A forum post from everybody's favorite poster, Taolurker...
The Hellgate:London beta NDA was lifted yesterday so finally I can discuss the game that I saw, in comparison to the demo tutorial of the first 2-3 smaller subways that everyone gets to try out. I only started the beta a week or so ago, so I barely got much time playing, and probably spent more time crashing, reading forums about current issues or filing bug reports then actually playing anyway, but here goes.
Basically, Hellgate:London is trying to be many different things, but honestly as a jaded MMO veteran, aged FPS player, and Diablo fan, I think that it fails miserably trying to mesh all of these things together.
Firstly, the game is very greyish/brown, which I sort of expected from an "Apocalyptic Zombie" game, but this does not mean that SOME color and dark scary atmosphere can't happily co-exist. The graphics aren't bad, and quite a few things look extremely nice, but it's mostly mud colored darkness with lighting effects and "ooo shiny" effects and explosions made by your character. As if the lack of color wasn't enough, whenever you're in combat and hit by a monster/zombie the entire environment goes black and white, sometimes with runic symbols flashing.
You can scroll the camera in typical fashion from first to third person, and combat is very First Person Shooter like, with MMO type specials fired from your hotkeys (1-9). It's played with typical WASD controls, and features Diablo-esque randomized drops and maps, packaged around a quasi MMO style interface. Damage is based on stats, skills, and whatnot similar to MMOS, with a decently handled FPS targeting system, but obviously these two things aren't very effective together. Basically though it doesn't really do any of the game types it's emulating very good, and combat is mostly a click and hotkey spamfest, with very little strategy other than timing when you have enough action points for that special or when to take that health or adrenaline (mana) item.
Classes aren't very unique feeling, and basically are either melee type, ranged type, or magic type, with quite a few of the same abilities just upgraded for each different class. I could describe all of them, and what each one has that's different, but honestly it all seemed exactly the same un-fun spamminess no matter which I tried. There's a lot of different things to specialize in and equip with, so you aren't a clone of everyone else, but having the additional option of other weapons or higher powered XXX skill doesn't really make it that different. There's a crafting and upgrading system that's quite involving (and buggy) and you can even pay to upgrade weapons with a random effect (that probably won't be helpful to your class).
As a ranged or magic character you're basically backing up all the time, and every ranged attack has a fixed distance it can travel (which is loosely based on "Range" stats of items). Melee types are better able to deal with being surrounded, but honestly only a few specials deal damage to more than one enemy, which means YUP, you need to back up if you want to survive. There are two different classes that have pets, but you can't command them at all (like to attack the same thing as you), they have no actual life meter to speak of, plus will run around aggro-ing everything or getting stuck on parts of the environment, along with dying very easily and attacking nothing a lot (but, hey, you can have more than one of some of them!).
The UI is quite possibly one of the worst possible configurations I've ever seen, with extremely poor choices made on nearly every one of them, especially concerning inventory, skills, chat and quest dialog.
The inventory is not a floating window, it's a full screen affair that shows a vanity pose of your character in the middle, surrounded by things you're wearing, and windows on either side with stats and your "backpack". You can't use your inventory while in combat, or basically do anything with it open (move, heal, etc.) let alone see what's going on in front of you, because of the full screen nature of it. To me this totally bites, making it more like a console "Pause" screen than a useful MMO inventory, and it completely hampers using your inventory except when you're far away from enemies or have time to spare. The space for picking up items is extremely small, and ala Diablo items have different shapes/sizes, making it even more limited in what you can pick up to carry. The skills window is another full screen, with the skill tree pictured, that blocks your view completely.
The Quest dialog window opens whenever you are speaking to a quest giver, and for the most part gives single sentences of "dialog" that you need to skip through. I found it most effective to just hit Accept on any quests and either read the full screen message it gives you about the quest or examine them in the Quest Log, rather than skip through every> single> line> of> text. Most of the time I still didn't know what the quest was even after reading all the "prompted" scripts. About the only interesting thing as far as quest givers is the personalities and voice-overs (which are more atmosphere and comedy that have nothing to do with the quests), but the quest text was totally wasted effort and for the most part seemed unnecessary. They may have been written cleverly, and with story in mind, but why can't I just have the whole quest text presented to me? The quests were mostly of the kill X number of these, and weren't all that diverse or interesting anyway.
The chat dialog window is nearly as bad, because there's no way to configure or move it, resize it, or even filter out which chat you do or don't want to appear (at least not that I saw). The chat window is also horrible because it's borderless, in a nearly unreadable font and color, and not user friendly or customizable at all. You do have the normal MMO chat channels, but they all spam together into this one window, and therefore scroll by at a blindingly fast speed. There's an overlay map screen, which is totally useless showing boxes with lines representing how zones link together, and then a mini-map (which looks like a radar normally would) with the drawback of not being on by default. While the mini map is useful and necessary, it's nearly unreadable if it's showing more of the zone layout when you zoom it all the way out.
All the zones are instanced, including the common areas, but instead of creating new instances when people attempt to zone into them, it just randomly dumps people from the zone and then places them in a new instance all in the same spot. Many times when loading a new zone/instance the loading screen will disappear, and show a blackened environment with just the UI, and then show the loading panel again. I wasn't able to group (let alone test that much), but a RL friend of mine playing and was unable to zone into the same subway hub as me, so we were forced to solo separately while sending tells to one another.
Another thing that's pretty inexcusable is whenever I've crashed, I wind up back at the nearest Hub, many times with lost experience. There have been posts of people who sold items, and similarly lost their connection, and now have items "stuck" in their inventory that are not usable and cannot be removed from their inventory. It seems like the folk at FSS don't know about coding around link deaths, and updates to logs that will back up character data, but this to me seems like it could be a huge issue if not resolved before release.
At the time I write this, the servers have been down for 40+ hours, and there were still lots of issues with class and item balance, a noticeable memory leak, problems with Dx10 hitching and slowdown, and then of course an incredibly huge amount of bugs and glitches. Mobs warping, getting stuck on the environment, dupe bugs and broken/stuck items are definitely not something that you call polished, and when your game crashes from the memory leak after two hours or multiple zone swaps you definitely aren't ready for release. The game itself is going to be free to play online, but honestly I'm pretty sure they're mostly handicapped because they don't have any sort of patching system requiring you to download the entire client over again when there are updates. The login doesn't show you server status, so when/if the servers are down loading up the game ends with a time-out on the "Loading" screen, and the game Not Responding, with it only sometimes telling you that the "connection timed out".
The subscription model of this game allows for a hardcore/elite mode, and ability to create guilds, but honestly I can't see paying a monthly fee for this. It seemed like it could be a fun game, if it's ever fixed properly but I can't see it being anywhere near spending a subscription for, and definitely not worth spending money on a box in the shape it's in right now. I'm pretty sure it would make a decent single player game, but as a hybrid Diablo/MMO/FPS it's a major failure, and one that will probably have some spectacular server meltdowns, cheating/duping issues, and be no longer supported or have online servers in 7-9 months.
Hellgate:London is sadly doomed, yet will still be swallowed up by a few zombie/demon hunters thinking it's the anti-Christ... Yet, it isn't. Avoid with extreme prejudice, or just play the demo over and over, because that's basically all it is.
