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

Feature: Hands on gameplay report
Date: September 23, 2006
Source: ShackNews forum post by graah.

Gameplay Report

So two weeks ago I was lucky enough to get to sit down and play this for awhile. I figure this is as good a thread as any to post some info.

My gf and I went to a Giants game with Bill towards the end of which he asked if we wanted to play some Hellgate. Turns out it was a 'Play Day' where they had machines set up in the conference room all day for people to bang away on to test their Tokyo Show build. And if this seems odd, I've mentioned in a previous thread that my gf has known Bill for years and years and I know him through her etc.

Multiplayer isn't enabled for the build they'll be using at the show so my gf and I each played single player on machines next to each other. She went with a Templar and I went with a Cabalist.

The Templar play looked pretty straightforward with hack and slash dual handed goodness. Bill explained that in that build the dual wielded swords weren't calculating correctly so they were doing crazy damage. My gf enjoyed wading into crowds and laying waste to them. One whirlwind to cleave them all!

The Cabalist was a ranged only experience, I had fun with trying absolutely every gun I could both dual wielding and the big two handed assault guns. Some guns shot out scarab beetles that would crawl from foe to foe and chew them to bits, some guns shot bolts that would thunk home into zombies and sparkle for a second or two before exploding them to bits, others worked like a scatter gun...heck there was even a gun that had a jar full of eels as it's 'clip' and you'd launch electric eels at things which they would commence to sink their teeth into and then shock the heck out of them.

While the Templar had auras of some kind I didn't pay too much attention to what was going on over there on my gf's screen. The Cabalist on the other hand had a few different trees in the current build: Evocation, Summoning and Shapeshifting.

Evocation was a tree I ignored in order to try out the other two. Summoning granted various types of imps (Fire, Physical, Electric, Spectral etc.) as well as what I referred to as a giant hairless bulldog that acted as a tank. The bulldog follows you around, the imps (in their current incarnation) are stationary, think turrets. As it's early on they are still trying out different things with how they want to handle pets, and the AI still has kinks as you might expect. I won't comment too much on how the play felt because it's still undergoing changes and in the form it was in in that build it was a bit cumbersome. I ended up going back to the weapons.

Shapeshifting had different skill trees to turn you into a melee oriented zombie or a demonic shaman. I went with the Shaman because it had a heal/shield ability that I thought would work well with my pets. It served well to keep my hairless demonic bulldog thingy alive. The shift only lasted about a minute before I reverted back to my pierced, tattooed self.

Personally I think I'm more twitchy when it comes the the FPS perspective that I ended up in most of the time, so I stuck with guns / eel launchers etc. It'll be interesting to see what direction they take the pets.

The graphics were good. The characters are stellar. If you like the high detail vanity aspect of Guild Wars then you'll love the detail in Hellgate. They're still working on art assets etc. so not everything was finished but the Templar armor is very very nice. It looks close enough to the stuff shown in the trailer not to disappoint. The unclad characters are ok if unspectacular. But it's still early on and most of the time they'll be covered in gear anyway.

The demons were demony, the zombies were zombie'ish. One caveat I'd give is that you shouldn't expect Oblivion-like combat. Things don't feel as kinetic as they did in that game. This is a game where you are meant to go through throngs of baddies so think of it as a different sandbox.

We ended up playing into the wee hours of the morning and my gf lost time while playing, not realizing it was already 3am. I actually spent my time trying to break the game and ended up doing it by cheating. I found a gun listed in a shop that had no icon, it was also the most expensive gun in the shop. So I sold everything I had except the armor I was wearing in order to buy it. It turns out the gun was a new asset and it's scale was a bit off. When I equipped it the entire world went into a bizarre shadowed, visible/not visible weird visual effect. When I went outside it became a little bit more clear.. my gun was about as big as a city block, and I was inside of it :P

I only add that to stress that this game is still very much in development and will probably see lots of changes before it approaches finality. I will say that I had an ok time in singleplayer but I spent most of my time wishing it had multiplayer enabled for that build.

Oh yeah, almost forgot. The UI is a work in progress. I made several comments about the look and feel (for me as an individual) and Bill said the feedback was nice and that it's still being polished etc.

Once more things become common knowledge I'll be able to share more but for now I can't say much more.