From Hellgatewiki.com

Combat is at the core of the Hellgate: London play experience and it can be carried out in almost infinite ways. All six of the character Classes have their own specialties, techniques, and combat skills/spells, and by combining those with more than one hundred types of weapons which can be infinitely customized with mods, players will never run out of new combat styles.

Contents 1 Weapon Variety 2 Melee Combat 3 Hard and Soft Targeting 3.1 Damage Matrices 4 Range and Targeting

Weapon Variety

There are a lot of different types of weapons in Hellgate: London. The design team has promised us over 100 different base types, and they are very, very different. It's not like most RPGs with 10 kinds of swords, or maces, or axes, that all do physical damage and that vary only by damage amount, swing speed, and durability. Weapons deal five different types of damage, deal it immediately or over time, to a single target or over a wide area, and every type of gun varies in range, firing rate, projectile speed, damage, splash damage, and more. See the Weapons listing for much, much more detail.

A cool aspect of combat in Hellgate: London is that you're not limited to a single weapon at a time. All characters can dual wield to some extent, and mixing different types of pistols, or guns with shields or swords, adds a lot of variety to the gameplay.

"Dual wielding is actually fairly simple. Anything that is one-handed can be duel-wielded. Players can set their mouse buttons to either fire/swing both weapons together, or use them individually. It's really fun in practice!"
--Max Schaefer, October 14, 2005

Not all the weapons are meant to deal damage, either. Some simply slow or confuse monsters, and others change their behavior. One of the niftiest is the Grappler which fires a hook that attaches to monsters and reels them into range. It's best used on enemies that fly or hover just out of reach of your melee weapons.

For much of Roper's demonstration, his character was armed with a sword on her off-hand, which she alternated with her gun when the sizable hordes of enemies got too close. Things changed when she picked up the Grappler, however. The Grappler is a secondary ranged weapon that does no damage by itself, but instead is used to draw enemies close to your person, so that you can hack away at them with your melee weapon. "Fishing for monsters," as Roper put it, kind of like Scorpion in Mortal Kombat.
--Gamespy Preview, October 17, 2005

There are two-handed guns as well, with their own strengths and weaknesses when compared to one-handed pistols, and the issue is further complicated by the fact that all weapons can spawn with some semi-random number of sockets, to be plugged by the modifying weapon mods.

Melee Combat

Melee combat happens when your character equips a sword or other triggerless weapon and goes at the monsters at close range. As Hellgate: London enters alpha testing in June 2007, only Templars can equip melee weapons such as Broadswords, Holy Maces, and Cricket Bats. The design team has talked about possibly enabling melee equipment for the other factions, perhaps as a post-release feature, or a quest reward for accumulating very high faction points, but as of now those concepts remain on the drawing board. So if you want to play with swords, you'll need to pick a Blademaster or a Guardian.

Melee combat must be carried out in 3rd person view. All guns can be fired in 1st or 3rd person, but switching to a sword automatically jumps the view out to 3rd person, though the height, angle, and orientation of the camera can still be customized. (There is one known exception, the Weed Whacker, chainsaw-like weapon, which can be used by Hunters, and can be operated while in 1st person.) The reason is simply that it's too hard to control the character and aim swings while in 1st person, and it's therefore prohibited for our own good.

Melee combat works about as you'd expect; you move your character into range with the WASD control keys, use the mouse to face at the enemy, and click attack, or use one of the many special skills Templars possess for their melee attacks.

Sword fighting is fun, I'm happy to report. I didn't really care for it when I first played Hellgate: London back at E3 2006. At that time the controls didn't feel precise to me, and the Templar felt kind of "floaty." The character didn't stop moving when swinging then, and it played like I was wearing rollerskates. I'd start to swing and hit a monster once, but by the second swing the monster would be to one side or behind me, and I'd have to use the arrow movement keys to rotate around to reacquire the target. Or I'd drift backwards or to one side while swinging, and miss, or at least look like I should be missing.

Whatever caused that problem, it's been fixed. Melee combat is now solid and stable, and is quite enjoyable. The movement and damage physics are nicely handled, and when you hit monsters the impact looks and feels "real." Monsters are knocked over or hurled back by your hits, especially by the killing hit, and collisions are believable. It looks and feels like you're bouncing off of and into the demons when you run and crash into them (or vice versa), and there's none of that sticky "we're touching shoulders and neither of us can move" stuff some games are plagued by.

The animations and graphics for melee are done well too. My guardian alternated sides of his body to swing from; the default was right to left, and he'd then do a second hit bringing the sword across with a backhand. A cool feature was that if the right-to-left hit killed the demon, my avatar would hold the sword on the backhand side for a few seconds, before relaxing and moving it back to the right side of his body. This would happen if I stood still to pick up loot, or walked or ran along to find more monsters to kill, and it was a nice touch of semi-realism. There could be a lot more variety in sword movements, with over the head swings, stabs, uppercuts, bouncing hits rather than all slashes across the body, etc, but for a computer game the movements are entirely adequate. (In real life I've been training in stick/sword-fighting martial arts for several years and know how much cooler this aspect of the game could be, so forgive my pet peeve digression.)

There is some variety, though. Most of the melee skill attacks have unique animations, with leaps, spins, or twirls rather than just the normal swing with some kind of +damage. They're not just animations either; the leaping hits bring down the sword in an arc capable of striking flying enemies overhead and hitting ground targets as well.
--Flux, Mega Community Day Report, May 2007

Melee combat is quite effective against most enemies in Hellgate: London but it's realistic too. If you're close enough to hit the demons, they're close enough to hit you, and swords have issues against monsters that leap over your head, or fly around, or shoot at you from a distance. It's a good idea to carry a gun in at least one weapon switch slot, and other support weapons like the Grappler should be considered as well.

Melee combat is further complicated by the lack of "leech" weapons or skills in Hellgate: London. Unlike in Diablo II and many other RPGs, your Blademaster and Guardian can not regain lost health simply by smashing monsters to bits with melee weapons. Healing happens more slowly and usually from med kits in Hellgate: London, and this makes the Blademaster quite vulnerable at times. Yes, he can kill individual targets much more quickly than the Guardian, but they'll do him damage at the same time, and Blademasters are not suited for stationary "tanking" against huge targets, and getting surrounded by lots of monsters at once can be quite fatal. Playing a successful Blademaster will require quite a bit of strategy and positioning, to string out the enemies and quickly slaughter them one or two at a time.

Hard and Soft Targeting

One of the key differences between Hellgate: London and FPS games is how targeting works. Read our Weapons page for full details, but basically Hellgate: London determines hits, misses, and damage by factoring in your stats, your equipment, the skill you're using, the monster's stats, and more, in addition to your mouse-clicking accuracy. Hellgate: London isn't a shooter, where it's all about targeting. Hellgate: London is an RPG, where your stats and skills and equipment are the keys, assuming you possess enough coordination to at least point your weapon at the target.

The classes in the Cabalist and Templar factions enjoy "soft aim," as described here by Ivan Sulic.

"If you fire at an enemy within range while aiming within its bounding box -- meaning you have a green light, which the game will indicate -- you will score a hit unless said enemy flies out of the way, which is rare. So basically you have to look at a thing to hit it. Even then, most weapons provide splash damage and lots of leeway. And accuracy does determine chance for critical hits, BTW."
--Ivan Sulic, March 2006

The targeting reticle for Cabalists and Templars locks on if they point near the monster, and the skill in shooting for those characters is in positioning themselves so the monster remains in the firing line. Shooting slow bullets at a fast-moving target will result in lots of misses, even if your target was locked on when you pulled the trigger.

The Hunter faction, on the other hand, does not have soft lock targeting. Hunters must actually aim at the target, controlling their crosshairs with the mouse, as in a First Person Shooter game. Hunters get some lock; beam weapons will remain locked to a target once its acquired, but while Hunters have to aim more, they get some benefits as well. It can be easier to hit a moving target with a Hunter since you can aim ahead of it, or below flying targets you expect to divebomb, etc. targeting issue are further diminished by the hunter Engineer's minion Drone, which can "tank" and make monsters stand still while they attack it, and the hunter Marksman's wide variety of gun skills which include abilities such as multishot, rapidfire, homing bullets, and more.

This was my first time playing Hellgate: London since the Hunter and his FPS-style targeting went in, and I made my first character a Marksman so I could try it out. It's not that big of a deal, really. Hellgate: London has no damage matrix on the body; headshots don't do more damage than toe shots, and you can't shoot an arm and blow it off, though you might see arms fall off as part of a monster's varied and random damage/death animation. So as long as you hit the target anywhere, you're doing the same damage as a perfectly aimed bullet to the temple. Furthermore, the weapons in Hellgate: London aren't that precise. There are some guns that fire single shots, but the vast majority fire beams that lock onto the target, or clouds of poisonous gas, or throw flames or explosives, or shoot sprays of high speed darts.
--Flux, Mega Community Day Report, May 2007

Damage Matrices

While Hellgate: London has some targeting elements of a first person shooter, it does not replicate every feature of those games. There are no "headshots" or other bonus damage portions of the body on humans or demons. Hitting a monster in the foot does just as much potential damage as putting one right between its eyes (or tentacles, or whatever). This means that while hunters need to practice better accuracy to hit their targets, they are not rewarded for perfect accuracy -- they want to hit the target with as many shots as possible, rather than trying to get precision shots to the head.

This fact has been the subject of much forum debate, but since changing this would make for some dubious balancing issues between hunters and templars/cabalists, and since implementing damage matrices would require the Hellgate Team to do a tremendous amount of programming and changes to how the game calculates damage, it's highly unlikely that we'll see any changes in this aspect of the game physics.

There is bonus damage in Hellgate: London, but it works the same way that hits or misses do; it's calculate in RPG style, based on stats, skills, resistances, critical hit bonuses, and so forth. In this way hunters, templars, and cabalists are all equal, once they hit a target. It's only in the aiming mechanism that the factions and classes differ.

Range and Targeting

Range is a major factor in the function of weapons and every aspect of combat in Hellgate: London. When you point your aiming reticle at a monster you see a range display, in meters, as in the screnshot to the right. (Full shot here.) The distance displays red if you are out of range for your equipped weapon, and turns green when you are in range. The range of a weapon is a major factor in how effective it is, and how that range works with monster awareness/vision will be a huge issue in gameplay.

In Hellgate: London, players can almost always see monsters long before the monsters can see them. Seeing a monster is not the same thing as being able to shoot the monster, though. Different weapons have different ranges, and using something that lets you shoot the monsters before they "see" you and run at you is a sound strategy.

The distance display near the targeting reticle is a new addition we've enjoyed in screenshots, and it works for all characters with a ranged weapon or spell. The distance to a target is always shown if you're pointing at or near it, but you don't get a green target until you're actually in range. This is very apparent with some weapons; the Summoner now starts off with the Locust Hive rifle, and it has a very limited range. You must be within 3 meters of your target before the gun will fire, which is practically close enough to go melee combat. The difference between that and the Spark Rifle the Marksman starts with, which has an outer range of about 9 meters, is very noticeable.

I had no trouble shooting most low level monsters and killing them with the Spark Rifle before they could react to being shot and run to attack me. With the Locust Hive I had to get in close enough to shoot at them, and then run back for a few seconds while the monster chased me and my locusts swarmed over and steadily depleted the its hit points. Both guns did about the same damage over time, partially because the Spark Rifle sprays its ordinance fairly-widely, so most of the shots will always miss a single target. But with the Spark Rifle I could stand still and gun them down before they reached me, while the Locust Hive required constant run in, shoot, run back, tactics, which made the overall progress far slower, and forced my Summoner to regularly heal the damage he took while waiting for his bio-mechanical locusts to finish off the pursuing demons.

This is just one example of how range works, and I think that guns that have more range, skills that increase in range with more points added to them, and mods that boost range are all going to be quite popular. Perhaps more so than added damage in some cases, especially with faster firing weapons. Stat-happy players will be working out the exact mechanics: gun firing speed + range + damage vs. monster vision range + monster reaction time + monster movement speed + monster damage. Is it worth 10% less damage if you get 20% more range, and can therefore hit the monster before it sees you, thus adding a full second of damage depending on monster speed, etc, etc. The calculations will be interesting, and while I never got to experiment with it this time, I hold to a strategy concept I thought of during an earlier play session: equipping a long range gun to get first shot on a monster before it "sees" you and reacts, then switching to a faster firing gun with a shorter range to take it out as it charges. This could easily be accomplished with different weapons in each hand. Long range, slow-reload rifle to hit monster and make it run at you, then use a slow-firing, medium range area-damage pistol like the Grenadier, then switch to a short-range fast-fire pistol like the Spike Bolter to finish off the charging demon.
--Flux, Mega Community Day Report, May 2007