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HGL Online
From Hellgatewiki.com
We full anticipate that a very large number of people will be playing this game without paying a subscription. We're going to be making those people happy, we're going to keep sustaining that group and making sure this is a popular online game for a long time.
--Tyler Thompson, IGN video interview, e3 2007
See the Multiplayer page for more general HGL online information.
Contents |
Subscriber Status
The HGL Online experience comes in two flavors. Free online multiplayer gaming for anyone who owns the game and has a valid cd-key, and a Subscriber mode, which costs $9.95 a month and has lots of extra features. As Flagship has repeatedly stressed, you don't need to pay a dime to play HGL online for free, with secure character storage. You can play happily without paying the subscription fee. The subscription system is an MMO-style bonus, with regular content updates, and lots of other nifty features you may or may not feel are worth the money.
Subscribers
- Regular content updates, small ones every month and large ones every three months. (ie. new quests, dungeons, weapons, monsters, etc. that can only be accessed by subscribed players.)
- Can create guilds.
- 24/7 Customer support.
- More character slots/larger shared stash.
- Additional play modes, hardcore, pvp, rp, etc..
- Hopefully there will never be server queues but -if- there are then subscribers get priority.
Free Play
- Does have customer support but it isn't 24/7 premium customer support.
- Can join guilds but can't found a guild or use guild officer functions.
- Can play with subscribed players in all areas of the game that come with the shipped game but not in new areas added post launch.
- Can not use 'subscriber only' items. It should be noted that subscriber only items are not more powerful/unbalanced items but rather have flashier appearances or simply new items that still fit in the overall balance scheme.
- Includes patching/balance updates. (in case that's not obvious)
- On the same secure servers as 'subscriber' players.
Other Tidbits
- Characters of subscribing players will have access to different game modes, such as Arena PVP, Elite difficulty, Hardcore and potentially others.
- Flagship is considering loyalty bonuses, for people who maintain constant subscriptions for 12 or 18 or 24, etc months. Special item rewards that are more about being neat and unique than super powerful unbalancing tools.
- Subscriber's characters will not be deleted if their account goes inactive. You do not need to keep paying $10 a month to keep them from being deleted. You will simply be unable to access any characters beyond the free level's character limit - currently three.
- Subscriber accounts will in some yet to be determined way rank their top three characters, so if their subscription lapses they can choose which three will be accessible as part of the free online play.
- There will be subscriber only perks and features available from the day Hellgate: London ships, so there is a reason to subscribe from the start. The first special event is a Halloween themed event to coincide with the game's Halloween launch.
More Subscriber Only Features
- The subscriber only areas will be structured like another subway station, with multiple gateways off to the extra PvE dungeons, PvP arenas, and other special game types. Only characters of subscribed players will be able to enter this station, so it may function as a sort of Subscriber only private club.
- Flagship has plans to add content, story, quests, and more with the subscription content. It won't just be more of the same "further adventures of" type levels where nothing new ever happens. The plot will advance beyond where the main game ends.
- Subscriber only content will cater largely to higher level characters, but there will be plenty of dungeons for low and mid level characters to experience as well, in addition to level-sorted PVP and other special game types.
- Subscriber only content will be as varied and random as the rest of the game. There will be special, rare content levels that hardly ever spawn, just as they do in the rest of the game.
- Flagship has plans for all types of bonus areas and levels. One that Bill Roper enthusiastically described at Community Day was a sort of monster fountain. A big boss monster would continue spawn in a dungeon, and when it was killed another, slightly stronger monster would spawn. And when it died, a third, and so on. Flagship envisions a player finding this area, fighting until the monsters grow too strong, then calling in friends via the in-game chat system so a group of players could fight together against monsters that kept getting stronger and stronger forever.
Tiered Service Controversy
Since the announcement of the subscription and free service differences, players have engaged in a great deal of debate over the service. A major worry of some is that the free HGL Online service will eventually just serve as a demo for the subscription service. Players will come in for free, see all the good stuff they're missing, and either quit, or pay the subscription fee. This may be unavoidable, but as some have argued, "What's the problem?" HGL's free service will be far more robust than the free service most MMORPGs offer, and in most comparable titles there are no free services; just the month you get with the purchase of the game itself.
Playing free HGL Online will probably not be for power gamers or those who want to play a lot of Hellgate: London. If you must "keep up with the Joneses" then you'll want to subscribe, to get access to all the content areas, all the equipment, and all the online features. For instance, even if Flagship sticks to their plan to not offer more powerful equipment to subscribing players, they are going to offer more dungeons. These dungeons will necessarily be high level, and will necessarily increase the odds of subscribing players finding more top items. This will inevitably lead to subscribing players having more of the best stuff, even if their best stuff isn't better in any way other than appearance. And most players assume that eventually Flagship will have to add more top level loot that will probably be subscription only, or that subscribers will have a much better chance of finding with more dungeons/demons capable of dropping it.
This forum thread is a good primer for the basic issues in this debate, with any number of detailed, coherent arguments on both sides of the issue.
It seems likely that the subscription service for HGL will eventually be seen as mandatory for "serious" gamers and HGL-addicts, and that free HGL will be primarily for new players, or people who only play occasionally due to time constraints, other games coming first, or other reasons.
Monthly Fee Justification
Flagship said all along that they'd be looking into alternative streams of revenue to support Hellgate: London's online operations. They didn't want Hellgate: London to be like Diablo II; with nothing but a ladder and a patch every 12-18 months. They want to keep adding content and features all the time -- the question is how best to pay for that.
"Creating continuing content costs a lot of money since you have to keep a team on the game at all times. When you’re running an MMO, it costs even more since you have the physical and virtual infrastructure to pay for. Players, however, have shown a desire to keep playing in a world they love and understand that this isn’t free for the developer. Oblivion made a great choice to create new content in bite-size pieces and let people buy what they want as they want. This is a very popular model across Asia right now and has allowed a lot of companies the latitude to make some very fun and compelling games and, most importantly, continue to support them. There are many ways to pay for this continuing content and support – from a monthly subscription fee to purchased items to time cards to in-game advertising to releasing expansions every 4-6 months. We have not decided our exact model yet, but when we do, we’ll let you know."
--Bill Roper, October 2006, Strategy Informer interview
What aspects of Hellgate: London would and should cost money to play online was the subject of much player debate, a situation that boiled over in early January 2007, when Bill Roper was (mis?)quoted talking about their pricing plan, and his comments made it sound like players would have to pay to play Hellgate: London online. Controversy and complaints ensued, until the waters were calmed by Flagship COO Max Schaefer.
"We want the best of both worlds: free play for both single- and multi-player, AND an ongoing revenue model to fund the expansion of our world through ongoing content - something we never were able to do with the Diablo series at Blizzard. Exactly how we get there is the subject of ongoing discussion, but rest assured we're committed to significant free online multi-player play!"
--Max Schaefer
Most players seem to accept that everything can't be free with Hellgate: London, and that the game out of the box will be a full game, one you can play online for free. That there's additional, ongoing content online, for those who wish to pay for it, is still a point of contention for some.
Bill Roper tried to clarify things with fuller remarks after the controversy.
"We'll probably have some kind of detail in the next month or two as to our pricing model, but the design is both a stand alone as well as an MMO, so we want to be able to hit both markets just like we did with the Diablo titles. There are a lot of people that in some instances actually can't get online, and there are also people who are online but for gaming they aren't sure if they want to make that commitment to pay the monthly fee and go online. They can get the game and play the standalone, and get 30 or 40 hours' worth of gameplay. If they like that, they can go online and we'll have a good ramp of some kind for them to go online and check out some of the services. Exactly how we handle that, whether it'll be a trial or whether they can check out some of the game for free, we're still hammering out the final details. Then beyond that it will be pay to play, and again we're about a month out from announcing more on that. But what you're getting with that service is you're getting 24/7 customer service, secure servers, databases, and the biggest thing is that you're getting continuing content. We'll have a full dev team that's on the project from day one. Actually, right when you buy the game, when it launches there will already be content available that you can't get in the single-player -- additional monsters, areas, all the community and economy things, you'll be able to form guilds, auction houses, all those things you expect from MMOs."
--Bill Roper, January 2007
Bill spoke to CVG in July 2007 to defend the online pricing plan.
"We wanted to have the best of both worlds: to give people the free experience they're expecting, because this is from the Diablo team, but at the same time to provide continuing content," Roper told PC Zone magazine before discussing exactly what players will get for their $9.99 a month.
He continued, "We want to be able to stream things into the game continuously - additional gameplay modes, mods, quests, monsters and environments, special events for special days, weekly events, things that are ongoing and that go above and beyond balance fixes and bugs - even up to including new factions and character classes".
Roper explained that a fixed, regular schedule won't be applied to such updates but provided an example of how "at the end of every quarter or something, we do a big thing such as adding a new character class or some story".
The subscription, he said, is a way for Flagship Studios to be able to maintain the live team that produces the updates for the game and to interact with the community to see what they'd like added.
--Computer and Video Games, July 2007
Player Acceptance
After the various controversies and the subscription service announcement, the Unofficial HGL Site ran a vote, and judging by the results, most future HGL players are okay with paying a subscription fee.
Will you pay $9.95 a month for the "Elite" HGL Online service?Total votes: 523
- 29.6% -- 1) Absolutely. From day one.
- 29.4% -- 3) Undecided. I'll see how Elite looks when I start playing for free.
- 15.9% -- 2) Probably, but I want to hear more details first.
- 13.0% -- 4) It's extremely unlikely.
- 12.0% -- 5) No way.
How well these results translate to the general gaming population who aren't yet paying that much attention to Hellgate: London (as evidenced by their not voting in polls on fansites) remains to be seen. Most players may think paying an extra monthly fee is silly when they can just play the game for free, or they may go the other way and look at $10 as 50% cheaper than WoW and other major MMORPGs and think it a bargain. Most of the controversy about the subscription fees was between early-adopters of HGL, who had it in their heads that it would be free. The influx of fans who come along once the beta begins and the game approaches release may never have heard of the game before the subscription fees were announced, and will therefore not think anything of it.
Press Coverage
Flagship's announcement of the fee structure for Hellgate: London online was accompanied with an impressive media blitz. This page was written with information taken from the following sources, but follow the links for full details.
- Games for Windows magazine scans broke the news.
- Bill Roper's Gamespot UK Interview added more details.
- Lee Dotson bullet point lists the service differences.
- Bill Roper's open letter to HGL fans explained Flagship's goals.
- Bill Roper's EuroGamer interview answered more of the same questions.
