Demons in 2D were more fun than demons in 3D.
Hype, arrogance and finances are often the three prime killers of games. Sometimes it just takes one to finish a game off. Other times a developer manages to achieve all three with all too predictable results. This is the story of Hellgate: London and its developer Flagship Studios whom promised us something remarkable and fantastic, tried to do too much in too little time and then crashed and burned when the money dried up.
Flagship Studios was formed in 2003 by former Blizzard North employees that had worked on some game named Diablo. Their experience and skills let them to believe that they could do something much more and they set out to develop their first game, Hellgate: London. It would be a hybrid action RPG game with both offline single player and online multi player gameplay. The story would take place on Earth infested by demons that traveled from hell through gates aptly named hellgates. You play as a hero whose job it is to smash these demons in the tunnels and streets of the city of London. Nothing ground breaking, but since it was being made by former Blizzard employees, one can easily guess how fierce the hype machine got. After all, if they figured out how to make killing demons in top down view stupidly fun, how hard could it be to do it in first and third person?
The game was officially announced in 2005. It would have an optional subscription model whereby those that forked over $10 a month would get access to perks like the ability to create guilds, extra storage space and access to special content in the form of regular events. Everyone else could still play online but wouldn't get the perks and instead would feel like second class citizens. There was significant uproar and backlash over this model and the developer later went on to admit they knew even before the game launched that this was not a good idea. Since income from these subscriptions would be required to keep the game servers and subsequent development going the games future was already looking bleak.
On October 31st 2007 the game launched. Right from the start just looking at the games version number folks knew something was not right. The game shipped as version 0.5. It is standard industry practice that when a game goes final or retail it starts off as version 1.0 which denotes the original and complete product. During development the version numbers typically go up in increments of 0.1 for major milestones until the game reaches 1.0. If a game launches early or development exceeds the original scope and planning most developers regardless of what the internal version number is change it to say 1.0 for launch which may not be very honest but it does present the product in a complete light. That was not so with Hellgate which made it apparent that the game was half baked and the developers weren't willing to hide that fact.
Public reception to the game was mixed. The majority of reviews were around the 70% favorable mark. This certainly wasn't enough to sink the game but it also wasn't enough to justify the hype the game had received. It ended up as an above average game and far from the stellar product that most thought, or at least hoped it would be. The game was so hyped up that nothing short of perfection would have sufficed. Its unfinished launch and subsequent technical problems guaranteed to put a damper on things. This is why hype can backfire big time if you can't deliver on your promises.
Technically the game had quite a number of bugs and issues stemming from its incomplete launch. Many class skills and abilities either did not function correctly or at all. Since skill choices were permanent and there was no way of knowing which skills even worked or how effective they would be players could and often would create flawed or gimped characters if they didn't spend a whole lot of time trolling the games forums reading every last bit of information beforehand. The game featured DirectX 10 support, but turning that feature on would cut your frame rate almost exactly in half. Crashes and performance sucking memory leaks were very common for many and proved to be one of the most enjoyment degrading aspects. All together the games technical issues were a huge drag on its initial popularity. I was one of those that didn't pay attention to the game until a month prior to launch so hype didn't factor into things but those darn bugs sure made it hard to enjoy that what was working as intended.
It wasn't just technical problems that bogged the game down. While it had lots of great ideas, many were poorly implemented or had significant flaws. Levels were randomly generated which while initially offering a nice amount of variety players quickly would notice repetition in the modules the game used to create the levels. It also didn't help that the levels were all quite linear and did not lend themselves to any sort of exploration or alternative means of completion. Playing the game online would allow the player to interact with others when at the quest hub stations but once you entered a level if you weren't grouped you would play alone. Combined with significant instancing of the hub stations and the complete lack of requirement to interact with other players and the net result was that playing online was only a little more interesting than playing alone offline. For most the only benefit of playing online was that the multiplayer version of the game got patches before the single player version. And then there was the issue of broke level scaling on difficulties like Nightmare mode whereby it was simply impossible without some sort of cheating to complete the game. Even months later after many patches the last boss could not be killed with his health at 80%+ after an hour of bashing his face in. And then the game would crash and you would lose all progress. I had to buy a new keyboard after that one.
Later the developer went on to say that the game launched early and while they may have wanted to keep it in development a while longer, once they dedicated advertising revenue promoting a specific release date, that was it, things were set in stone and the deadline could not budge. While the choice for release date initially may have seemed sound and reasonable it apparently quickly turned out to be a problem. Flagship planned to launch the game in multiple regions and markets at the same time. This burdened the team with a whole lot of work that otherwise would have been carried out after launch. Ultimately upon launch the game was missing half a year of development time to truly complete it. Since any game gets to launch only once in any given market or area, launching in so many markets at once with an incomplete product meant that Flagship Studios had missed not just one but all opportunities at having a good initial reception. Couldn't have they waited until the North American version was perfected and then launched elsewhere?
To the credit of the developer, patches for the game came at regular intervals. These addressed the balance problems between classes, repaired or reworked the many broken skills, added new items, added new areas and so forth. So it's not like they released the game and left it an unpatched mess. The problem is a games audience is not infinitely patient. They want to enjoy the game they purchased and don't want to wait weeks or months for serious problems to be addressed and resolved, especially if they are paying a monthly fee. This is perfectly understandable and while one would think that maybe those who quit early would come back later when things have improved that theory is often disproved. Once a person stops playing a product due to discontent and moves on to greener pastures they will rarely look back. By July 11th 2008 the writing was on the wall and Flagship Studios financial trouble forced them to lay off most of the staff.
Many started coining the phrase Flagshipped which essentially meant "screwing up Flagship style". To us what happened to Hellgate is nothing short of a total SNAFU. Its incomplete launch, untested business model and overambitious plans were a recipe for disaster. Today the game is no more with the online servers having been shut down as of January 31st, 2009 and further development ceasing. Having lasted only about 15 months those that splurged out $150 for a lifetime subscription didn't get the shaft nor did they come out on top. There are many lessons to be learned from what happened to Hellgate and Flagship Studios, one that we certainly hope other developers paid close attention to.
