Hellgate: Lacking?

I’ve had a chance over the last few weeks to give the highly anticipated Hellgate: London beta a shot. As much as I hate to say it, I’m finding the game a bit lacking so far. Granted, I haven’t really dug that deep into it yet, but after progressing about 10 levels in with one class and dabbling with another, I’m not all that impressed.

I was really hoping to have something that played like a much-needed update to Diablo, but it only partially succeeds. Perhaps the closest Hellgate comes to Diablo is in its fast-paced combat. You can take on literally dozens of monsters at once and, in classic Diablo fashion, take them out about as fast as they come at you. It’s a fun formula, if not a bit repetitive.

Unfortunately, I think Flagship may have gone too far in the “MMO” direction with the game. There are countless random quests to pickup in the “towns”, marked with the now familiar exclamation point and question marks, spanning all of your classic MMO quest types: collection quests, kill X enemies quests, kill generic mini-boss quests, etc. I don’t remember the Diablo’s being quite this side-quest heavy, and I don’t feel like they really serve that much of a purpose in a game like this.

Adding to the “MMO” feel is the way “skills” are performed. Something that has really annoyed me about the different Diablo “clones” is the fact that none of them seem to pick up on how the right mouse button worked in the Diablo’s. In Hellgate, as in other “clones” like Titan Quest, the right button is assignable, but not on-the-fly. In Diablo, hitting a number key would immediately assign the right button to that ability. It’s subtle, but it makes a big difference. I remember constantly switching abilities in Diablo for whatever the current task required. Hellgate simply lets you pre-assign one skill to the right button and then forces you to use the number keys to execute any other abilities. This either typically means you end up using pretty much 1 ability for most of your time playing or you start having to hit series of numbers keys while also trying to move around with the W,A,D,S setup… not really the most comfortable setup and also quite simply doesn’t feel as good as using a mouse to execute your abilities anyway.

I’ve also been sort of disappointed with the variety of environments. So far I’ve seen a bunch of randomized “sewers” setup pretty much the same way each time, Underground/Tube tunnels setup pretty much the same way each time, a few outdoor environments setup pretty much the same way, and the occasional Hellgate “arena” (basically the same for the ones I’ve seen) and “museum”-like place (which incidentally have been the most interesting places so far). Again, I only played 10 levels in, so perhaps there’s more to be seen, but so far even in this limited variety the locations really haven’t really been that interesting to look at either.

The interface, or at least educating the player on the interface, is also terrible. The retail copy of the game should be better in this regard only because it should (hopefully) come with a manual that explains things, but without a detailed manual, I’m lost. There are several pieces of your onscreen HUD that seem like you should be able to mouseover with a cursor/pointer and interact with, such as the chat box. But guess what? During normal gameplay, there is NO pointer during normal gameplay. The only way I know how to bring up the pointer is to open my inventory or skill tree, which unfortunately blocks or closes the part that I’m trying to click on. Having some experience with this I tried the “tilde” key on my keyboard to bring up the “console”. Well, the console came up, but still no mouse pointer. Other issues with the interface include the Party system. Again, having some experience with this sort of thing, I tried “P”, which, instead of bringing up a “Party” menu, instead just put me into “Auto-Party” mode. Hmm, ok… I wasn’t sure exactly what that did, but I left it on for awhile to see what would happen. Suddenly I joined a party, but they were doing a quest I had just finished, so I wanted to leave. So, how do I leave the party? Normally such a thing would take place in the “Party” menu, but no such luck since I couldn’t even find a “Party” menu. Looking through my options menu and at the controls revealed nothing about how to deal with my party. As such, I’ve been playing the game solo so far as well.

There’s even some strange design and interface issues around the crafting system. Since I basically don’t know what I’m doing, I basically just “break down” pretty much any non-”Legendary” item into components. There are various machines and people in the game that let you use the components craft new things or upgrade your current equipment. To craft something new, you just select the thing you want to craft and then tell the game to craft. It will automatically take the components out of your inventory and create it for you. To upgrade something, you need to place the item you want to upgrade into a slot and then place all of the required components into another slot. Huh? Why doesn’t it just tell me the cost like the other thing and automatically take the components out of my inventory? As it was, I had no idea if it was safe for me to place my entire stack of 100 Component A’s into the slot when it told me I only needed 4, and I couldn’t figure out how to separate out just “4″ from my stack either (and apparently no one in the “town” that I was trying to chat to wanted to answer my questions about it).

As if all this weren’t enough, the game is still pretty buggy. It’s much better than it was even a few weeks ago, when it seemed to crash on me at any random moment. But, as an example, I’d say I have maybe around a 50% chance of having the game allowing me to exit “gracefully”. When it doesn’t, it will slow my computer to a crawl and (apparently) take up a ridiculous amount of RAM and temporary HD space (as I briefly received a “low disk space” warning in Windows after my last failed “exit”.) How difficult can it be to exit a game, particularly after I’ve already quit out of the server? That’s just unacceptable.

In the end, I just feel like it’s a game that’s kind of fun, but ultimately disappointing. It plays sort of like a mashup of WoW, Diablo, and Tabula Rasa (which I also beta tested and disliked), but lacks that special something that made Diablo so much fun to play. Is it possible that I’ve simply outgrown this kind of game? I still look very fondly back at the Diablo’s and remember emptying untold amounts of hours into the games (particularly Diablo 2’s expansion pack). I’ve been waiting for a sequel for years, so I don’t think it’s just that I don’t like these kinds of games any more. If the right one came along, I think I’d embrace it.

In any case, it’s possible that Hellgate:London could get a lot better as I progress in levels, but then the game just takes too long to start. It’s also possible that the game will strengthen with patches and updates post-release, which is unfortunately what I’ll now be waiting for before I decide whether to purchase the game.

I suppose the good news in this is that we can strike another game off of my list, and now I’ll have more time/money for all the other great games that are coming out this season.