Hellgate London Alpha

[Falwell]

any feedback on grouping?  How many can be in an instance, good combos, etc...  How about PvP?

PvP has been basically non existent the entirety of beta so unfortunately there won't be a lot to hear on this end.

Grouping is a blast. Again, the technical issues become even more profound with a full group of 6, but mechanically it's a good time.

[Morfiend]

A few comments.

Why would you play a Guardian? Maybe you are dumb. I don't know. They certainly have the means to take more damage than other classes, so if you like being wailed on this may be appropriate. Also you can beat people with your shield.

Ummm. Dumb? Are you kidding. Guardians are one of the most powerful classes right now. They combine a very very powerful aura (Health Aura) with a lot of hitpoints and armor, with about 95% of the Blademasters damage output. To put it simply Guardians are walking tanks. And not DIKU tanks, but tanks like the army has, that are very fucking hard to kill and do massive damage. It was a known fact in beta that two of the main developers of HG:L played Guardians, and people joked that that was why they where so powerful.

Evoker
I have less info for this than any other class. I guess you fire off big spells and revel in barbed-wire inspired design. The use of focus items in place of guns (necessary for casting said spells) mean you will also likely have scary shit covering your hands throughout the game. Probably the most group-kill oriented class in the game. Probably.

Yeah, that would be wrong. Evokers are sort of lost and looking for a place to live. Their autoattack pretty much sucks, and their spells can deplete your energy very quickly. They are fairly late bloomers, but their AE ability is very lacking. The level 30 skill Arc-Legion is supposed to be very good, but I cant find a playstyle that I like with the low level Evoker skills.

[lesion]

thanks for clearing up Evoker stuff. I rag on Guardians because I play a BM.

[Morfiend]

thanks for clearing up Evoker stuff. I rag on Guardians because I play a BM.

I played a BM also, my roommate played a Guardian. It was sick the difference in what he could do compared to what I could do at levels 15+.

[Falwell]

Also, I have never seen a forum more full of rabid fanboys and myopic followers. Any word of doubt or negitivity was greated with ether "Duh this is beta" or "GTFO the game is fine". during the early stages of beta, myself and quite a few others posted many threads on the games problems, and gave solutions and possible fixes. After a few weeks as more and more people joined, our threads got buried under waves and waves of Vault like posts.

He speaks the truth here. The HGL beta boards were much like the WoW general boards. They might even have had the WoW forums beat in douchebags per capita.

[Modern Angel]

Downloaded demo, played it, holy fuck... this is the great hope everyone was waiting for? It's so... average. Walk three feet, go into tactical stance, shoot thing down, walk a step, go into tac... you get the idea. I got a piece of armor and a lot of money. Graphics are average, no fully destructible environments... man, not seeing it.

[Salamok]

Seems like they blasted out a bunch of beta invites yesterday as well.  Instead of downloading the demo I just went ahead and downloaded the beta last night, looking forward to trying it out this weekend.

[Trippy]

SO is this like GW, where the towns are common areas and the countryside is instatized?

Yes it's just like GW except that you don't have control (or didn't, I still have to redownload the entire fucking beta because they don't have a fucking patching system for the fucking game so they may have changed it) over which common area instance you are in like you do in GW.

[Aez]

?  From the NDA covered impressions, I tough most of you liked the game.

My impression :

Bugs:
There's allot of bug.  Up side is that they fix them fast enough.  They could use a 2 months delay.  Ironically enough, I think the closest "release state"  I can think of is diablo 2.  Go read some Diablo 2 reviews, it will put things in context.

Difficulty:
I heard allot of complains about the game being too easy.  This game IS a diablo sequel, the mechanisms are the EXACT SAME with some small evolution.  Of course the first difficulty is a joke. I just read about the elite option to crank the difficulty up from the start, should be great but will probably be terribly uneven since it's rushed.
 
Loot:
The loot system is everything I ever tough about for a perfect loot system and more.  Of course more armor graphics would be nice.

Skill:
I feel like I'm loving an art piece while everyone else think it's shit. My minor gripe is why do you need to put more than one point on some skill to access the next one up the tree.  I don't understand people who complain on lack of builds or diminishing return on skills. There is easily 4-5 possible effective builds per class righ now and some of them are quite original.  It's way, wayyy more than diablo... where you would pick 3-4 skills max.  I'll keep the different builds for the class description.
The way it works is that most skill get 70% (out of my ass number) of their effectiveness with one point and you can spend up to 9 point to get the remaining 30%.  I know it sounds dump but it actually has some great effect: jack of all trades are actually viable for once.  You can still think about skills and weapons synergy's that maximize the additional skill points spent if you want to specilaze.  For example, a Markmans can heavily invest in a few skills to get an additional 20% critical chance, then double the dmg of it's critical, then add a ricochet effect where a bullet will hit multiple mobs and finally dual wield miniguns (with huge bonus to critical of course) at close range.  That's a lvl 50 builds and you used 5-6 skills out of 25.
You also have to remember that we don't have access to lvl 25 and lvl 30 skills rigth now.  What would you think of Diablo2 with out the lvl 30 skills?  Most builds were based on them.

Class:

Guardian: the strongest at low difficulty, not sure the armors will scale for higher difficulty.  They share a sweet Scorpion "get over here" gun with the blademaster.  For weapon variety, sword and shield is has viable as sword and gun.  You can also dual wield gun effectively with the right skills.  For build options: you can either charge/stun/kill, anchor(planetside heavy armor) and taunt/grapple/kill or simply hack away with boosted dmg and armor.  On top of that, you chose one aura(self buff) that defines your main defence mechanism: torn, regen, pure armor, etc.  So you can pretty much combine 3 weapon options, with 3 skill builds with 3+ auras or just use a jack of all trade build and switch your weapon settings at will.

Blademaster:  similar to guardian.  Add surges (an other self buff).  Switch the sword and shield option for dual wield.  Remove the stunt/kill option and replace it with whirlwind.  More dmg, less defence.  Looks like ninjas instead of knights.  Still no pirates.

Summoner: pure pet class.  You support the pets.  You can still shoot things to past time, if you want...  It's really specialised.  You chose your main summon out of 3 options which are pretty much the 3 builds : one tank protect your smaller nuker summons, one buffer/healer support your smaller summons and a scrapper kill shit.  Low player involvement at lower difficulty, I'm guessing you have to optimize your summon support on higher difficulties.

Evoker:  Nuke from short distances or close distances depending of your taste.  An original build came out where you teleport in a group of mobs, activate some mana shield, torn dmg and then drain life everyone.  Rinse and repeat.  A late bloomer class for sure.

Marksman: the build choices is mainly about specializing on an optimal range (short, medium, long) or being polyvalent. You can call airstrikes and throw grenade (weird physics on the grenade).  You can also cloak (invisible mode).

Engineer: hybrid pet call.  The pets support you.  You can make a non specialized marksman with some bots (non-targettable pets, basically a debuff) or heavily invest in your stronger pet the drone( bugged).  It's also a great jack of all trade class.  On the down side it's the class that suffer the most from the diminishing return skill system since it doesn't have any skill synergy.  I'll still play it because the gameplay is diverse and involved.


General

Levels design is repetitive, the randomisation is limited.  It's quite dark overall(needs color).  Not a game breaker for me but definitely not a selling point.

UI is weak.  The quest tab is especially painfull.

Graphics are great and performance is quite good (a nice change from D2...).  Too much loading time for 2007.

It's a great coop game, call your old D2 pals

Need a compelling loot drop sound.  Sound is weak in general.

I have hopes for episodic content and updates.  The development was fast.

Complete failure on community management.

[Trippy]

thought.

[Phunked]

Also, I have never seen a forum more full of rabid fanboys and myopic followers. Any word of doubt or negitivity was greated with ether "Duh this is beta" or "GTFO the game is fine". during the early stages of beta, myself and quite a few others posted many threads on the games problems, and gave solutions and possible fixes. After a few weeks as more and more people joined, our threads got buried under waves and waves of Vault like posts.

He speaks the truth here. The HGL beta boards were much like the WoW general boards. They might even have had the WoW forums beat in douchebags per capita.

Umm. I'm sorry man, but unless you've invented some new branch of mathematics, you really can't beat the WoW forums' impressive tally of 1 douchebag per capita. The WoW forums had like 3 people who weren't rabid fanboys total over their entire duration. And they all got banned for starting intelligent posts about fixing stuff and then getting flamed until the original point was lost behind 20+ pages of ad hominem.

[Yegolev]

Once again, I'm glad I have that spider-sense thing.  I wish it worked on more than just games.

[Righ]

HGL forum posters are simultaneously anal and urethral douchebags.

[Falwell]

?  From the NDA covered impressions, I tough most of you liked the game.

I do like the game. Quite a bit actually. The problem is that right now, it is in a state technically that is far from release quality.

As it stands, the situation is a game full of people preaching that we haven't seen the end game content, they have a super secret build for launch day, the promise of many long touted features being implemented "soon" after launch, and a monthly subscription fee for public beta.

Hey wait, this all sounds familiar somehow...

[Yegolev]

Yeah, like someone dropped Diablo 2 into a pile of steaming MOG.  I do hope that it lasts another six months so that I can start playing it.

[sam, an eggplant]

Yep, it needs another 6-12 months of polish. It's nowhere near ready for release, and their golden patch explanation seems far fetched.

I think that the problems many of us have with HG:L is that we were expecting an instant classic, a clear 10/10. We were expecting another diablo2. And HG:L just not anywhere near that level of quality or certainly polish. If it were released by anyone other than the team behind D2, we would have played it and moved on. But we bought the hype, and when we actually played the game, were disappointed. HG:L isn't an instant classic. It's a solid 8/10.

[Morfiend]

?  From the NDA covered impressions, I tough most of you liked the game.

Hey look. We managed to catch one of the HG:L forum posters.

HI. THERE. LITTLE. FELLA.

If you speak slowly, some times they understand you.

[Velorath]

So if this game never receives the polish that it needs, does that pretty much make Too Human on the 360 the next big hope for a successor to Diablo?

[tkinnun0]

We were expecting another diablo2. And HG:L just not anywhere near that level of quality or certainly polish.

Oh boy, here we go again. The only thing missing is Schild dredging up a new game with Diablo-style loot to deliver us to MMOG nirvana.

Here's your problem: by today's standards, Diablo 2 is not polished. It has a repetitive gameplay and a clunky interface. The world is unimaginative and monotonous. The plot is totally forgettable. Their villain screams wasted potential! By today's standards, Diablo 2 is a shitty, shitty game, so you can take any Diablo 2 clone, polish it as much as you like and you'll still have a clone of a shitty, shitty game.

[schild]

Here's your problem: by today's standards, Diablo 2 is not polished. It has a repetitive gameplay and a clunky interface. The world is unimaginative and monotonous. The plot is totally forgettable. Their villain screams wasted potential! By today's standards, Diablo 2 is a shitty, shitty game, so you can take any Diablo 2 clone, polish it as much as you like and you'll still have a clone of a shitty, shitty game.

 

[Velorath]

We were expecting another diablo2. And HG:L just not anywhere near that level of quality or certainly polish.

Oh boy, here we go again. The only thing missing is Schild dredging up a new game with Diablo-style loot to deliver us to MMOG nirvana.

Here's your problem: by today's standards, Diablo 2 is not polished. It has a repetitive gameplay and a clunky interface. The world is unimaginative and monotonous. The plot is totally forgettable. Their villain screams wasted potential! By today's standards, Diablo 2 is a shitty, shitty game, so you can take any Diablo 2 clone, polish it as much as you like and you'll still have a clone of a shitty, shitty game.

I'm tellin ya, it looks like Too Human is blending some of the better aspects of Diablo and PSO.  I'm skeptical still, but the recent coverage of it on some of the news sites has been pretty positive.

[cmlancas]

tough, impression, allot, bug,  Up side, months, allot, complains, think, return, is, righ, wayyy, skill, point, dump, effect, synergy's, specilaze, Markmans, dmg, it's, builds, rigth, chose, an other, past, specialised, chose, protect, support, kill, of, is, grenade, call, suffer, painfull

Sweet Jesus. I'd say Engrish wasn't your first language, but I'm not so sure. You at least tried to vary your sentence structure a little bit. Is anyone not sure that this isn't Grunk?

[Moaner]

We were expecting another diablo2. And HG:L just not anywhere near that level of quality or certainly polish.

Oh boy, here we go again. The only thing missing is Schild dredging up a new game with Diablo-style loot to deliver us to MMOG nirvana.

Here's your problem: by today's standards, Diablo 2 is not polished. It has a repetitive gameplay and a clunky interface. The world is unimaginative and monotonous. The plot is totally forgettable. Their villain screams wasted potential! By today's standards, Diablo 2 is a shitty, shitty game, so you can take any Diablo 2 clone, polish it as much as you like and you'll still have a clone of a shitty, shitty game.

Do what now?

Never mind that shit.  I've been in the beta for almost 2 months.  The game has come a long way since I started testing.  It still needs some work and I'm unsure as to how things will turn out come release day.  I'm hoping for the best and expecting the worst.  What I do know is that in 6 months, if the servers are still up, it has a very good chance of delivering the digital crack I have yearned for.

[Ironwood]

Indeed.

I hate it when people think good games somehow 'date'.  They don't.

[Signe]

I like the game a lot.  I wish it was better made.  I'll play but I don't think I'll subscribe unless I'm confident there will be not only interesting new content but improvements to the game overall.  I can't spend money willy nilly like I used to... I have two kittens to support now.  Life has become serious!

[Merusk]

This thing runs like shit on my machine.  I can't decide if it's my vid card (which I know needs an upgrade. zomg it's a year old!) or the game.  I've turned down all settings, models, shadows, textures, etc so it looks like shit, and still runs at a 'mediocre' level.  Bleh.

Indeed.

I hate it when people think good games somehow 'date'.  They don't.

He wasn't saying it's dated, he said D2 is a shitty (well, "shitty, shitty" to be exact) game.  That's the bulk of his problem.  If you didn't like D2 at all, there's no reason to play HG:L.  I'm not a huge fan of D2, but I didn't think it was shit.  So far, my apathy towards HG:L feels about the same as my apathy towards D2 8 years ago.  I suppose that's a good thing for the D2 folks.

The rest of his complaints are pretty much par for any modern game.

[Kitsune]

Oh boy, the NDA's gone?  Finally!

This game is fucking boring.  Seriously, grinding up my magic skills in FFXI by chain-casting heals on myself was scintillating compared to Hellgate's gameplay.  Walk down a run-down street, oh look demons, now I click on them to shoot them with my infinite-ammo gun.  Click click click!  Okay they're dead.  Wait, more.  Click click click!  Okay, they're dead too.  And look, boss fight!  Click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click.  Okay, it's dead.

Diablo II's skill trees were head and shoulders better than the skills in Hellgate, none of which have seemed particularly interesting to me.  I'm pretty tempted to say that Tabula Rasa was at least as good as Hellgate.

[Falconeer]

I'm pretty tempted to say that Tabula Rasa was at least as good as Hellgate.

THAT WAS A JOKE. HAHA. FAT CHANCE.

[Yegolev]

I'm pretty tempted to say that Tabula Rasa was at least as good as Hellgate.

THAT WAS A JOKE. HAHA. FAT CHANCE.

Zing!  Bonus points for pulling Portal into a Hellgate thread.

The point of D2 or HGL is not the clicking or the repetition, it's the loot.  The problem, if there is one, is that the loot system is so awesome that no one needed to bother to make the rest of the game incredibly entertaining.  That said, plenty of people get into the D2 combat.  I guess this is a good place to mention that I installed the latest version of Mythos (Hellgate Junior or Fate 2, depending on how you look at it) and JEEZ-LOUISE they have improved the hot shit out of that game.  Mostly in looks and monsters, but it's smoother and easier to see and the skills may mostly work.  The combat is still D2 combat, this being my point, but it's plenty entertaining for those that enjoy it.  Mythos is giving me hope that HGL will be shit-hot in a few months.  For those who enjoy simple clicky D2 combat.  And those who are still alive.

The shop owner in the demo, his voice is certainly Roper.   

[trias_e]

Yay!  I was worried I'd have to get this game.  I have too much on my plate as it is. I've never been so excited for a game to not be worth playing at release.

I'm sure I will be checking it out in 6 months once they've cleared out some of the suck though.

[bhodikhan]

Well after playing an Engineer to level 10 in the Beta last night I have to say that the "Out of Memory" crashes and other oddities still make HG:L a much better game than Tabula Rasa and that's saying something!

Personally, Even with the bugs I have an addictive personality and this style of gameplay fills that missing spot in my gaming life. It's like Dungeon Runners crashed into Tabula Rasa and Hellgate:London is the result of that accident.

[Margalis]

Playing a game just for the loot sounds to me like a small variation of Progress Quest.

[Tige]

Maybe I'm going soft, I just don't have a bunch of angst towards hgl.  I've been having fun for the past couple of months.  I just can't get too worked up over stuff like the ghetto buddy list procedure, chat window and a few other things I would rather have been done differently.   But that is what it boils down to, I would rather have a few things done differently, mostly it's just preferences over the way they've implemented some stuff. 

I'm all for a auction house and the ability to link loot to chat though.

[Oban]

Ok, played all of seven minutes.  No need to repeat what is already above.

So, where does grouping come in, or is the whole thing just solo play with a leader board?

[Murgos]

I played a Marksman up to 15, awesome gameplay.  Really loved it, running and gunning and tossing grenades around corners blasting the crap out of everything.  Getting the Sniper skill and a rigged out SNPR with the escape skill was just like, "I win".

People who play four levels of a demo limited to the newbie area and think they got the inside poop are a bit deranged.

Undoubtedly the game would benefit from 3-5 more months of polish.  Give the UI a nice shine, get those mem-leaks taken care of, figure out the other annoying bugs and take another pass at the skill trees and voila.  Classic.

The difference between HG:L and Tabula Rasa is that HG:L actually has a solid core game that just happens to be currently hampered by bugs and minor issues.