Hellgate:London

[LochnarITB]

Just wondering something. WoW was also a complete friggin mess when it was released. Is HG:L even worse?

-Bolty

They really can't be compared. World of Warcraft is just that, a world. The mess that it was(is?) in large part resulted from the depth and breadth of what there was to do. As your toon matured out of its little starting zone, the variety of directions they could go grew and grew. HGL is very linear. I would call it a maturing of the Diablos into a FPS that is getting hyped as a MMORPG seemingly mainly because people can play together in a manner very similar to Diablo and it offers guilds. The game's fun comes in its frenzy and run and gun play, but that frenzy is also what needs work big time. There are just too many times when you get overwhelmed by situations you can't avoid. It also doesn't offer strategy in the way that a WoW group or raid would. It is more "put your backs together and kill or be killed". Because of its linearity and its simplified "strategy", it should have been much easier to test. Fill a room with computers, teens and game dvds and they should have shortly run into most of what people are having problems with. The only way they could have been missed is if all human factor was taken out and the "testing" was strictly scripted. This is very clearly a case of Big Publisher telling Little Developer "I don't care if you need more time - deadline is up, ship it!"