HGL Exclusive

[ST]

[glow=black]HellGate London officials report that some publications have been falsely reporting next character classes. These reports are simply just false.

However, HGL will have a magazine article sometime in October or early November detailing new character classes.

You'll just have to wait 'til then. [/glow]

 

[Laharl]

What magazines will these articles be in? I really would like to read up on it

 

[Clearcast]

Here is a quick review of the process of the game for those of you left behind in the dark. Its basicly any news thats worth mentioning from the developers ever since last Febuary '06 for your viewing pleasure. Enjoy!

Feb 23, 2006
Demons have their own languages. Some of the chittering little freaks are a bit unnerving. I'm not sure if our more humanoid offshoots of higher level castes will eventually speak English, or at least opt to in certain situations. I honestly don't know that yet. But the mightier demons far up in the hellish hierarchy are certainly capable of it.

Feb 23, 2006
Right now voices in Hellgate are used as character introductions. Voice is also interjected throughout conversations as an exclamatory. Our voice implementation seems to be inline with most Americanized action RPGs. That being said, there is not an overabundance of text in Hellgate, either. The game does not beat your face with tens of thousands of words about ye holy bracelet. It's very much like Diablo in this sense and very much unlike Neverwinter Nights or other far more text heavy RPGs.

Feb 27, 2007
1. Hellgate is very fast. Finding respite requires venturing into a safe haven, like a town. The rest of the game is filled with thousands of very evil things you kill mercilessly. So in terms of your direct comparison of Sacred = small fights with rest and Diablo = constant fight with towns, it's much more like Diablo.

2. Hellgate is an extremely focused action RPG. We're not so delusional to think we can make a 3D fighter in an RPG environment, nor do we intend to deliver an amazing twitch shooting experience. Hellgate is quite simply the action RPG Flagship Studios wanted to make. That being said, it is a far more involving action RPG than Diablo or its hundred clones -- even those few outstanding ones that have appeared on consoles. We have a cool environment, awesome monsters, great technology, nice weapons, a good storyline, and we're planning a far more compelling multiplayer component than most titles can boast.
Still, we are making an action RPG. It's exactly what Flagship wants to do. Our game is not an interactive movie and there are not thousands of different context sensitive action animations. You simply attack things in a few different ways and they die spectacularly thanks to a nicely integrated Havok physics engine. Then you continue adventuring. Very focused.

Feb 28, 2006
1. I am fully aware of motion sickness. Incidentally, it's a huge problem across Japan and some game developers have even had to completely rework their titles to alter in-game perspectives with the intention of alleviating any sensation of nausea.

Anyway, Hellgate might give you motion sickness if played from the first-person. We are certainly not including motion sickness as some kind of idiotic feature. It's totally unintentional. Actually, we have some people here who are prone to motion sickness and have become ill over the course of our early development. We've since made improvements to the game that have helped remedy the issue, but if you are prone to serious motion sickness, I can make no promises that Hellgate will be good for you.

That being said, our third-person mode is capable of zooming out far enough that you likely won't have any issues with our game.

2.

- Ugh! That's a horrible, old screenshot. If one of our artists like Lee Dotson saw that they'd probably spontaneously combust.

Anyway, that's supposed to be an injured Templar knight. He's currently the first character the player meets in the game as part of the tutorial. He's hurt, so he's slacking off on the job.

- Just to clarify, he's an NPC that's scripted to sit like that. He's not chilling as part of some rejuvenation routine.

3. There will be different difficulties. We're still looking at exactly what will change between the settings, but obviously enemies will be tougher and you'll be weaker. I wouldn't expect to fight a great deal more enemies at one time, but to rather fight enemies that are significantly stronger than they were on other settings.

March 3, 2006
1.It seems like you're wondering more about dynamic AI scaling (like in Max Payne and FarCry). Por ejemplo: If I really suck and I'm doing horribly the game dynamically gets easier... That is not in Hellgate. You pick an obvious difficulty setting you feel comfortable with before playing and then you play at that setting until the end of time (though I'm not yet sure if we'll allow gamers to change difficulty mid-play -- it might happen).

The scaling the other guys are talking about is also correct, but it basically applies to multiplayer. Like was said, you can play against Y number of demons with X power alone or you can play with four other people and face 4y number of demons at 4x power. Realistically it'll be more like 2y number of demons at 6x power, or however we end up balancing it. The key point to understand in terms of multiplayer scaling is that we can only fit so many monsters on-screen at one time.

2. There will be considerable differences between our singleplayer game and our current multi-tiered multiplayer setup, which isn't so plainly cut and dry as Diablo's. The differences between Hellgate solo and Hellgate multi will not exactly be comparable to the differences between Diablo's singleplayer and Diablo's multiplayer, however. We have a different set of changes in store, actually. Though, I obviously still can't speak much about multiplayer.

3. In my time here I've seen no indication whatsoever that the divine forces of Heaven will play any significant role in combating Hell, but Templars are super powered killing machines who wield the righteous wrath of God in flaming sword form, so who's to say there's not a little blessing going on behind the scenes?

No, I don’t believe you'll meet any notable servants of God from the Nine Orders, be they Seraphim, Cherubim, Throne, Dominion, Virtue, Power, Principality, Archangel or Angel. Though it would be pretty awesome if some valiant heroes were sent down to seriously mess shit up when times got dark.

March 8, 2006
1. I believe we'll have various localized versions of Hellgate for markets including, but not limited to: North America, UK, Germany, France, Italy, Spain (a Spanish version that applies around the world, anyway), Sweden, China (Mandarin, I believe), Japan, Korea, and Thailand.

I'm doubtlessly forgetting a few.

2. Q. Why does hell invade earth all of a sudden in the game? Is there a reason along the storyline or is hell just casually pissed by everything living that has neither horns nor tentacles?
A. They've been trying to invade for thousands of years, but are only now able to. The reason why they can is a major part of the storyline. Their desire to, however, is pretty simple. They hate us and want our world to expand their dominion. They feed off us and our world as if we were cattle. They look upon us as a hunter would a piece of cooking meat that doesn't know it's supposed to be cooking.

3. We will have cinematic sequences in the game. How many there are and where exactly they'll be interjected, I do not yet know.

March 11, 2006
There will certainly be penalties (and we will have our own sort of hardcore mode), but in general we are not into overly punishing the average player who's just trying to have a good time with our game, unless he really wants to be punished.

March 18, 2006
1. You can certainly avoid shots by sidestepping and moving around corners or behind obstacles, but some magical attacks have a tendency to impact anyway. What I'm not sure of is whether or not this is because of the specific attack, the current state of the game, or if it's just planned that way.

2. HG:L does have collision detection. You cannot bull through enemies as if you were a ghost, nor can you slide through obstructions. But, once an enemy dies, it can be walked through just like every other game out there (since the corpses pile up and navigating around them would be impossible in some places, and probably also difficult to calculate and maintain).

3. Q.what about ingame loading screens? or when will a loading screen appear?
after each street? or "act" or what?
A.Performance is fine. Even right now with unfinished code the game runs well at high detail settings and on modest machines. As for loading screens, right now the pathways between instances and safe hubs have load points. The load points are triggered by walking through a blue portal /shield thing that's still a work in progress. The actual loading screen is just a piece of Hellgate art right now. I'm not sure what it will be in the end.

April 06, 2006
1. Q.Is there kind of a reorganized army, where plain soldiers fight, or has the world to be saved by heros like you and me?
A.There are survivors. That's basically it. Those who have survived all contribute in some way to fighting the demons. Some can be lumped into our classes while others are just people who make things.

2. Like in most action RPGs, Hellgate features different levels of conversation. Some NPCs just stand around and say "Hello" while others contain pertinent information. Right now everyone can be spoken to, even if they do just say, "Hi. Now move along."

3. Q.where do the people in hellgate live?
A.Mainly, they live underground in relative safety.

April 20, 2006
1. Most of the music is a compilation of ambient, spooky noises but we also have industrial music and some faster paced epic orchestral stuff with demonic overtones. So it can sometimes sound like a mixture of God of War and Ministry.

2. Q.Is Hellgate: London an FPS?
A.Is EverQuest a first-person shooter? It has a first-person mode. What about Deus Ex? Thief?

We have shooting, but that does not make Hellgate a shooter. We have a first-person mode, but that does not make Hellgate an FPS. We're an action-RPG with multiple perspectives. Besides, we also have a third-person mode, from which many players will game exclusively.

And indeed there is nothing wrong with location based damage. We just don't have it. Precise aiming was never something we wanted to feature in our game. This is partly because we're striving to deliver the basic click heavy experience of an action-RPG, but also because we want our players to be able to enjoy Hellgate like they would Diablo. That is, if you choose to play from the third-person and from a vantage point high above your character, we cannot also require you to aim precisely. Controls simply don't work like that.

April 28, 2006
Q.is there a chance to flee when monsters attack us?....run to win or will they always stick on our asses
A.You can flee, but you're going to have to run pretty damn far.

May 22, 2006
Jessica, because that's her name, will eventually be an NPC in our game. Her exact role has yet to be determined, however. But after having listened to her very loudly whine for the entirety of E3, I'm pushing for her to die horribly within the first five or six seconds of gameplay. It wouldn't even be a heroic death, either. I just want her to fall down a whole lot of stairs and land in some acid.

May 24, 2006
1. Once you visit a station you can reach it instantaneously from any other station via a railway post. There are also recall devices and town portals.

2. We have a lot of DX10 specific graphical effects planned. More rubble, better fog, better effects...all kinds of crap. It should be a fairly significant change. But since we don't have a functioning DX10 version yet, there's no way for me to prove any of that, you know?

August 11, 2006
1. We don't have a rest state in. Pat was trying to explain that it was like punishment in WoW for players who game at length and that we wouldn't feature it in Hellgate.

2. By consequence I mean the Player fails to achieve a result and so bad things happen to him/her or other characters in the world. But the Player will always be allowed to progress. No story related consequence will ever require a reset. Basically, we hope to levy penalties onto Players who fail objectives without giving them cause to start over. So no, it's like you just die and do it again. Though that can still obviously happen.

3. We have towns and safe areas that may or may not be bound to towns. Towns are useful in the same ways they were in Diablo. It's all about story, items and rejuvenation in towns. Our towns are also bound to major sections of the game, but forward and backward movement between them is possible. Unfortunately, our towns are not dynamic environments in which players can do many things.

4. We have both active and passive healing in the game. Passives are bound to auras. Actives are bound to items and directed skills. The exact tree that separates skills (if there will be one) has not yet been finalized. The current plan is to not require everyone to fend for themselves. However... Our characters are offense oriented. None are designed to be buff classes. With that in mind, players will not be encouraged to rely upon another's passive or active healing to consistently save their own assses.

5. Health rejuvenation is not instantaneous. Our medical kits and skills that replenish health do so over 00:XX amount of time.

6. We have two maps. There's the world map that shows how our instances are interconnected and there's the in instance automap that fills as players explore. The world map is in-game and takes up the center of the screen (what you see in that You Tube link). No menu navigation is required. The Automap functions the same way, but can either be positioned in the center of the screen or it can be tossed up in the right-hand corner. Further UI accessibility options are being developed into the game as we speak.

7. We may actually have a "player bank" in the game so that it won't be necessary to mule your items.

Information sourced from HellGateGuru. Thanks guys for finding the time to keep us well informed!