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An archived Hellgate: London feature. See the Hellgate Archives for more.

Feature: Flux's E3 2006 Mega Report
Date: May 18, 2006
Source: The Unofficial HGL Site

Contents 1 E3 2006 Report 1.1 Game Design and Chaos 1.2 E3 Build Nerfs 1.3 Playability Issues 1.4 Game Build Stability 1.5 Character Creation 1.6 POV 1.7 Controls and Interface 1.8 The Paperdoll 1.9 Character Stats 1.10 Inventory 1.11 Life/Power Regeneration and Leech 1.12 Level Layout and Navigation 1.13 The Minimap 1.14 Movement and Invisible Walls 1.15 Multiplayer 1.16 Monsters and Scalability 1.17 Monster Respawning 1.18 Quests 1.19 Items 1.20 Gambling and Magic Find 1.21 Game Length

E3 2006 Report

Condensed from the original four pages for easier access. All images (broken links) removed.

Game Design and Chaos

The Hellgate: London build at E3 was the latest and newest version of the game, but as is always the case with builds of games being developed, there were bugs, memory leaks, and last second additions galore. When I first arrived at the Namco booth I spent an hour or two chatting with/interviewing Peter Hu, Lee Dotson, Tyler Thompson, Matt Householder, and various other Flagship guys. While we talked we watched other Flagshipers playing HGL, and both the guys I was talking to and the guys playing made constant comments to the effect of, "Oh wow, that's in the game now?" and, "Huh, is that what we're calling that weapon now?" and so on.

Those of us outside of the computer game-making industry tend to think of the games as huge, monolithic products assembled on some precise template, like a car or a washing machine or a toaster oven. In reality, games are welded together from hundreds of pieces provided by dozens of programmers, artists, designers, and more, most of them working flat out 20 hour days the week before a deadline (such as E3) to get just one more cool feature in.

No one knows everything in the game, no one knows every bug or problem, and no one knows exactly what's been changed until they actually see it. Things are a bit more organized and systematic for a final game release (at least in theory) but builds for game shows or other media events are always very last second, and there are always bugs and problems, along with a lot of new stuff no one but the programmer who made them knows about.

This goes for major features and quests and such, but especially for minor things like weapon damage, monster damage, item names, skill values, and so forth. Most of those type of things are changing constantly during development and balancing anyway, which is why you should never become too attached to the names or values of anything pre-beta. Lots of weapons and monsters had different names than they did in screenshots and gameplay movies released just a few weeks or months ago, and they'll probably have different names by the next time we see them.

E3 Build Nerfs

The E3 build was worked on specially by the Hellgate Team, and differed substantially from the latest builds they'd been testing internally. You can easily see why; internal builds are not polished for graphics or ease of use since the guys are busy testing new skills, monsters, AI behaviors, and so forth. Polish and graphics and explanatory descriptions are added once features are working properly and finalized, since the guys playing/designing the game every day don't need them.

A build for a major gaming show where noobs are going to be playing it needs polish and redundancy and ease of use though, and you certainly don't want that new monster causing assertion failures, or the graphic for that one gun showing as a series of pink blocks. Details and visual things matter at E3, since most of the gaming press will see 5 or 10 minutes of your game, at most. They won't have time to get into the content and quests and story; they want to walk up, grab a mouse, and start blasting. And that's what an E3 build is optimized for, while still containing enough content and plot and monster/item variety to give gamers an idea of what the full game will do.

So what specifically was done to the E3 build to make it more accessible for new players? Here's what a senior Flagship employee told us:

"As far as I recall, monsters doing 1/2 damage was the only deliberate global tweak. Some monsters were toned down individually, too. However, we also chose not to "fix" some bugs, like the HARP pistol always locking every monster down. I believe we turned off player knockback and stun, too.

Equipment and loot was completely E3 specific. The guns, armor, health drops, etc. were tweaked for the show in a million ways.

One thing we *should* have done, was pull that breath meter! That killed so many people who had no idea what was going on."

You heard him right. All monster damage was cut by 50% in the E3 build, and a few beneficial bugs were left in, all to make the game easier for new players to get right into. The item spawns were also tweaked to make better quality items drop early on, so players could see a wider variety of toys in their limited play time. Furthermore Cabalists and Templars started out with better equipment than they usually would.

These sorts of changes are necessary for a game show build, but just keep them in mind when you read comments (in this report and elsewhere) about the game's difficult and playability. Monsters in the E3 build could hardly hurt your character, and besides skewing the difficulty, this made it very hard to estimate the game's pace. My characters killed faster than usual since I didn't have to worry about retreating to stay alive, and after an hour or two I was familiar enough with the game controls to rip straight through almost every area, taking hardly any damage from the monsters there.

Besides the lessened difficulty, the Hellgate: London E3 build had been streamlined to allow players to get into the demon-slaying more quickly. The opening tutorial/introduction was not included, there were pre-made single player characters to select and adventure with if you wished, and the introductory NPC dialogues were largely removed.

Flagship wanted people to walk up, lay fingers on keys, and immediately start blowing away demons. They didn't want players put off by long intros or cinematics or tutorials or plot info. Yes, hardcore fans like you and I would have loved to see all that stuff, but Flagship's got to target the average person at E3. Most people there, journalists or others, have just a few minutes of time or interest to spend on a given title, and if they don't get to the fun stuff immediately, they're going to walk away. You could talk to NPCs, peruse merchant selections, examine your equipment and skills, and so forth; they just didn't want to make you do that, since it would have bogged down the casual fan.

As for questions about the game and technical problems, there are lots of Flagshippers roaming the area at all times, ready to step in and answer questions, or reboot machines after crashes (which were pretty frequent, unfortunately).

Keep this in mind when I talk about gameplay, since yes, everything was pretty easy, but it was supposed to be, and it's not going to be that easy in the real game. The game we played at E3 was HGL, but it's got enough show-centric changes that you need to factor those in when you read previews and reports.

Playability Issues

As you can see in various photos of the Namco booth, the play stations were keyboards and mice on shelves, set about waist height from the ground, with huge monitors at eye level. The monitors were nice, and the mice were optical with very high precision (which was good, since they were on very small squares of wood and could only be moved an inch or two without falling off the side). The problem was the keyboards, which were a few inches too low for most normal-sized adult males to comfortably play. You couldn't quite rest your palm without ducking down, and I saw several tall guys just get down on their knees to play.

It's a nitpick, but try playing a keyboard-intensive action game while standing, with just your fingertips on the keys. It's not too bad if you're only using the few keys you can reach, and 90% of the time in HGL we were just using the WASD keys to move up/down/left/right. The tricky part was using hotkeys, since you tended to miss the key you were aiming for, or else miss the WASD when you moved your hand back. It's easy sitting down, since you've got your palm resting for stability, but when standing and using just your fingertips, hotkeys become a lot clumsier.

I don't want to sound like I'm complaining, since who would give me any sympathy? "Oh poor Flux, couldn't hotkey quickly while playing HGL. Didums get a sore wrist too?" Yes, actually, I did. My right one was aching from the bad angle at the mouse. Oh wait, I mean no, that doesn't matter. I stretched my arms and hands on every loading screen, but my point is that few non-Flagship employees were using many hotkeys, switching weapons, using health injectors, etc, and that was due to a lack of familiarity with the key locations, but also due to physical difficulty in hitting them quickly.

Even after several hours playing, I was still having problems hitting F1-3 and then getting back to the WASD quickly, and trying to hit F (to pick up items) or tab (to open the map) or 12345 (to cast various skills or hit the health injector or power potions I had set on 1 and 2).

Flagshippers told me the keyboard layout would be fully-customizable, and I certainly hope so, since I wasn't a big fan of the default set up. WASD controlled your walking, the mouse controlled the direction your character looked, and the mouse buttons shot your weapons/swung your sword/cast your selected spells. F1, F2, and F3 cycled through the three weapon switch slots, and you could set anything you wanted to the 1234567890-= row of keys. I chose 1 for health injectors, 2 for power potions, and = for personal relocation devices (town portals). That left 34567890- for other things, but realistically just 3456, since those were all I could easily reach with my left hand. I'll be further limited on my own computer, since I use a natural keyboard (try one and you'll never go back; they add 10-20wpm to your typing) and the numbers higher than 6 are way out of reach.

There were other hotkeys too, of course. L opened your quest log, M opened the map, I opened your inventory, K opened your skills, and so forth. Most of the keys easily within your reach were wasted though, and when I get my own copy of HGL I'll do what I did with Diablo II, and immediately set every key my left hand can reach to do something useful in the game. The difficult controls at E3 kept most players from fully-utilizing their skills, since you could put points into them, but if you couldn't switch to them and away from them quickly in battle, how often were you really going to use them?

Most skill use I saw was with full time skills on the mouse buttons; players would drag the universal skill for "fire both weapons at once" to the left click (if they knew to use it), and put Spectral Lash or Spectral Bolt (for instance) on their right click, and use the left click constantly, and the skill occasionally. If they remembered they had it. Most of the people I watched playing were on the game for 5 or 10 minutes, and if an FSS employee didn't point it out, they never did anything with any of their skills at all, essentially turning HGL's RPG gameplay into something akin to an FPS without precise targeting or weapon switching. I'm sure this not knowing what they were doing is responsible for a lot of the less-than-positive reviews of the game, at this early stage.

Another factor is the "rush through it" mentality that comes over gamers at demos or press events. When you know you've only got a few minutes to play, you tend to play in a very hurried, slapdash fashion. You don't evaluate and optimize your equipment, you don't examine the skills at your disposal, you don't figure out the hotkeys, etc. (I've played a lot of games at E3 over the years, and noticed this mentality coming over me and other players many times.) As a result, you don't enjoy the game as much, and you don't take advantage of all it has to offer. Most of the time I spent playing HGL at E3, even when I was enjoying myself on day 2, I could only think how much more fun it would be and how much better I'd play it once I had a copy on my own machine.

Game Build Stability

Another playability issue was the state of the game build, and unfortunately it wasn't good. It looked great, and there weren't many slow down issues (it would get stuttery at times, but never from too much on the screen), but the level loading times were long, and there were a lot of crashes. I played half a dozen games of more than 15 minutes, and in every single case my game ended with a machine crash or lock up. I took several characters from level 1 up to level 7 or 8, but never got any further, never got to try the higher level skills, and never got to the furthest levels in the E3 build since the game never lasted that long.

I saw a few other people with characters of level 8 or 9, and some of the Flagship guys reached levels further than I did, so my crashing was more bad luck than an indictment of the buggy E3 build... but it was definitely not a real stable build. I was told there were memory leak issues.

Another contributing factor was the physical layout of their booth. The rented computers were stacked up in narrow columns inside the faux-subway tunnel, and a couple of Flagship guys told me they were having overheating issues, without sufficient space in there for ventilation.

All in all, the stability of the E3 build left a lot to be desired, with memory leaks causing longer games to die. It seemed pretty stable for shorter games and press demos, and that's really what events like E3 are for. The lack of overall stability doesn't mean much, especially not in the long run, when the final game will be thoroughly tested and not prone to such technical issues.

Character Creation

Hellgate: London will offer a robust character modeling system, allowing you to design your own character and tweak their height, width, eye and hair color, facial hair, hair style, and facial appearance. Some of this was working in the E3 build, but the system was obviously still under construction.

Here you see a pair of screenshots from the creation interface; click it to see the full image with more shots, and check this one out for a comparison of four differently-sized female Cabalists. The pasty, Borg-looking guy on the left is short, skinny, and the lightest skin tone available. The darkest was almost pure black, and there were at least 25 colors in between.

Height and width varied a lot too, though width was sort of odd. It was width, not weight, and they meant that literally. Dragging the slider to the right did not make your character fat; it just made them wider. They remained muscular and well-formed, they just enlarged all over.

Eye color and facial features were in, but pretty much pointless, since you couldn't see that level of detail in on your character in the game, and they almost always had helms or monocles or masks on anyway. The only time you could make it out (and we were standing about a foot from huge monitors) was in a multiplayer game, when you saw the other player's heads next to their health bars on your screen. Facial hair and hair styles were newly added, and there were only a few options to play with.

Facial appearance was very good, with a wide variety of appearances and ethnicities represented. Not that you'll ever see your face below your helm...

While making a character you could drag them to rotate the view, and check out their back and side views as well. This is an option during the game, and it goes for items as well as characters. Hardly anyone seemed to know it was there though, and players would often gasp in surprise when a Flagship guy demonstrated that the weapon graphics weren't simply two-dimensional pictures, as they were in Diablo II.

While fooling around with the character creation, I was told that it had recently been limited in height and width, since most of the Flagship guys had been making outrageously short and wide characters. Just because they could. So while you could make a tall or short character, you couldn't make a dwarf or a giant. I'm no programmer, but I say that's like the first thing mod makers will disable, when they get their hands on HGL. I might play a mod just to go charging through the streets of London with a knee-high, couch-wide killing machine.

POV

I spent most of my time playing from the 3rd person perspective. So did other people, from what I saw. I'm used to that style of view from Diablo II, and even though the Hellgate: London 3rd person view is usually from right behind your character, rather than off to the 3/4 view side, it's not so different. In 3rd person it's easier to see where you're going and to see what's around you, and you have to play in 3rd person view when you've got a melee weapon equipped.

I switched to 1st at times when I had 2 guns equipped, but I mostly went in 3rd. You can't (currently) aim up (no mechanism in the game for it yet) in 3rd person though, so if you found an Orible or dark seraph you had to go to 1st to shoot at them. In theory 1st gives you a more immersive feeling, but I missed seeing monsters to my sides and behind me in that view, and combat aside, I just find 1st person kind of ugly. I miss being able to see the scenery and the details on the ground. But then again, I'm not much of an FPS fan, and I've never really liked the "looking through a box" limited view you get in 1st person games.

Moving your view around was easy; that's what the mouse did, and at first that was a bit tricky. I'd lower the mouse some, and suddenly find myself looking at the back of my Templar's knees. So then I'd raise it and find myself looking almost straight down. It's easy to get used to though, and after a while playing I was having no problem turning corners left or right, without screwing up my angle of view at the same time.

Controls and Interface

They were very good, on the whole. One major change is that the much-talked about PDA appears to be gone. In earlier Hellgate: London previews it was seen in the to right of the screen, and was said to be a multi-purpose device; capable of displaying maps, accepting com transmissions, keeping track of your quests, and more. All of those features are still in the game; they're just displayed in different places, which makes it seem like the PDA is done for.

In other controls news, let me first mention the context sensitive skills, since they can be tricky to understand. Here's a quote from a recent preview:

One of the [Templar] skills for instance was an overhead chop, a high powered attack that had an energy cost associated. What was new however was the fact that he also had a circle attack power, kind of a mini one-revolution whirlwind attack. What made this new wasn't the attack it was the fact that the power activation didn't need to be micro managed. The same key that activated the overhead chop would activate the circle attack as long as there were at least three baddies nearby, less than three and it would revert back to the overhead chop.
--Shack News pre-e3 preview, May 2, 2006

And an E3 quote from a Flagship dude about the same issue:

We intend to let you configure the keys as you want, so yes, other keys could also do situational skills. The situational skills idea was a fairly recent development. We're not sure how many there'll be, or to what degree you might want to micromanage, turn on and off, set the firing order, etc. So we'll see how it develops. People do usually want full control in the long run, though.

Got that? In HGL, you can use the same key (shift, for now) to activate more than one skill, depending on your situation. It will trigger Sprint if you're out in the open, and make you run fast. If you're in melee combat though, and have the other skills selected, it will trigger them, when appropriate. This comes in handy in HGL since human beings very seldom possess more than two dextrous limbs, and with HGL, your left hand is primarily used on the WASD keys, to move your character around.

A third hand just to manipulate hotkeys would be wonderful, but since that's not in the cards, he Hellgate Team is trying to make it easier to use multiple skills while letting you still retain good control of your character with the WASD keys. In Diablo II we had a left hand to do nothing but manage hotkeys, but with at least three of those fingers busy all the time in HGL, and lots of skills and weapon switches to manage, other solutions were needed. Hence the shift key handling multiple commands.

The implementation probably needs some work, since it wasn't always clear which skills were enabled on shift, especially not in the heat of the moment to new players. But once players get used to it, and especially if we're able to map whatever we want to those keys, it should be a really useful feature.

In other ways, the controls were pretty well-designed. One that that takes some getting used to is the lack of a cursor or pointer on the screen. You get a targeting dot when you've got a target, (red when you're out of range, green when you're in range) and you get a pointer when you're in the inventory or skills menu or other such things, but during regular gameplay you just have a wide open screen. There's no pointer when there's nothing to point at, and pointer or not, if you move your mouse left or right your character turns in that direction. Unless you've got a game menu open, there's no way to click on the skills you've got displayed on the lower left and right. You can't even point at items on the ground to pick up (unless you hold down Alt).

This is all by design, and is par for the course in many FPS games, but it's strange if you're coming from an RPG or Diablo II background. The way you select skills and change what your left and right trigger do is by hotkeys, or by opening the skill menu, clicking on a skill you want, and physically dragging and dropping it on your right or left click display, or into the access bar. (1-10, and -, = too, in the E3 build)

Handling items is a bit different too, since it's largely automated. When you hover on an item you like, you get a display like this. Note that it lists the item you're examining, and the equivalent items in your current equipment. The same thing happens with armor, if you were wondering.

This character is hovering on the molten edge sword listed in the right window. He currently has a corrupt blade and peacemaker pistol equipped, and if he picks up the molten edge and drops it onto his left or right item slot, it will switch inventory spaces with the weapon he has in that slot. Note what's different from D2 there; you don't switch items and find the switched one on your cursor; it goes straight into your inventory, wherever the item you switched it with was.

I didn't particularly like this, since I'd then have to search out whatever I just switched out, if I wanted to sell it. I'd have preferred to have it remain on my cursor, to be placed where I wanted to place it. But this new style did save a click, in most cases, and I liked the compare equipment pop up on the hover; it was very useful at E3, when we were changing out equipment constantly. It would probably be less useful long term, when you know what your equipment is and don't need to see a hovering reminder every single time you pick up something to sell.

Buying and selling worked much the same as in Diablo II. You could drag and drop items to sell, or use shift + right click to do it with one touch. Buying things had a twist, since you could click an item to buy and see it magnified in the center of the window (to examine it closely) without actually buying it. You had to click another button to buy it, and the first time I wanted to buy something I thought I had done so, until I couldn't find it in my inventory and noticed that my gold hadn't decreased at all.

The Paperdoll

As expected, there were changes to the character window, inventory, and the paperdoll. Long gone are the jewelry, runes/implants, and tattoo boxes; replaced by fewer boxes and a better layout.

Much nicer layout, and the outlines of what type of item goes in a given slot helped too. Note the left side spots for what looks like a shirt, pants, and then a backpack on the bottom. Heavy armor for the upper body and legs went on the right, and there were no items to put into those left side slots in the E3 build. I asked, and learned that they were intended for lighter wear, like shirts, cloaks, and pants that would be worn beneath the outer armor. How much they'll add to your stats or if they'll even make it into the game remains to be seen. As for the back slot (represented by the backpack) there wasn't anything for that yet, and when I asked if it might hold jet packs or other flying devices, I was met with innocent looks. There will likely be capes and such at the least.

The top right glasses spot had one item in the E3 build; a monocle with a spot light that you were given as part of one quest. It had a random +5-10% damage mod on it, so of course no one took it off once they got it. There will obviously be more options for that spot in the final game.

Finally, note the weapon switch spots below the paperdoll. These were neat, with the space changing from a large square to a pair of diagonally-overlapping squares if you went with two weapons. The icons to the sides show you which commands you have mapped to those buttons when you switch weapons. In this example no skills are selected, but if you had fire both weapons on the left, and a skill on the right, you'd see the appropriate icons.

Character Stats

The main difference in character design was the removal of the 5 types of defenses. There's now just one main armor value, added to by various equipment and skills. It largely determines if monster attacks hit you or not. There are still five types of defenses though, and as you can see from the lower shot, taken at this year's E3, they're not percentages. They are values, and can go well over 100. We don't yet know anything about how high these numbers will go, if there are hard caps, or how they work to protect you from being knocked back, ignited, poisoned, and so on.

We did see what happens when you're poisoned, though. It's cool; you turn green, take damage, and your foot speed is greatly reduced. Fortunately, the toxin wore off quickly the few times my character was poisoned, but it's a nasty attack. I can imagine a pack of poisonous monsters being really nasty, since you couldn't outrun them and your fight back ability would be curtailed by your very slow movement.

If there are items that make you immune to poison, phase, stun, etc, there's been no word of them yet.

Inventory

The inventory no longer has large and small item squares. All squares are now the same size, and the 4x8 block of them (that's 32 total, if math's not your strong suit) all hold one item each, whether a large weapon, a piece of armor, or a tiny weapon mod. Potion-type things stack; you can have up to eight health injectors (superior health injectors look a bit different and stack separately) or power potions in a stack, and they pile up automatically when you pick them up, of course, and stacks will even combine if two of them drop below eight total. Weapons, armor, and mods do not stack though, since they've got different stats.

Items have different colors for backgrounds to let you know what they are. Red means you can't use it, usually because it's class-specific for the other class. (There were lots of these items in the E3 build.) Items also show green and blue, one for magical gear and the other for superior quality. Presumably uniques and sets will have some special color, and glow orange or yellow or who knows what. I never saw anyone find anything like that at E3, so I can't say for sure.

In other inventory news, there will be some sort of town stash for extra storage, but it's not in the game yet. There will probably also be quest rewards that add more inventory space, but the details of those aren't worked out yet either.

I already mentioned items automatically switching places, but to recap, if you picked up something and dropped it onto your paperdoll, it would switch with whatever you had in that item type's slot, and the item you switched out would go straight into your inventory, rather than remaining on your cursor. Also, if you want to drop an item, you have to pick it up and click the drop item button below the window. It took me a good half minute to figure this out when one of my characters was completely full and wanted to chuck a few extra stacks of health injectors, but couldn't figure out how. If you pick something up and close the inventory window, it gets automatically stuck back into your inventory, since you do not pick things up with a cursor during normal game play.

Gold is represented by the numerical readout above the inventory window. You never actually have a stack of it anywhere, it has no weight, and you don't even need to click a button to pick it up; any gold on the ground is automatically snatched if you get within a step or two of it. Items are different, you've got to actually click the F key when you're within range to pick them up. You get a prompt to do it, and the range is pretty forgiving, so it's not hard to grab stuff without even slowing down.

Life/Power Regeneration and Leech

The Hellgate Team is determined to make Hellgate: London fun, but challenging. They do not want potions (or health injectors) to flow like water, since that makes the game too easy. On the other hand, they don't want it so hard that players have to stand around all the time, or return to town to get their life or power refilled. These conflicting desires are difficult to balance, which is part of the reason games take a long time to make and require a lot of play testing.

Prior to E3 we read about life and power balls that would pop up above monster corpses and act to heal players who walked through them. A neat idea, we thought, but apparently the Hellgate Team soured on it quickly, since it had already been removed. At E3 there were no such balls of health and mana; just health injectors and power potions. Each filled a fair amount and each worked over time, to prevent players from loading up and getting immortality by chugging them madly while tanking some behemoth of a monster. If there were rejuvenation type potions, ones that refill both health and power or that fill them instantly, I never saw any. I did find superior health injectors, but not superior power potions. Not that I needed them, since even the regular power potions were good enough to completely fill up my Cabalist with plenty left over. Higher level characters with more power will obviously have a somewhat different reaction.

In the E3 build your power regenerated by itself, but your health did not. There will be items to boost regeneration, and in fact, we were told that there was no power regeneration until just before E3. That would have been a very large difference in the game, and I'm very glad they changed that feature. Without my power refilling on its own I would have had a lot less fun playing, so while power potions weren't that uncommon, and they were for sale in town, I think a regeneration rate, for blue at least, is mandatory.

Regeneration boosting items may make it into HGL too, but none were in as of the E3 build. Getting your life back slowly seems a pretty safe bet. We've got no idea if there will be power regeneration boosters, working like the Sorceress' Warmth skill did in Diablo II, but it's a possibility.

I also asked about leech modifiers as well, and was told yes, they would be in the game, but would be very rare, probably only found on a few uniques or other high level items. Leech modifiers, if you're not familiar with them from Diablo II, steal a percentage of the damage you deal and turn it into life or power (mana) for your character. The general consensus is that leech was far too available in Diablo II, and that it made much of the game too easy.

While leech will be very uncommon on equipment, there will be leech skills in the game. We know of two now, both Cabalist skills. It's possible there may be Templar leech skills of some kind, or some on the other unannounced characters, but we don't know of any yet.

It's hard to say how needed leech will be, since so much has yet to be balanced. I certainly didn't need it at E3, and was throwing away health injectors by level 5 or 6. But as I've said elsewhere in this report, the E3 build was nerfed, so of course I had more healing than I needed.

Level Layout and Navigation

Besides the minimap, opened by the Tab key, there was a full level map that basically approximated a subway map. Like this one in Bill Roper's hot little hands. Simplified a lot, but the concept remains.

The map remained the same each game, with the same areas in the same places. They changed, of course, both in random layout and in area type. The Covent Garden District might be subway tunnels one game, and city streets the next, for instance. The same quests seemed to be associated with the same levels every time though. If you had to go to Tottenham Court Road to kill a demon and get Little Joey's leg back, the monster you had to kill was always the same, even if its surroundings changed greatly.

In another change from past games like Diablo II, there are multiple safe areas in each act. They're the yellow hexagons on this map, with the middle one, Covent Garden Station, the place you start the game. To reach the other towns you have to travel through the orange areas, find a portal at the far end, move through the next area, and so on. You can use a personal relocation device (town portal) to return to the last Station you were in at any time, but you've got to journey to the next station to claim it. Once you're there, you can use the kiosk with a listing of all the stations in the act to travel between them.

So once you're in Holborn station, you can click a kiosk, select Covent Garden Station from a list, and be there instantly. Just like a waypoint in Diablo II.

Eager for more info about the maps and level layouts, I asked a Flagship guy about it after E3:

Flux: Is the map layout the same every game, with Tottenham right off of CVG, etc? I know the individual areas are randomized; sometimes streets, sometimes tunnels, etc, but how about the larger organizational scheme of the acts? Answer: At this point the "larger organizational scheme" is not random, but its easy to randomize it and we probably will to some degree. One idea we're kicking around is randomizing extensions for late-game content.

The Minimap

It needed work. The mini map appeared right in the center of the screen, or up in the right corner, if you hit Tab for a second time. The big map in the middle wasn't bad to navigate by, but it was very white and obscuring and playing with it active was not a lot of fun. The top right corner one wasn't such a vision blocker, but it needed to be at a different scale, since you could not see enough of the level around you on it. I didn't really like either map that much, but the Flagship guys I talked to agreed and said maps were definitely on the improvement list. They need to look better, have some suggestion of 3D to them, show more, and so on. The minimap in D2 wasn't that great pre-game either though, and got some changes during beta to make it much more useful, so don't worry about the Hellgate: London ones.

The maps were necessary too, since you could easily get lost. The various London streets levels were the worst, since they covered multiple city blocks, all of which looked pretty much the same. I mostly navigated by going where the monsters weren't dead yet, but finding my way out, or back through an empty level was a pain. I think the team needs to work in some sort of compass heading, since it was very easy to get turned around. I didn't like that the map rotated as your character turned; I'd have preferred a map with my character represented as an arrow that changed direction as I moved, since then it would have been easy to find the portal to the north, or lower left corner, for instance.

I found my way around a lot better the 2nd day there, as i played more and got used to the environments.

Movement and Invisible Walls

Hellgate: London fans often ask about movement, jumping, and obstructions. The news is good.

While Hellgate: London isn't an exploration, Tomb Raider-style game, you can move everywhere it looks like you should be able to. There aren't those Guild Wars style invisible walls locking you into following a narrow path; the city blocks are wide open, and while you can't actually go into any buildings that aren't open to the air, you can go on the sidewalks, leap bus benches, jump up onto abandoned semi trailers, and so forth.

The borders of levels are good also, with very tall and sheer buildings, huge, vertical piles of debris, blocked subway tunnels, and so on. You don't just have a little wall or stream you could obviously leap to hold you in; when you're at the edge of a level, you know it.

Elsewhere, there are lots of little ledges and platforms in all sorts of areas, and these actually factor into gameplay; monsters will stay up on them and shoot projectiles at you, and you've got to do them ranged, or leap up and go melee. Playing a cabalist at one point I almost died when I leapt up onto a ledge to kill some monsters without realizing the physical elementals I'd been using for tanks weren't going to follow me up.

The ability of monsters and/or your summoned minions to leap up onto stuff behind you is of course subject to game balancing, but the levels felt good to me. You can get up on low piles of rock you expect to be able to leap onto. It's not tomb raider or some climbing exploration game, but there aren't invisible walls constraining you, at least.

Multiplayer

Unfortunately, there's not much to say about this. MP was working at E3, and they had MP games going all the time. Most of the 12 machines were networked, and there were often 4 people in the same game. Unfortunately, no one really teamed up much. There aren't any skills now in Hellgate: London that benefit others in your party, so the only reason to play side by side is to pair your killing power. And since the E3 build was so nerfed, that wasn't necessary. Plus, no one playing knew each other, or wanted to stop to talk strategy.

So you'd see people in town, and then you'd run off to do your own thing, and never see them again. In the final game I expect there will be some more cohesive parties, with experience sharing, or some skills boosting other players, since otherwise there's not really any reason to team up, 99% of the time. A harder game would certainly help though, since then you'd need to double your firepower, and even play complimentary character types. Not so much at E3, though.

Monsters and Scalability

Like items, monsters are hard to discuss individually, since they're mentioned constantly in every other section of this E3 report. I can give some basic info, though.

The stats of the Monsters are indeed based on the stats of players; low level characters get low level monsters, even if you head to an area that had higher level monsters in your last game. Monsters have a listed level that roughly corresponds to yours, and it's quite obvious. If you're level 1, all the monsters you find are level 1 or 2, and that number is right in the box beside their name.

There's apparently a sliding scale of damage and hit points and such, since all the level 1 monsters felt about equivalent in power, as did all of the level 3's and 5's and so on. Some monsters are a bit nastier than others, and some are easier (zombies are the easiest and most common, but they seldom drop anything better than gold), but if a level 10 character plays the same area as a level 1 character (not together or in the same game), the level 10 will see much higher level monsters that hit harder and have a lot more hit points.

Monsters scaled up rapidly and accurately, too. I got zombies from level 1 to level 7 as I leveled up, and if I skipped an early area and then came back to it at level 7, the monsters there would be near my level, when they would have been level 1s and 2s if I'd gone to that area first thing. Monsters are said to scale up for larger parties and based on your character level, and when I asked about that, here's what I found out:

Flux: What does monster scaling (for character level or multiplayer parties) affect? Hit points, damage dealt, resistances, all of the above?
Answer: All of the above. Without going into the formulas, monster health is the biggest percentage change.

Flux: Hypothetically, how far does monster scaling go; would a level 5 playing solo in late act 3 find level 5 monsters? Would a level 40 templar returning to the early areas of the game find level 40 zombies in the Covent Garden District?
Answer: For the "storyline" levels and quests, the monster levels are pre-determined. So a level 5 player would be facing very high level monsters in late act 3, and that templar would be fighting boring level 2 zombies in Covent Garden.

I'm not sure about this answer, since my observations at E3 had monsters scaling up and down a great deal in levels. "Storyline" monsters must be relatively rare and few, and all I noticed were the levels listed on the regular monsters I saw so much of.

Another scaling issue is size, rather than numbers. Just as characters can be taller and wider, so can monsters. Bosses and champions are about 50% larger than common monsters of their type, and certain monsters can be huge; like multi-stories high. We don't have a good picture, but the Gatekeeper changed size in huge fashion; going from human-height to a good 10 meters in mid battle. He didn't get any tougher when he was larger though, which seemed sort of silly. Especially when some Templar would run up and start furiously slashing at his ankles.

A dying super-sized Gatekeeper had his own special bug, where part of his drop would remain hovering in the air, several meters over your head. You couldn't grab it either, even if you leaped and hit F.

Another giant monster was a nightmare type demon four Cabalists summoned up. You had to bring them a stolen object to make the spell work, then had to help destroy the resulting monster, and never mind that it was a purple skeleton 7 meters tall and emitting a poisonous aura that nearly turned you green and crippled your foot speed.

As Ivan Sulic's said, the design docs call for a lot of really large monsters, and having seen a couple at E3, I'll join Ivan in hoping they make it into the game. The huge size is really awesome to behold, although it does pose some realism issues. I suppose that's a problem in every 3D MMORPG, where you get toothpick-sized warriors tanking demons the size of small buildings, but that doesn't make it look any sillier as they work some gigantic demon's ankles to a pulp.

Monster Respawning

Another thing that seemed to be still under debate was the issue of respawning levels. In the e3 build there was no formal respawning, though small monsters like death maggots would appear in levels that had been cleared, and Fellbores (lower level beast demons) would sometimes burrow up out of the ground in the dry River Thames level. Generally speaking though, once you cleared out an area it stayed empty.

The problem with this was that the levels were boring if you had to retrace your steps through them later on, and they also remained empty if you had to return there for a quest.

For instance, the L'il Joey quest requires you to venture to the Tottenham Court Road district and kill a large grotesque called The Taint. If you get that quest before you first visit Tottenham, it's all good, since the London streets level is full of various low level monsters, with the Taint near the end of the accessible area. However, if you've wandered around and already cleared out Tottenham Court Road before you get around to speaking with the L'il Joey the NPC, he'll still report that he lost his prosthetic leg there.

So off you go to Tottenham, and there you'll find the corpses of all the monsters you killed (if it hasn't been long enough for them to decay yet) in a big empty area... with the Taint wandering around all by itself at the end of the block. The quest still works and all, but as Erich Schaefer and others I talked to about it agreed, it's just sort of lame to go back to a completely empty area to kill one monster on a quest.

This same thing happens in more than one early quest, and as a result, the Hellgate Team is considering if they should allow full level respawning after some amount of time, partial respawning all the time, full respawning attached to quests, or what. They definitely seemed to be leaning towards some kind of respawning though, so I think it's pretty safe to expect it in the final game.

Quests

I'll cover specific quests in more detail when I update our quests page. Read it now for more general information about the different types of quests in Hellgate: London. There are tasks, missions, events, plot quests and more, most of them randomly-occuring from game to game. There will even be super-rare quests, ones that might appear only every 100 games. These won't just be "kill monster X and return body part Y to me." missions either.

There aren't very many random quests and tasks in the game yet, but we saw a few at E3. We saw some plot quests as well, and others that weren't really plot-centric, but that seemed to be there every game. Retrieving L'il Joey's prosthetic leg, killing The Thief for an item a circle of Cabalists needed to summon up a gigantic Nightmare, entering a hellrift portal and traveling to a small area of hell to slay the Gatekeeper and plant the Falkes Device (seen to the right)... these and more were in most games, and were soon routine.

Tasks popped up quite often too, and were of dubious use. Random NPCs in town would show a quest prompt, and when clicked would say they needed an item or two within a given time, and if you brought those items they'd give you a reward. For example, one might want a battery and ammo mod, and if you brought them within 18 minutes you'd get a spike bolter pistol as a reward. These tasks weren't always wise to accomplish; the items you gave up might be more useful or have more value than what you got as a reward. They were buggy too; an NPC would tell you to kill 17 fellbores in a given area, and when you went there you'd find other monsters, but no fellbores. Or fellbores, but only half a dozen.

When you received a quest, you could hit the L button to see your Quest Log. It showed up on the right side of the screen, and listed the quest, who gave it to you, your status on it, and the reward. You could only have a few quests active at once, too. Three seemed to be the number, and if you received 4th quest when you already had 3 active, the game would say you couldn't have that many open quests. Your choice then was to decline the new quest, or remove one of your active quests from your Quest Log.

For all the quests I saw and did at E3, I didn't see many with plot ramifications. They were mostly errands or things to gain rewards (I got a skill point for one early quest.) and while they tied into the game's plot, it was more in a "kill monsters to win" sort of way. This was not an accident, since it seemed the longer, more plot-related quests were not active, so that players could do quick ones and get immediate rewards during their brief play sessions at E3.

Items

There's info about the items in every other section of this report; especially in the Cabalist and Templar play reports. I'll also be working all the new info and play experience I had into our current items section, as I update changed names, add info about actually using the weapons, and so forth. Here are a few tidbits, though.

Items that are the equivalent of Diablo II rares, uniques, and sets will be in the game. Very few have been worked on yet, and the Hellgate Team isn't sure exactly what form they'll take, but we'll definitely see them in some fashion. I asked Peter Hu if HGL uniques would be unique, or if they'd have variable values as they (mostly) did in Diablo II. Item X gives 100-150% fire damage, for instance. He said they'd be like they were in Diablo II, and that some items would have variable ranges, while others would be set all the time. It didn't seem like something they'd given that much thought to yet, to me.

As I mentioned previously, the names for items, monsters, skills, and everything else in Hellgate: London are changing constantly while the game is under development. Numerous items had different names than they had in recent gameplay movies and screenshots, and lots of them were new even to the Hellgate Team. I'd watch one of the Flagshippers playing and hear constant, "Oh, that's got a new name." type remarks. We've spent some effort tracking down names in our weapons section, and there are a lot of named items on the official Hellgate: London weapons page, but seriously -- don't worry about weapon names at this point. They've changed in the past, they will change in the future, and there's no point in getting attached to anything. Not knowing what they'll be called next build does make discussing favorite weapons a lot more difficult, but at least a lot of them have locked in functions now, and probably won't be changing too much more.

Also, remember that there are a ton of unknown weapons yet. We've seen something like 40 pistols/rifles in the game at this point, of which maybe 25 or 30 are fairly set in their function. Of the total 100+ weapons, probably 75 will be pistols or rifles (and 25 melee weapons), which means we've never even gotten even a sniff of info about almost half the guns in Hellgate: London. The unknown guns will do all sorts of things we've never imagined, and even the known guns are being changed regularly. Splash damage is added to direct bullets, damage types are changed from fire to physical and back, ranges are tweaked, firing rates are adjusted, and so on.

We saw several new weapon types in the E3 build, and saw other weapons working differently than expected. We knew about the Scarab Gun and the Locust Hive, rifles that shoot out locusts, but at E3 we saw two more bug guns; one a pistol that fired a swarm of dragonflies (physical damage, slow but steady), and the other a rifle that shot a different kind of locusts than we'd seen in the past.

The Cabalist's focus device was mentioned before E3, but it's hard to understand without playing it a bit. See the Cabalist gameplay report for much more discussion about it. Basically, it's a glove that takes up one of your weapon slots, lets you fire constant projectiles from it, and enables you to cast higher level Cabalist spells.

We knew about the Shockwave, a gun that fires a nova-like blast of electricity, but at E3 we saw the Flamewave, which does the exact same thing; but with fire.

We knew about the HARP rifle, a gun that fires a beam that locks monsters into place, but at E3 the Cabalist's starting weapons were a focus device, and a HARP pistol, which did the same thing, but in just one hand. (Which means the HARP rifle is probably out of the game, or that it needs an improved function to make it worth using with two hands instead of one.)

We knew that Shields were not in the game, but that they might return, and in that light I'm happy to say that they are back. I saw several kinds of shields in the E3 build, all of them, like swords,Templar-only items. I did not see anything in the character window about shields though, so how they displayed their blocking boost, and what attributes related to it, is unknown.

On that note, there are now a lot of class-specific items, something the Hellgate Team had previously said they were not going to include many of. Every sword is now a class-specific item, and only usable by the Templar. Focal devices are definitely Cabalist-only, but so were a number of the higher level rifles I saw in the E3 build, including the Tempest Rifle. Presumably if the third/unannounced character had been in this build, various guns would have been reserved for that class only as well.

The interesting thing about these class-specific weapons is that they may not stay that way. Flagship has said in various E3 interviews that all other classes can gain enough faction points by doing various quests to be allowed to wield weapons of another class. So if your Cabalist did lots of quests for the Templars, she/he might eventually be allowed to use swords. It's unlikely you'd be all that good with them, but at least there's that option. This feature is new and subject to change, of course. All the good stuff always is.

Gambling and Magic Find

Unfortunately, I don't have a lot to report about either of these topics. I brought them both up with Peter Hu, and he said the same thing about both. That they were probably going to get into the game in some form, but that nothing had really been done about either of them yet. Both are end game options, things that help to extend the life of the game and that give high level characters something to do other than just mindlessly clear the same area for the 500th time, and as such they aren't really on the Hellgate Team's radar yet.

Game Length

Hellgate: London fans often ask how long the game will be, but it's not a question that can really be answered. I never heard any estimates on game length while talking with the guys at E3, and I doubt any Flagship employee would offer an estimate if asked. The game's nowhere near done, and even if it was, how do you estimate game length when the game is designed around replayability, and all of the areas are randomly-generated?

The E3 build comprised about 50% of act one. There will be three acts in the game, and while FSS hasn't said much about them, they have said they won't be as clearly-demarcated as the acts were in Diablo II. You won't go from a desert in one act to a jungle in another, for instance. The transitions between the acts will probably be more plot-based than geography-based, and players might not even realize they've moved from act 1 to act 2.

Accepting the "50% of act one" estimate, I asked how much of the total game we were looking at, and got a lot of, "Hmm..." replies. The usual response was something like 10%, but even that figure was offered with numerous caveats. Honestly, it's really impossible to say exactly how much of the game was in, when the game's nowhere near done. Also, how do you quantify potential online features such as guild halls, PVP arenas, online stat tracking and ladders, and so on?

In theory, you could get through Hellgate: London pretty quickly just running as fast as possible, only using a few skills. Why would you want to, though? Playing through normally; doing the quests, improving your equipment, talking to the NPCs to follow the game plot, etc, is what's fun about playing. On top of that, remember that there are 30 skills per character, and realize that you can't possibly try them all out at a powerful level with just one character. Besides the skills, there are dozens of quests in HGL, many of them occurring quite rarely; are you going to replay the game enough to get them all? How about other character builds, or playing through with a friend in teamwork style?

Most players played countless games of Diablo II; building up characters, replaying favorite areas, repeatedly hunting particular monsters who had the best chance to drop special items, etc. Hellgate: London won't have as many character types as Diablo II (at least not right away), but there might be even more item variety, and there should be more viable character builds, with Flagship's commitment to making more than 2 or 3 top quality skills per character.

Hellgate: London won't take hundreds of hours to get through once, but it will take that long to do more than scratch the surface with the variety of character builds, randomly-occurring quests, and countless item types and properties. How long you'll spend playing it depends more on you than on the length of the game.