Hellgate:London

[Thecla]

Actually it is crippled and seriously so. I did not buy the game; I am playing the "beta" version but aside from not being able to advance into Monument Station the beta version is the full version and it is very lacking.

I think your comments are accurate in some ways; but, despite rough edges in the release (many things could've been much more polished than they were), I take a different perspective on the game --- though I'm pretty sure that anyone who does want to play HG:L on a consistent basis is going to have to subscribe, if they think it's worth it. And the "elite" version (available on the test servers in the beta, and I think now to anyone who buys the game) is a much tougher version of the standard game, and it's something like what the good Diablo Mods were to the original Diablo.

My main complaint is that to get more storage space I would have to buy a monthly subscription.

I'm not at all sure this should be the main issue, even for people who don't like the game. Subscribers aren't that much worse off than non-subscribers in this regard --- too much of nothing is just as tough. Why they're so stingy on item-storage space I don't quite understand; and I also wonder how the character-naming thing will go, since it seems like names never expire but people are on region-wide servers.

This is very wrong in a game that spams your inventory with useless garbage (you can not select the items you want to pick up; the game does it for you when you hit "F" and it will fill your inventory with so much crap that I spend half my time dealing with that trash. In addition to the regular decon trash those who are playing online will be spammed with many Halloween Event items, some of which stack only to "2".). The only way to create more mobile storage space without visiting town every 5 kills is to de-construct items and this requires, you guessed it, an open inventory. While the inventory is open you cannot attack or defend so pray nothing spawns on top of you while you are sorting through all your "treasures" that the "f-key" got for you. If you want to party with strangers I recommend mastering the techinique of deconstructing on the fly to lessen game play interruptions.

As pointed out elsewhere, you can select what you pick up: you target the item you want to pick up and then hit F. I found this system very easy to use and efficient. I also ended like the deconstruction system --- you take up 9 inventory slots, 8 for the scrap types (4 normal and 4 rare) and 1 for a big stack of analyzers to id anything you might be interested in (still seems unanswered whether id + deconstruct is the same as deconstruct, but that's a minor issue), and then you can put to use anything you find without having to go back to town. If your party members aren't willing to put up with that momentary delay, well I'd say that's not surprising in general D2 terms, but it's hardly something unique to HG:L as opposed to the internet. It is true that you can get interupted by monsters while doing this, but IMO it's a positive feature of the game that you can't just stand in a previously cleared area with total impunity.

There is no postal service in the game so transferring items to friends or other characters must be done online with the help of someone else.

This is defintely a problem, but I'm sure it will be fixed.

The memory leak has been improved upon since last Friday's patch but game freezing and crashes are still common. Some people might think this is okay for a new game but I disagree.

I've experienced a few crashes/freezes in the release game, and (unlike the beta) I don't think that's ok. It does seem that, for whatever reason, FSS didn't have time to fix all those issues before they released the game (not to mention some basic --- and frequently repeated --- gamplay issues, like engineer drones losing their guns).

The scenery is uninspired. Even classic Diablo had better dungeon layouts.

I agree that there's too much linearity in the dungeon layouts, but I think a lot of the scenery is really well-done.

Many of the class skills seem to be poorly developed as if the entire class was an afterthought. The inability to see what effect attribute points have combined with no option to change point distribution and only 3 character creation slots further cripples Hellgate for those who want to experiment with different character classes and skill specializations. Deleting a character is NOT a viable option to me.

I actually believe that the whole character/skll/stat/item/combat system in HG:L is pretty interesting, but it's not what one might assume from other games. I don't claim to understand it at all myself, but I think there's a lot more there than what you might see from a superficial glance. For example, items require stat points to equip them, and that's what seems to drive your stat distribution; in turn, the items you equip depend on your character class, and how you want to play that character. Some skills (reduced willpower/strenght feed) reduce your stat requirements, and low lvl skills increase in power as your character lvls, so it's not at all clear that saving up skill pts for high lvl skills is the best (nor is it the worst) strategy,

In combat, there are 4 different special effects, with subsiduary secondary effects (poison-prevent heal, shock-prevent skill use, ignite-5% reduction in life, phase-50% increase in da taken and 50% decrease in da given), which can be applied both through items and skills, and which your character may take from demons.