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

Feature: Flux's HGL Play Report
Date: October 12, 2006
Source: Article originally posted on the Unofficial HGL Site. Also see the forum thread for many replies to questions.

Contents 1 Flux's HGL Gameplay Report 2 Quests 3 Game Difficulty and Speed 4 Skills 5 Equipment 6 Conclusion

Flux's HGL Gameplay Report

Thanks to an out of town guest and some old Blizzard North friends now with Flagship, Lanth and I were lucky enough to be invited to their new offices on Friday, September 29, 2006. I arrived a little after 3pm and left around 7pm, and aside from lunch, a tour of the offices, and a fair amount of conversation with some Flagship guys, I devoted every available minute playing Hellgate: London.

This was my second chance to get some hands-on time with the game, after I spent a couple of days hovering around the Hellgate: London booth at E3 this past May. I wrote a long, four-page report about my E3 playtime, and spent a lot of words detailing the general game mechanics, and another page each for the Templar and Cabalist. Since I covered all of my first reactions and made a lot of comments about the technical aspects of playing Hellgate: London then, I'm going to skip that stuff now and focus on the gameplay, and the changes and improvements I noticed this time around.

We played the exact same build that's been on display at the Tokyo Game Show, and as such had some hanzi on the interface buttons, and no multiplayer option. I don't know why they didn't include MP in the TGS build; it was working fine at E3 in May and the Flagship guys play it all the time in the office, but know that our build was single player only. Just don't think the MP isn't working now, or that it's been scrapped or anything crazy like that.

Also realize that as a game show build, it was nerfed a bit from the normal difficult the guys test it at. Monsters did less damage than they will in the final game (all subject to further balancing, of course) and died more quickly. At least that was the case early on; I ended up warping forward to a bit higher level towards the end of my play session and promptly got absolutely slaughtered by massive spawns of much harder monsters. I actually found that pretty encouraging, since I don't want it to be too easy.

I knew I'd only have time to play one character to even a low level, and after about .01 seconds of soul-searching, I picked a Cabalist and got started. The character creation screen was slightly modified since May, but still worked about the same. I fiddled with the sliders a bit, comparing very pale vs. very dark, short vs. tall, skinny vs. thick, and so on, before settling on a tall, olive-skinned, medium-weight, white-haired (flat like a bowl on top, with long bangs), female Cabalist. There looked to be more female hair styles now than there were at E3, but there were still only a few male hair and facial hair looks. They'll add a bunch more for the final game, I'm sure, but this isn't The Sims: Demonpocalypse -- character appearance style points aren't exactly the Hellgate team's highest priority during game development.

The game started up much as it did at E3; I clicked okay on my character look, typed in a name, and next thing I knew I was in the Covent Garden Station. There I noticed some changes. A few of the NPCs had different looks, and there was a new NPC as well. Murmur was his name, (IIRC) and he wore a hood and mumbled a lot. He actually reminded me a bit of Ormus from Act Three in Diablo II; the healer who speaks in half riddles and seems a bit cracked. I didn't speak much to him, or any of the NPCs, since after all, I only had a few hours. While I greatly anticipate some future day when I can actually install the game on my own computer and take my time with the game, hurrying along to see as much as you can see is the only way you can play at game shows/during afternoon feedback sessions.

I didn't notice any appearance changes to Covent Garden Station, but once I got out into the streets and sewers, I could see a lot of improvements. I'm not sure exactly what's different; there's a new wind that occasionally gusts audibly and blows scraps of paper past you, but other than that... Whatever it is though, the game just looks better. The textures are clearer and more detailed, the lighting seems smoother, the characters and monsters fit into the world perfectly, and it's just much more real. The clipping issues seem to be fixed, the monsters move very realistically and turn and rotate smoothly, the character animations are fluid, etc. I think more than anything now being that different, we were mostly noticing the lack of any visual problems. Nothing looks bad or sticky or repetitive, so rather than focusing on the small bugs, you get an overall sense of visual quality.

As Lanth said several times, the screenshots and low quality gameplay movies do not do Hellgate: London justice. Seeing it in person, on a good monitor, is really impressive. It's certainly not done yet, but I can't imagine too many people complaining about the graphics or visuals or world design, etc.

The level design has been tweaked and improved as well. Maybe it was just the luck of the random level spawn, but I entered a lot of areas right in the middle of things. Rather than coming through some portal and finding myself at the end of a long, branching bowling alley, I'd run up a flight of stairs and see monsters visible in three directions, and the minimap displaying a lot more level behind me, around a building. The streets seemed more interconnected now, and there were multiple directions to head off in as I explored areas. The design seems to be very unlike D2's infamous Great Marsh area of Act 3, and more like oh... the surface cities in Kurast, late in Act Three, but not as deserted, and much larger. It feels like walking through a city, but one with very short blocks and lots of open space and courtyards to cut through. Not like a labyrinth you must puzzle your way through.

There are lots of connections between the areas too. The first town area has 4 or 5 portals or stairs leading out into dungeon areas, but 2 or 3 of them are blocked at the start. As you level up and reach new areas though, the barriers are removed, and you can then connect to areas right from town that you could not at level 1. It's kind of how waypoints worked in D2, except that there are multiple town areas, and each connects to maybe half a dozen dungeon levels. For example, the portal to Area D is red when you start the game. You can go to Area A or Area B, and if you go to B you'll find a portal to Area C. If you pass through that whole level you'll find a portal at the end of it to Area D, and somewhere in that area you'll find a portal back to the station; the portal to Area D that was red when you tried to pass through it initially. It's cool, and initially kind of confusing to find a portal or stairway leading down to the station you thought you'd left so far behind.

Travel is also simplified by kiosks that allow you to travel instantly between stations (towns) and there are also Town Portal-type spells that let you make portals to and from the town you were last in.

Quests

While I didn't spend much time reading NPC dialogue, I did pay attention to the quests, and did click on most of the NPCs every time I returned to town -- and I was surprised to see Murmur again when I reached Leicester Square Station, the second town area in Hellgate: London. (You find numerous safe stations while you play, and travel back and forth between them while completing quests; HGL isn't like Diablo II with just one town in each huge act.) "What are you, Deckard Cain?" I asked, when I clicked on him. He did more of the same thing in this station; mumbling about prophecies and such, but from what I observed during my play time, he's kind of the quest helper NPC. You talk to him to get more info and tips and such, and I'm assuming he travels with you all through the game (at least early on), popping from station to station, Cain-style.

As for the quests, I'd already seen all of the ones I encountered, though that's to be expected, since I was still quite early in the game. One that had worked fine at E3 was buggy in this build, but that's how it goes. The rest worked fine, though there was a bug in the quit quest option, and I couldn't turn down a quest once I'd accepted it. This is necessary in Hellgate: London since you can only have so many open quests at a time, and can not accept new quests until you complete some old ones, or abandon them. If I'd had time I would have completed all the quests I saw, but I was playing with limited time, so I kept moving forward and ignored quests that required backtracking.

There were some changes to the Quest window. Rather than just the name of the quest and some basic info about it, which is all I remembered seeing at E3, quests now included a sort of bullet point list of things you had to do. A hypothetical:

• Talk to Murmur
• Travel to X via Y
• Kill Monster A
• Retrieve item B from Monster A
• Return item B to NPC D for reward
• Take reward to NPC E to trade for different reward

They weren't that explicit and spelled out, but you get the general idea. I do not know if the quests will be that step by step in the final game, or if the tutorial style quest info is just something in the game to help along newbs at gaming shows.

The other game interfaces had been tweaked since E3, and the biggest change were the drop down menus. Rather than just a flat screen of information in fixed locations, the TGS build of HGL had more info than would fit on the visible screen, and individual menus to compress or expand. For example, look at attributes, stats, and defenses boxes on the left in this shot. In the TGS build, each of those three portions of the display showed in their own mini display, which opened up if you clicked on it, like a compressed navigation bar on a website.

I didn't much care for it, and I got the feeling this change wasn't going to remain in the game, so I'm not worried about it. It's an interesting idea, though. The windows, when all expanded, grew a scroll bar since they did not all fit on the screen at once, and that intrigued me. I'm used to seeing all my character's stats all the time, but honestly, is that necessary? Most of the time I only look at hit points, or resistances, or attributes, or whatever, and sometimes don't look at one group of stats during an entire game, if I'm not changing my equipment around. If I'm hardly ever looking at a display, why do I need it taking up screen space? With this concept, Hellgate: London could show only the info you needed, and could fit a lot more info into a smaller space. Why not customizable menus and interfaces? It's not like we don't do that in every other program on our computers, at this point. For example: do you want every single one of you bookmarks visible all the time, eating up valuable screen space? Or just when you need to refer to them?

In a more general sense, the design theme for Hellgate: London's interface screens is very futuristic and modern -- they're all partially transparent and they show over the gameplay view, rather than popping up in half or full screen windows as they did in D2. It's obvious, from all the changes we see in gameplay movies and screenshots, that these displays are being constantly tweaked, and worry not; if everyone hates the function or look of them come beta, more changes will be made, right up until release, if necessary.

Game Difficulty and Speed

I can't swear to it, but leveling up seemed a bit slower in this build than at E3. It seemed like I was level 5 for a lot longer than I expected, and still level 6 in an area I thought I'd been up to level 8 at, at E3.

I eventually jumped forward to the British Museum just about the time I had to leave, and found that area horrendously difficult, compared to what had come before. I was there a couple of levels too soon, and had crappy equipment since I hadn't spent time comparing new stuff and buying upgrades (another penalty for fast play during limited time), and I paid for my boldness with repeated deaths.

Fellbores had been popping up out of the ground (with a scary growling scream) for several levels by that point, but suddenly they were appearing in mega packs of twenty or more, and completely swarming me. Like this, but double the monsters, and replace that buffed out Templar with Flux's cabalist in crappy armor and still using her starting equipment.

They weren't all Fellbores either; huge packs of little gonad-y dudes and Morphoids would pop up all the time, hordes of zombies would come rushing around a corner, and so on. The monster variety was definitely higher than at E3, and the difficulty was clearly higher.

As for the perpetual "how long is the game?" question, I have some new insight. At E3 I played roughly the same areas, and was told that up to the British Museum was about 1/3 of the first of the game's first act. It was hard to estimate time played at E3, especially since I was just rushing through everything to see more, but I know I played about 3 hours this time, moving at least 33% faster than I would if I hadn't been on the clock.

I was still probably an hour from reaching the British Museum, and I would have spent at least another hour or two cleaning out all the earlier areas and finishing the earlier quests. It's safe to say 4-5 hours to the British Museum; more if you really go slowly or spend a lot of time looking at equipment upgrades and making trips back to sell your loot, and if we assume there will be 3 acts of that approximate size? Easy math: 5 hours for one third of the act = 15 hours for Act One, and 45 for all three acts.

Bill Roper has given 40 hours as a very rough estimate of play-through time, and that seems very reasonable. Conservative, even. Of course, I have no idea if I really saw 1/3 of the first act, but there's definitely a lot of play time with Hellgate: London. You've got to also consider the random levels and random quests, and the fact that most of us will surely play more than one character with one skill build, and with that the play time rapidly multiplies beyond any reasonable calculation.

Skills

There were a lot more skills in this build than I saw at E3. I believe all three skill trees had ten skills, though you can be certain they'll change quite a bit between now and game launch. Unfortunately, most of the new skills were too high level for me to try them out, and honestly, the game at low levels isn't real skill dependent. You want to grab a weapon and run out and start whacking/shooting things, especially when you're just playing for a short time.

The Summoning tree was pretty much the same as at E3. Fire Elemental and Physical Elemental returned, along with the various bigger, golem-like summonings. I greatly enjoyed my mecha-carnagor pet, and the fact that every new one had a new, unique name (like monster bosses spawn with) was a nice bonus. I almost felt bad when little Sykall the Carnegor died, since I'd grown to like him. Inconsolable. For like five seconds. His successor and identical twin Karlat the Carnegor did help to soothe my pain, though.

New skills in Summoning were additional types of Elementals. I believe they were Spectral, Poison, and Lightning, but maybe I'm just conflating them with the damage types. I never got to cast any of these to see what they did, but the way Physical and Fire worked was changed. At E3 you got 3 total, with the two types counting towards it. So you could have 3 of either, or 1 of one and 2 of another. Now you got 1 of each at level 1 in the skill, and another pet with higher damage and hps if you added another skill point. A nice touch; both cast at once. You didn't have to cast the spell twice to summon both your Fire Elementals.

Evocation still has most of the attack type spells. Drain Life, Drain Mana, Spectral Lash, and so on. There were a few higher level skills added here, but again, no chance to try them out. Mastery still had a bunch of minion type skills; stuff to share health to your minions or heal yourself from them, or make them faster and stronger, etc. I've seen no reason to use any of that yet, but no doubt in the final game we'll have powerful enough minions that it'll be worth healing and powering them up, rather than just casting a new one.

I did see the new shape changing skills, and tried out the "turn into a zombie" skill, just for laughs. It works; you definitely turn into a zombie, and it's funny to see yourself running forward, arms stretched out in the classic "reaching for brains" pose. It only lasts about 20 seconds at level one, and I'm not sure how useful it would be; you can sneak past monsters while in that form, and there are other skills to add zombie type attacks, but most of the time you'd rather just kill things as you find them. Maybe an emergency skill, to transform and escape dangerous mobs? There were a few other transformation skills too, but Flagship didn't want us taking notes or photos of the skills in progress, so I'm not going into too much detail.

Equipment

There are a lot of new types of weapons and armor, and the names are outrageous. We're all going to spend a month trying to learn what things are; I literally had no idea if I'd found armor or a weapon half the time, with funky names like "beetlebore" and many others along those lines. The modifiers are all very different too; a few you can guess are fire or lightning or poison damage, but most of them you've got no idea at all, without reading the hover information.

Even then, players will spend months comparing weapons and arguing their various merits. This isn't Diablo with 50 types of swords that vary only by range, speed, and damage. In Hellgate: London the weapons are radically different in function, and getting them all even halfway balanced is going to be a hell of a task for the designers. How do you compare guns that fire electric eels that deal heavy electrical damage to a single target, to pistols that fire darts that explode in the target, to laser beams that do damage over time once they lock on, to a pistol that fires seven jets of poison out at everything in range? How about when you can find all of those with from 1-5 mods, and there are five types of mods, and about a million possible mod values?

• Gun A shoots bullets that do a fair amount of spectral damage every hit. It has a slow firing rate but very long range, allowing you to get the first shot every time, but often doing zero damage when the slow bullet misses.
• Gun B shoots a swarm of insects that fly slowly and not very far, but that do substantial poison damage once they find a target. The insects don't live very long though, and you can't fire out multiple clouds at a time, and the weapon requires both hands.
• Gun C blasts everything on the screen for low damage, but it takes 8 seconds of charge time per shot.
• Gun D squirts a stream of fire that locks onto the target and does steady damage, but it's not very much damage, and it can only hit one target at a time, and it doesn't have very long range.

See how the choices can get very apples vs. oranges? And we're not even considering monster movement, mob size, resistances, your support spells, weapon switching, multiplayer games, etc. I didn't have time to get into large scale weapon comparisons, but they'll definitely be fun in the final game, and I suspect players will constantly be finding new ways to use previously-unappreciated weapons.

My preference thus far leans towards the beam weapons, but it's hard to say if they're actually more effective. It's great fun to see a fire or lightning or poison beam jet out and lock onto a target, causing the monster's hit points to steadily drain. It looks busy and deadly, and it's hard to objectively compare that to the potentially higher damage of projectile guns. Fireballs and exploding darts and poison bombs and fire grenades and other of the countless other bullet types hit for varying damage, but they also miss some quick monsters, and the chunks of damage they deal periodically don't seem as impressive as the steady drain you get with beam weapons. Especially whey you consider the apparent delay a lot of guns have, firing things that hit monsters, wait a moment, then blow up.

I didn't get to try any swords since they were all Templar-only, as were all types of shields, and lots of pistols too. In fact, most equipment early in the game is class-specific, and it runs at about a 3 to 1 ratio for the Templar. By level 5 or 6 the merchant screens were practically 2/3 red, with all the Templar-only weapons I couldn't use. Cabalists have class weapons as well, but just focal devices (which are seldom found/sold) and some of the weirder two-handed rifles.

The weapons and the balance of them will surely change during development, but I was left to wonder how the buying screen will look once a third character is in the game. Will more existing neutral weapons, or current Templar weapons be assigned to additional characters? Are there a lot more weapons finished but not in the game yet since they're only for other classes to use? Flagship's talked about possibly allowing characters to use every type of weapon if they complete quests and earn enough faction points, but that is still under debate, so there's really no telling what sort of weapon choices we'll have long-term.

In the short term, I played the Cabalist, and liked her a lot. Her starting equipment was overpowered, and fun. She had the same focal glove with 16 spectral damage, and replacing the no-damage, monster-freezing harp pistol in her other hand was the new and very awesome hydra pistol. As the screenshot caption describes, it fires seven streams of poison damage, spreading them around multiple monsters or pumping all seven into one target, for quite effective killing power.

I know the hydra pistol was the bomb because I didn't find anything better for quite some time. This skewed the play experience somewhat, making the early levels quite easy, but that's how they have to set things up at game shows, so the noobs can hop on and have fun right away.

Mods start dropping immediately too, and since they can be popped in and removed from weapons at will, it's a good idea to stick in any that fit your weapon's mod slots. I didn't pay that much attention to mod stats, but in my early game they were mostly minor bonuses to one type of elemental damage. The only cool one I remember was a battery mod that added "+23% chance to ignite target." I stuck that one into my hydra pistol, but never saw anything catch on fire. Possibly I didn't notice, possibly the poison killed them too quickly, and possibly that mod only adds on if you're using a fire weapon that has a chance to ignite in the first place. It's gasoline, you need a match, and my hydra pistol didn't make sparks?

That brings up a point I wanted to make; the display on mods, weapons, spells, and more is still early. Function is changed on everything all the time. Documentation is added in later, if at all, and this is yet another reason the hover stats we see on skills and weapons and monsters are largely meaningless, at this early stage. After all, there's no point in changing the info about a weapon when it's being changed for a quick trial, and will almost certainly be changed further tomorrow, or the next day.

Conclusion

In a game as big as Hellgate: London, it's impossible to get more than a snapshot of things with just a few hours to play. It looked very good and was a lot of fun to play, but things are obviously still under construction. Lots of skills don't seem very useful yet, the weapons are wildly unbalanced, and not all of the quests work. Lots of features are still being developed too; there weren't any kill counters in yet, the interfaces and displays keep changing, the spells are different every week, and yet the game is clearly making progress.

Hellgate: London was noticeably advanced in every aspect from the version I played at E3, just four months ago. Furthermore, we were told that as the mechanics and core functions get locked in, more designers are free to spend time evaluating, polishing, and adding new content. I won't be surprised if there are lots more quests and many changes to even the lower level stuff before the start of the beta test, as the team polishes and perfects more of the late game stuff no one has even seen a hint of yet.