. In order to counter this, both Hunter classes have access to the Tactical Stance skill, which minimizes scatter, extends maximum range and increases missile velocity. It's as close to a must-have skill as I've found yet in the game. Hunter armor is very light on armor value, but is the highest in Shielding, which means that Hunters will take damage quickly, but since much of it will be Shielding damage, they can recover from light damage rapidly. The two Hunter classes are the Engineer and the Marksman. The Marksman is a ranged combat specialist, and their skills are almost entirely focused on doing massive amounts of ranged damage. The Engineer, on the other hand, is one of the game's two pet classes. The Engineer has a moderate number of ranged weapon skills, but the majority of their skills are about their Drones. Each Engineer will have a number of Drones deployed that fulfill various utility roles. They do have a combat drone, but for the most part, the Engineer uses Drones to supplement his own abilities rather than as a primary combat force.

The Cabalists are the magic faction. Their equipment has a distinct 'quasi-alien' look, and they also use ranged weapons only. Unlike the Hunters, they don't suffer from accuracy problems, which is a good thing because they don't have access to Tactical Stance either. Their weapons have shorter ranges than those of Hunters and do less damage, as they are supplementary to the Cabalist's skills. Cabalist armor is low in Armor Value, similar to Hunters, but they have only about half the Shielding value of Hunter armor, giving Cabalists the weakest armor around, generally speaking. They make up for it on the offensive end, though. The two Cabalist classes are the Evoker and the Summoner. The Evoker is the 'nuker' class, having a large number of damage skills that can do more damage in a short time than any other class - the only drawback is the huge amount of Power (see, Mana) that the skills can suck down. The Summoner is the other pet class of HGL, but unlike the Engineer, the Summoner uses pets as a primary fighting force, and is perfectly capable of moving through the game just on pet power without firing a single shot. A final note - almost all Evoker skills (and a few select Summoner ones) require the use of a Cabalistic Focus as a weapon. While they're not rare, this will still restrict an Evoker's weapon choice somewhat.

Gameplay

As mentioned, the gameplay is quite Diablo-like. The 'towns' are subway stations, each equipped with quest-givers, vendors, and portals to various zones. Each station serves as a kind of hub, attached to multiple adventure zones, some of which will lead you to the next station. The main quest takes you from station to station, but side quests will take you to almost every one of the zones. Like Diablo, there are Town Portal scrolls (not called that, of course), and a fast-travel method between stations.

Like Diablo, there are stashes in the stations, which is a good thing as inventory management will once again be a challenge as you will find more cool toys than you know what to do with. And since there are three distinct equipment types corresponding to the three factions, it's a slam-dunk that you will find many cool toys that your character just can't use. Transferring items will be a challenge, as the shared stash is a function of the subscriber account ($10/month).

The combat is very hack and slash, as befitting the genre - there's little in the way of strategic elements, and at it's core the game consists of getting the weapons, armor and skills to do unto them faster than they can do unto you. Simplistic but fun is the Diablo mantra, and it's the target HGL shoots for. The switch to a first/third-person MMORPG like view gives the game a little more of a 'shooter' flavor than games like Diablo or Titan Quest, and the demonic back-story gives the whole a rather 'Doom 2007' feeling.

The quests are fairly standard, go here, go there, kill X, kill N of Y, etc... Nothing even mildly earth-shattering. And the main quest seems to be fairly well integrated into the storyline of the game. A beta first look can't tell you a whole lot about the entirety of the game though.

Zones seem to respawn if you move a significant distance away - or perhaps it's time based, I haven't checked that out in detail yet - so that's either good news, if you like grinding, or a reason to use town portals :)

Character Development

Development is fairly standard, at every level, you get 5 points to allocate amongst the four attributes, Accuracy, Strength, Stamina and Willpower. Accuracy is the key for Hunters, giving them increased ranged damage. Strength is the Templar attribute, for better melee damage and effectiveness, while Willpower is key for the Cabalists, giving them a larger Power reserve and faster Power regeneration in order to fuel their skill use. Stamina is good for all characters, giving them increased hit points.

Attributes are important for equipping gear too, each item has a cost in attributes to equip (this doesn't actually reduce the attributes, but you can't equip more gear in terms of attribute costs than the attribute level.)

Each character class has their own skill tree, although there are some areas of overlap (fairly limited), most skills are unique to the class. The skills are ranked into tiers, which are unlocked at 5 level increments, and with seven tiers that gives skills up to level 30 (1, 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, 30). Some skills have prerequisite skills while others are stand-alones, and each skill has multiple levels of improvement. Since each class has around 30 skills, and most appear to have at least 5 levels, there's potentially 150+ levels worth of skills. Now it *seems* like a run through the full game will only take you about 40-50 levels, this suggests that there are going to be many, many possible builds within any character class. Also the possibility of the traditional 'three difficulty levels'.

Items

Items were the key to Diablo II, and it's not surprising that a lot of effort was expended on the item system for HGL. While there are various grades of items just like Diablo II, there are a few things that have been added, and one glaring omission.

Each item comes in various grades, color coded in terms of power ( grey < green < blue < yellow < ? ), and each can have multiple bonuses attached to it. One thing that's new is that it's possible to pay to add a random attribute to an item at a crafting station in the subways. There's a limit to how many enhancements can be crammed onto a single item, though, so you can't keep piling stuff on. The enhancement you get is random, too, so there's an element of risk there too.

Each item also has sockets, but unlike Diablo 2, there are multiple different 'flavors' of sockets, and only the correct type of mod can be put into the corresponding socket. The number of sockets seems to correspond loosely to the grade of item, with the better items having more sockets, of course. Socketed mods can be removed from items, by using another crafting station. It just costs coin, and unlike Titan Quest de-modification, doesn't require the destruction of the mods or the base item.

That's not all, though, there's a crafting system as well. You can find blueprints as loot that allow you to craft the best items in the game. In order to craft something though, you need a supply of components - components that can only be gotten from deconstructing items. And the rarer components can only be gotten from deconstructing the rarer items - so in order to craft the uber weapon of pwnage, you may find yourself needing to demolish multiple legendary items.

The components can be used for more than just crafting from blueprints though - they can also be used to upgrade items using yet another crafting station. There's a limit to how much an item can be upgraded, but again, I haven't had enough time to play with it to see how far it'll go.

What's missing? Well, I haven't found any set items yet... maybe that's just me though.

[Brillig]

Although I've apparently killed any interest in the game, I'm still posting... :)

Couple of updates:

Yes, there are set items, but not in the beta.
Yes, there will be three difficulty levels.
There is a Hardcore mode, a la Diablo.
Everything so far may have given the impression that this is an online only game - actually, like Diablo, it can be played offline in single-player mode, it's just that the beta is focused on multiplayer.

Finally, I'm getting a little worried that the game might slip. They did another beta publish this week, and it took them two days to get the servers back up and stable. They improved the lag in stations, but it's a hack - now you see disembodied weapons wandering around until the game gets around to loading the rest of the textures for the characters. Memory leaks have abated somewhat, but are still pretty ugly. Five weeks to release may be pushing it.

[hoopsguy]

Still interested and appreciate the info.

Never realized that it was this close - five weeks? For some reason I had assumed this was a 2008 game.

[astrosfan64]

Although I've apparently killed any interest in the game, I'm still posting... :)

Couple of updates:

Yes, there are set items, but not in the beta.
Yes, there will be three difficulty levels.
There is a Hardcore mode, a la Diablo.
Everything so far may have given the impression that this is an online only game - actually, like Diablo, it can be played offline in single-player mode, it's just that the beta is focused on multiplayer.

Finally, I'm getting a little worried that the game might slip. They did another beta publish this week, and it took them two days to get the servers back up and stable. They improved the lag in stations, but it's a hack - now you see disembodied weapons wandering around until the game gets around to loading the rest of the textures for the characters. Memory leaks have abated somewhat, but are still pretty ugly. Five weeks to release may be pushing it.

It is a great game, they just need to optimize it and iron out the bugs. I really wish they would take the month or two or three extra to work out all the kinks.

[Brillig]

Update: just under two weeks to launch.

Today was an internal testing day for Flagship, so they placated the masses with an info dump including what we can expect for launch and what the subscriber benefits are http://www.hellgatelondon.com/underground/subscribers-and-patch-0

Some of the high points discussed are: apparently the beta builds are several weeks behind the internal builds. (To which I say, WTF?!?). Also there's a reason why DX10 has worse framerates than DX9, but they promise to have that fixed by release.

The initial pass at subscriber features is basically MOTS. More character slots, more storage. A global stash to allow item-transfer between characters was promised earlier but isn't in this list. Also, subscribers have access to Elite mode (which sounds interesting), and Hardcore mode (which doesn't.) Subscribers get 'achievements', sounds like CoH's badges, to chase after, and some minor holiday content.

Oh, and they lifted the NDA. Heh. :D

Finally, for those who want to get a look at the game, there's now a demo available http://www.hellgatelondon.com/underground/hellgate-london-demo-live

Only the Blademaster and Marksman classes are available in the demo, so you're stuck with the most basic melee/range stuff. But it's enough to get you a feel for the game. It only extends through the tutorial zone and the first station, so it's probably about 20-30 minutes of gameplay all told.

[Surtt]

I just received a Beta invite.
They must be doing one last round before release.

[Brillig]

It's live! Anyone other than me playing?

[law90026]

Quick question on this.

Impressions I have is that it's more of a Diablo style / FPS game with the option to have LAN games like Blizzardnet? So it's not really a MMORPG?

[Brillig]

It's built by the old Diablo crew, and so it plays very much like Diablo 3. Except not in the old top-down isometric view, rather a first/third person view like FPS games.

LAN is not an option, there's a secure online server a la Blizzardnet, which is free to play. Additionally, there's the option to pay a monthly fee which gets you some extra goodies (they've promised additional content, classes, skills, items, etc as time goes on - but only for subscribers).

So technically, it is a MMORPG. But more in the Diablo model, not the EQ/WOW model.

[Mota]

I personally think it's a ripoff. This game needs to decide what it wants to be when it grows up.

We pay monthly subscription fees for MMO's because they are persistant worlds, and there are many facets to the game that you can permanently change, economies, etc.

This game is essentially a co-op game with central lobby. People will be expecting more from their games to justify a monthly sub fee, and the ones who aren't paying it will feel like they're only getting half a game because of the extra classes / quests / items that are being held back right now for paying subscribers. Doesn't our purchase of the game at regular price justify getting the full experience?

[Brillig]

There are no "extra classes / quests / items that are being held back right now for paying subscribers."

And I've been playing MMORPGs since the original EQ, and I can count the number of facets of the game that I could permanently change without reaching double digits.

[Neon_Chaos]

Downloaded 1.2 patch for the Single Player mode.

Remarkable improvement in framerate as compared to its initial release.I play this on my other PC, a measly 7100GS, Dual Core T2400 1.83 GHz, and 1 GB of Ram on XP and it runs perfectly well with most settings on medium and detail on high.

I'm treating it like Diablo 3, though, so I'm probably not going to be playing multiplayer anytime soon. :)