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

Feature: Lanth's HGL Play Report
Date: October 11, 2006
Source: Article originally posted on the Unofficial HGL Site, now archived here. Also see this forum thread for many more game comments by Lanth on his Flagship Studios visit and play time.

HGL Thoughts

Graphics

The graphics were a lot better than I expected. All of the animations are very smooth and fluid, the textures are crisp and clear, nothing is blurry or ugly, as in the earlier screenshots of the game (E3 didn't look too great, IMO). The recent high-quality screenshots from TGS (the build we played) illustrate the clarity and crispness well, I believe. You really need to see the game in action to appreciate the smoothness of the animations, though. The lighting effects are great, I particularly liked the red glowing cracks you find in the streets of London, and I think the glowing, floating exospecters look excellent - very organic animations so they seem to swim through the air while adding a specter of menace to the scene. At the moment the exospecters are just scenery, but Peter mentioned they were working on things for them to do.

Sound

The sounds were great. Lots of varied zombie sounds that sound sufficiently rabid and slobbering. Background and ambient music/noises were good too, with Flux frequently thinking that the ambient station noise was coming from somewhere in the office, rather than the headphones he was wearing.

World

A bit on the static side (no critters running around, nothing moving apart from the monsters) but looked good. The wind effect with leaves and other stuff blowing around occasionally was neat. The destructible items (think barrels from D2) were varied and fit very well into the environments with good textures and models, they didn't stick out as being obvious 'smash me open' targets. I particularly liked the Thames setting, where you could look up the massive walls of rock to towering buildings, broken bridges and exospecters merrily swishing along on their mysterious journey. The level types all feel very different, more so than the ones in Diablo 2 ever did.

Interface

Very functional and easy to use, if a little rough around the edges, but all of the issues should be ironed out by release. My BF, who is a complete gaming noob, never having played D2 or any FPS or RPG games managed to jump into the game quite readily and could happily play along, at one point he managed to get about 45 minutes ahead of me in the game, where he needed my help to kill a particular quest boss with a special weapon you needed to find.

One particular feature I liked is that when you have a mod that you want to place in a gun, instead of examining all the items separately to see if they accept that mod type, you pick the mod up with the cursor and all of the items in your inventory that can accept that type of mod will have green frames around them. Conversely, if you pick up a particular weapon, all mods that you have in your inventory that could fit in that gun will be highlighted in green. The quick-spell system is also a great feature.. This lets you drag a spell into the equivalent of a potion slot from D2, so that when you press the number key assigned to it, you will cast that spell once. Very useful to put summoning spells or other one-off spells in here, to use quickly in a pinch without having to swap your main skills around.

Guns and items

I actually didn't use too many different guns myself. The reason being, I found an overpowered weapon when I was clvl 2 - a boneripper or some-such. It works like the flak cannon from unreal tournament, spraying out lots of little chunks of bone in a fairly tight pattern. This gun did 33 damage (total I believe, rather than per-shard), while most of the weapons available at that clvl did 10-20. So I used this gun for most of the time, and had no need to use other ones. It wasn't until about clvl 6, near the end of my playtime, that I found weapons that begun to rival this one.

One gun I got later in the game was a beetlebore which shoots out a small explosive charge that does area affect damage. If you simply shoot it as fast possible (hold down mouse button), you will shoot 1 beetlebore at a time out, with maybe a 0.75 second delay between them. This was a fairly weak way of using the gun. If you waited some time between shooting (ie, took your finger off the mouse button, or in between monster packs while you weren't shooting), then the next shot you did would be powered up to some extent and would shoot multiple beetles at once. It seemed to shoot about 12 or so at the maximum charge and this was enough to kill most monsters I came across in 1 shot. The charge up for this was approximately 5-6 seconds, however there was no gauge or meter to tell exactly when the weapon was fully (or partially) 'charged' to get this bigger affect. Something may be put in for this in the future.

Armor types, such as shields, helms, grieves and body armor were interesting. They provided a mixture of shields and armor. Shields work like the ones in Halo, absorbing 100% of all damage and regenerating after a while of not being hit - if you ever notice in a movie/screenshot a spherical translucent-yellow rune-encrusted globe around a player or monster, it is the shield kicking in taking damage. I thought the effect was possibly a little too distracting. Armor kicks in after the shields are depleted, although I am not sure if they reduce the damage you receive by a %, or if they act as a % chance to take no damage from an attack. At one point I had an interesting item dilemma - do I keep using my 6 armor / 5 shield body armor, or should I swap to the new 18 armor body armor I just found? Peter suggested the 18 armor, so I went with that.

Skills

I didn't experiment much with the Cabalist skills I had available to me, mainly because my weapon was overpowered, but also because I ran into a bug that made a couple of them un-usable (cooldown timer of ~2000 seconds). I put a couple of points into summon fire elemental, which was useful. If you have 2 points in a summon spell (allowing 2 critters) and cast it, it will summon all of your minions for you - you don't have to cast it 2 separate times. The cabalist didn't have too many direct-damage spells available in the build we played, there was one spell that worked sort of like charged-bolt from D2. I briefly tried out the 'zombie transform' spell, however I did not find much use for it - I was used to using ranged weapons and didn't like to get up close and personal. The effect was pretty neat though, lumbering along looking all sickly.

Gameplay

Gameplay was very fast and fluid. The version we played had the early monsters (Peter estimated mlvl 1 to 5) toned down in terms of damage and strength. We easily plowed through them, and I only died a couple of times early on for stupid reasons (examining my inv while a fetid hulk beat on me). This made it fairly easy to rip through things and not have to worry about items or stats or playing cleanly. This changed in the last level I played, when I started facing full-strength enemies - they were a lot trickier to kill and did a lot more damage. I had to quickly jab myself with several health injectors in order to stay alive.

The most memorable monsters were the ones I faced at the end, the Dark Seraphs. These monsters didn't fly around in the sky, instead they seemed to be invisible (or maybe I just didn't look up far enough), until a great pillar of fire came down from the sky with a Dark Seraph at the bottom. The seemed to be melee monsters, and would often appear right next to you when you least expected it. If you ran away too far, or did too much damage, the Seraph would retreat back into the nether the same way it arrived, and next time it came back it would have full shields. This meant that in order to kill them, you had to do it quickly.

I also faced some other flying enemies, which seemed fairly run-of-the-mill, but one boss I fought had the Warp ability, and it took me a few minutes of running around in circles (while been assaulted by Seraphs) to chase it down and kill it.

One thing I noticed that may be of interest to some people is mob activation. With the 3D perspective, you can see way into the distance (level geometry permitting) to see what monsters are around, however monsters do not become active until you get fairly close (or start shooting at them). This should allow for a more strategic style of play, similar to that found in Diablo 1, where you cautiously could activate certain monsters in small groups in order to tackle them, compared to the Diablo 2 style where if a monster is on screen, it generally is already running at you. This could all potentially change, due to improvements in monster AI, but I would imagine it will stay this way to at least some degree.

Peter described the gameplay as a mix between Diablo and Doom, and I would agree with that, although I would qualify that by saying Doom 2 specifically, rather than the more recent Doom 3. This is because Doom 3 has many smaller group fights, whereas Doom 2 tended to pit you against big mobs of monsters, which is similar to HGL. I do believe that skill and strategy will be required in the final game, as my encounter with full-powered monsters at the end showed my ability to be woefully insufficient - using up 40% of all of the health potions within 5 minutes that you'd just spent the last 4 hours attaining should be a good indicator that things are tricky.

The game was more fun, engaging and quick to learn than I expected it to be. The conversations we had with Peter really did convince me that Flagship do spend considerable amounts of time thinking about how to present features and facets of the game to the players so that they are understandable, usable and fun, and I have no doubts as to their design process or methods. I truly believe that this game is going to be another smash hit like Diablo was and an awaiting its release even more eagerly than I was before my visit.