Picked it up on a whim on friday on the way home from work. Not really had any problems so far and enjoyed the Halloween Event, got a lot of zombots and a few helms. Had I known about the zombots not being tradeable I would have saved all the parts so I could give them to the rest of my characters whenever they get around to a shared stash/mail system.
Although I'm disapointed in the skills I've picked for my level 19 Summoner, I've leant heavily towards the Carnagor and the more I level the worse he seems to get. Even with dropping skills into the armour buff and spamming Blood link he seems to drop health fast. I've only 4 fire elementals with boosted damage so that may be the problem, I've not really had any big problems yet but just doesn't feel right. I think I was expecting to be playing my necro from D2, just under a different name.
Anyone have any experience with force elementals, as I'm probably going to try a build with them as tanks mixed in with the ranged elementals and have a warper instead of the Carnagor.
My wife plays a 23 summoner and duos with me (a 25 marksman), and her Carnagor is a huge beefcake. She focuses a lot on gear that benefits minions though, their armor/dmg/health, and she focuses on keeping her pets up and alive over doing dmg (that's my job)
I am addicted like crack.
And only a week or so ago I said "Oh, Flagship. How ye have doomed yourself with Mythos, I will never play HG:L again."
And now I haven't logged onto Mythos since the Hellgate release.
I'm not getting Founder's, since I'm skating by on a free subscription from a friend. <.<=>.>
Flagship is empty now that the release has gone through. Wait... Do the developers have FAMILIES and LIVES?!
Whoa.
Just whoa.
I've wasted enough time here for today.
I'm going to London.
anyone else get REALLY shit performance in chocolate park?
Yup, performance goes down the tube there and in its latter version in Act 5. Thank God I get my new PC tomorrow.
You know those folks who bought this game for the single player aspect are possibly cutting themselves by now, especially if they don't have an internet connection (I know, its 2007, but I work for an ISP, you'd be surprised how many folks we get who are just now connecting to this scary intarweb for the first time). While we can all stare at the light at the end of the tunnel that is the patch that will fix all these problems, those folks will live in darkness, forever crashing and memory leaking until an expansion pack graces us. At least there's some solice in the fact that those people are probably the minority.
Turn off AA and dynamic lights in Chocolate Park, it helps a lot, at least for me.
For those people who don't have an internet connection, sure it's a problem. But that same problem exists for so very many of the games released nowadays on the PC. At least with HGL when there is a patch for singleplayer it tells you when you start the game if you have any kind of internet connection.
While the through about bringing Holy Wrath upon the minions of Hell is something I might enjoy, this game got 3 stars of gamespy.com, who's known for inflating ratings.
Why? Is it that meh?
This is a 97 page thread. Do you think there are 97 pages detailing how much this game sucks?
I know; the discontinuity is what I'm wondering about. If it rocks, why is it getting so-so ratings?
So, apparently the "letting people in on the fun" of Halloween? Yeah, it's more like "the first taste is free". I logged on to find all of the plans, organs and blood for my Zombot marked "Subscriber Only".
I hope the non-subscribers that made their pet enjoyed it for the week or so they had it. Now it... just sits in their bank? Or can they still use the completed ones.
That little detail was a moment of sour after looking forward to logging on and seeing if I could scrounge up the last 5 blood for mine, past the holiday as we are.
My Engineer made 10, but so far I've encountered a memory leak, several crashes, infinite loading (I assume infinite, but if a level isn't up in 5 minutes, it's time to try to close the program, and reboot if that fails), and the continuing "meh" that the lack of an easy way to move things between characters and the lack of respec's brings.
I'm not entirely poo-poo'ing on the game, but I'm glad I didn't go for the Founders. Just like the Holiday events aren't "$10 a month" of a draw, the whole bargain sure isn't "$220 worth", after the CE that is.
Perhaps it will be some day, and it's not nasty enough to stop me from playing entirely, but as much as I want this to be the next Diablo 2 (and I was there for the D2 release, I remember what it was like), so far I'm not getting that vibe.
Forar on
First they came for the Muslims, and we said NOT TODAY, MOTHERFUCKER!
I really want to hand Flagship cash for the founder's offer, but (especially in games with hardcore character modes) the stability needs to be damn near flawless before diverting staff to content.
Okay, this is a common misconception.
Staff do not get diverted from coding/optimising the engine to make Halloween/Guy Fawkes content. Flagship has dedicated programmers for all the key aspects of the engine (graphics, sound, etc) and while they may have some bleed into other areas, they do not get taken off engine optimisation, especially when there are still issues for some (note, not all) people, to make content.
I'd like to think that I provide a decently balanced viewpoint, if a little biased towards Flagship. However, I've been playing Hellgate for a long time now, and have seen the progress they have made. There's little reason that the progress in regards to technical issues will slow, if anything it's actually looking better than it did in beta because of the current patch cycle they're running through.
For me, they have to keep with weekly or fortnightly patching for technical issues. They have said that they want to get things like auction houses and mail in, even if it doesn't coincide with a content patch. This is great, but stuff like engine optimisation needs to be given the same priority for release.
They also need to focus on the higher end of the game and swiftly start balancing that. Even if they don't get it right first time (and seriously, it's balancing, who the hell gets it right first time), they need to start making movement on it. Otherwise you have people like s3rial getting bitter (and rightly so) that their character is nigh useless in that difficulty.
I seriously want to know what the fuck EA's QA teams were doing for the 6 months or so leading up to release. There is no fucking way that a team of that size could have contributed so little to game feedback given the mechanisms and methods available today for game testing. I get the impression that there was no multiplayer testing of the game aside from the beta, because Act 4 was atrocious for grouping.
Flagship also needs to communicate far quicker and clearer. Ivan is very good at getting the information out and cutting through the bullshit, but it doesn't look like he's given that opportunity very often. Tiggs seems hamstrung by something, to the point that she often doesn't post the downtime soon enough for many people to realise. Putting a news item reader in the launcher and making sure that someone, somewhere has the responsibility to keep that updated 24/7 would go a long way to sorting out some of the frustration coming out of the playerbase at the moment.
The things I'd like to see addressed (in no kind of order) are:
1) UI. Hire a UI programmer or three and let them fix it. Paperdoll displays, chat interfaces, the whole lot.
2) Guilds. I hate being the only one able to guild invite. I'm sure that there are people I have simply been unable to invite because of the timezone issue, despite the inordinate amount of time I spent logged in over the weekend.
3) Quests in multiplayer. They just fixed the CIC quest for multiplayer. After how many goddamn months of it being that way, all the way through alpha and beta.
4) Balancing. Harder difficulty should not be a case of just jacking up all the numbers, more monsters instead of harder hitting monsters is generally going to be a more satisfying experience. At the moment battles mean that characters with low shields and low health get minced very swiftly.
5) Communication. Have someone who is just a player advocate. While the communication has been better than say Blizzard's was, there's still a significant sense of detachment between the interests of the playerbase and the response from the community management team.
6) Travis Baldree. Give him a week off Mythos and let him redesign the skill trees in HGL. And don't let egos get in the way; whoever's responsible for the skills in HGL didn't succeed in making it a crowd-pleasing aspect of the game. Regardless of how balanced it might be from a spreadsheet point of view, or how it's matched the internally-stated goals, it needs to go and Travis has demonstrated he knows how to make it cool.
7) Engine. The engine programmers need to fix heavily for the next two months on absolutely tracking down the most widely-impacting memory leaks, graphical glitches, geometry issues, etc. Just get it done, there's no way you can allow it to continue. Yes it runs great for a lot of people (including me), but the game is getting by in spite[/I] of those issues because of the novelty and goodwill. Both of those will burn out quickly if the issues continue or (as has been suggested by some posters since the latest patch) get worse.
So, apparently the "letting people in on the fun" of Halloween? Yeah, it's more like "the first taste is free". I logged on to find all of the plans, organs and blood for my Zombot marked "Subscriber Only".
I hope the non-subscribers that made their pet enjoyed it for the week or so they had it. Now it... just sits in their bank? Or can they still use the completed ones.
.
Just to reiterate, that locked to subscribers is a glitch, they know about it, they are fixing it tomorrow, here's the post from the main site.
Well I'm glad I kept the stuff so I just need to find 5 more blood for the Zombot. I suspected that it'd be fixed, but logging in to find my 80% done Bot locked out was pretty lame.
Forar on
First they came for the Muslims, and we said NOT TODAY, MOTHERFUCKER!
So, apparently the "letting people in on the fun" of Halloween? Yeah, it's more like "the first taste is free". I logged on to find all of the plans, organs and blood for my Zombot marked "Subscriber Only".
The reason why the Halloween content was unlocked for non-subscribers was because of the billing issues they had. If you want to access subscriber content, you need to subscribe. Edit: Apparently all people get access to the Halloween content on and ongoing basis, which is a nice exception.
My Engineer made 10, but so far I've encountered a memory leak, several crashes, infinite loading (I assume infinite, but if a level isn't up in 5 minutes, it's time to try to close the program, and reboot if that fails), and the continuing "meh" that the lack of an easy way to move things between characters and the lack of respec's brings.
You brought up Diablo. No respecs there. Why do you need to respec at level 10?
Have you:
1) Defragmented.
2) Updated Windows/DirectX. Especially with the Vista memory hotfixes (that are not available through Windows update) if you are running Vista.
3) Updated all drivers. Not just graphics card, sound drivers have caused performance issues before. Network card ones can have an impact as well.
4) Stopped any and all internet security programs while playing.
I'm not entirely poo-poo'ing on the game, but I'm glad I didn't go for the Founders. Just like the Holiday events aren't "$10 a month" of a draw, the whole bargain sure isn't "$220 worth", after the CE that is.
Holiday events are not what the $10 is for. Implying so is petty. Also, expecting that you're going to get the full value of Founder's right here and now seems very short sighted.
Perhaps it will be some day, and it's not nasty enough to stop me from playing entirely, but as much as I want this to be the next Diablo 2 (and I was there for the D2 release, I remember what it was like), so far I'm not getting that vibe.
What vibe? People have ridiculous rose coloured glasses about Diablo that leads to all sorts of airy-fairy talk about how Diablo was better without any kind of examples.
Flagship also needs to communicate far quicker and clearer. Ivan is very good at getting the information out and cutting through the bullshit, but it doesn't look like he's given that opportunity very often. Tiggs seems hamstrung by something, to the point that she often doesn't post the downtime soon enough for many people to realise. Putting a news item reader in the launcher and making sure that someone, somewhere has the responsibility to keep that updated 24/7 would go a long way to sorting out some of the frustration coming out of the playerbase at the moment.
This is something that I see said about every MMO-style game ever.
Flagship also needs to communicate far quicker and clearer. Ivan is very good at getting the information out and cutting through the bullshit, but it doesn't look like he's given that opportunity very often. Tiggs seems hamstrung by something, to the point that she often doesn't post the downtime soon enough for many people to realise. Putting a news item reader in the launcher and making sure that someone, somewhere has the responsibility to keep that updated 24/7 would go a long way to sorting out some of the frustration coming out of the playerbase at the moment.
This is something that I see said about every MMO-style game ever.
They've made a great start and during beta it was a lot better. There's no reason it can't improve from the lull it's dropped into.
I want to know who the douchebag is who decided the deadeye skill for marksmen can only have a point invested every 5 levels. So much of the skills revolve around crits, yet good luck getting a decent percentage.
I want to know who the douchebag is who decided the deadeye skill for marksmen can only have a point invested every 5 levels. So much of the skills revolve around crits, yet good luck getting a decent percentage.
I'm curious, does it help you to call game designers immature names?
You can get way more +crit% from items and mods than you ever will from deadeye.
I know; the discontinuity is what I'm wondering about. If it rocks, why is it getting so-so ratings?
Because it is so-so. People are desperate to play anything that isn't WoW and are putting a better face on this game than it deserves.
Animations are jumpy and clunky.
Skill trees and powers are boring and ineffective.
Dialogue and quests are ridiculously cheesy. I have skipped all of the dialogue after seeing the first few examples, a first for me in an RPG.
On the plus side futuristic post-apocalypse is a plus and a welcome departure from genero-fantasy.
The atmosphere is almost scary at times but things are just too bombshelled all the time, there is nothing to break up the monotony of rubble and subway tunnels everywhere you look.
Well there are some things like rare pockets of Hell and Hellships floating around in the air which is cool but the cheesiness of the quests and dialogue just kill the mood.
You're there collecting fangs for some guy to make beer out of or generally some other fetch for just as lame a reason. They needed to stick with the material in the original cinemas.
It's like Naruto might be a good anime except for some annoying kid screaming believe it every five minutes.
Here you basically have Olarf and Co. going "Ooer thems is some scary wossnames they is." and farting while behind you in the theater while you are trying to watch Aliens.
I want to know who the douchebag is who decided the deadeye skill for marksmen can only have a point invested every 5 levels. So much of the skills revolve around crits, yet good luck getting a decent percentage.
I'm curious, does it help you to call game designers immature names?
You can get way more +crit% from items and mods than you ever will from deadeye.
:roll:
Yeah, tricking the player into thinking they have something valuable to put excess early points into which can't be maxed till level 40 is genius. Treating a level 10 skill like a level 30 skill IS retarded. And sorry, but % to do X based off a % based stat is uninteresting and uninspired.
The atmosphere is almost scary at times but things are just too bombshelled all the time, there is nothing to break up the monotony of rubble and subway tunnels everywhere you look.
There's a courtyard in Templar Station I think. I did a double take when I got there.
"Wait... is that... grass?"
And it was totally awesome because it was the first time I'd really seen something normal.
You brought up Diablo. No respecs there. Why do you need to respec at level 10?
Have you:
1) Defragmented.
2) Updated Windows/DirectX. Especially with the Vista memory hotfixes (that are not available through Windows update) if you are running Vista.
3) Updated all drivers. Not just graphics card, sound drivers have caused performance issues before. Network card ones can have an impact as well.
4) Stopped any and all internet security programs while playing.
... man what? No respec's, but getting level 10 didn't take 4-5 hours either. You could be level 10 in like an hour. What do my updated graphic drivers/defragmenting have to do with "I have 3 character slots max, which isn't enough to even play out all the classes, let alone all the specs, let alone to account for the developer's changing skills (or even bug fixing that requires a change of some sort), etc, etc.
Holiday events are not what the $10 is for. Implying so is petty. Also, expecting that you're going to get the full value of Founder's right here and now seems very short sighted.
I just said "Perhaps one day it will be", but, y'know, whatever.
What vibe? People have ridiculous rose coloured glasses about Diablo that leads to all sorts of airy-fairy talk about how Diablo was better without any kind of examples.
The vibe that this isn't nearly as polished a product at release as one that was released nearly a decade ago, by a team that had at least some members in common. To beat the horse; skills.
Forar on
First they came for the Muslims, and we said NOT TODAY, MOTHERFUCKER!
Posts
AKA [PA]Ilovepandas
If all 5 shards hit the same target, does it do 5x damage?
Although I'm disapointed in the skills I've picked for my level 19 Summoner, I've leant heavily towards the Carnagor and the more I level the worse he seems to get. Even with dropping skills into the armour buff and spamming Blood link he seems to drop health fast. I've only 4 fire elementals with boosted damage so that may be the problem, I've not really had any big problems yet but just doesn't feel right. I think I was expecting to be playing my necro from D2, just under a different name.
Anyone have any experience with force elementals, as I'm probably going to try a build with them as tanks mixed in with the ranged elementals and have a warper instead of the Carnagor.
SWTOR - Elysium
League of Legends Handle - Siegfreid
WoW - Siegfreid
FFXIV - Maxim
And only a week or so ago I said "Oh, Flagship. How ye have doomed yourself with Mythos, I will never play HG:L again."
And now I haven't logged onto Mythos since the Hellgate release.
I'm not getting Founder's, since I'm skating by on a free subscription from a friend. <.<=>.>
Flagship is empty now that the release has gone through. Wait... Do the developers have FAMILIES and LIVES?!
Whoa.
Just whoa.
I've wasted enough time here for today.
I'm going to London.
I would be really shocked if it didn't.
Turn off AA and dynamic lights in Chocolate Park, it helps a lot, at least for me.
For those people who don't have an internet connection, sure it's a problem. But that same problem exists for so very many of the games released nowadays on the PC. At least with HGL when there is a patch for singleplayer it tells you when you start the game if you have any kind of internet connection.
I know; the discontinuity is what I'm wondering about. If it rocks, why is it getting so-so ratings?
Margaret Thatcher
I hope the non-subscribers that made their pet enjoyed it for the week or so they had it. Now it... just sits in their bank? Or can they still use the completed ones.
That little detail was a moment of sour after looking forward to logging on and seeing if I could scrounge up the last 5 blood for mine, past the holiday as we are.
My Engineer made 10, but so far I've encountered a memory leak, several crashes, infinite loading (I assume infinite, but if a level isn't up in 5 minutes, it's time to try to close the program, and reboot if that fails), and the continuing "meh" that the lack of an easy way to move things between characters and the lack of respec's brings.
I'm not entirely poo-poo'ing on the game, but I'm glad I didn't go for the Founders. Just like the Holiday events aren't "$10 a month" of a draw, the whole bargain sure isn't "$220 worth", after the CE that is.
Perhaps it will be some day, and it's not nasty enough to stop me from playing entirely, but as much as I want this to be the next Diablo 2 (and I was there for the D2 release, I remember what it was like), so far I'm not getting that vibe.
pleasepaypreacher.net
I love that helm so much.
Okay, this is a common misconception.
Staff do not get diverted from coding/optimising the engine to make Halloween/Guy Fawkes content. Flagship has dedicated programmers for all the key aspects of the engine (graphics, sound, etc) and while they may have some bleed into other areas, they do not get taken off engine optimisation, especially when there are still issues for some (note, not all) people, to make content.
I'd like to think that I provide a decently balanced viewpoint, if a little biased towards Flagship. However, I've been playing Hellgate for a long time now, and have seen the progress they have made. There's little reason that the progress in regards to technical issues will slow, if anything it's actually looking better than it did in beta because of the current patch cycle they're running through.
For me, they have to keep with weekly or fortnightly patching for technical issues. They have said that they want to get things like auction houses and mail in, even if it doesn't coincide with a content patch. This is great, but stuff like engine optimisation needs to be given the same priority for release.
They also need to focus on the higher end of the game and swiftly start balancing that. Even if they don't get it right first time (and seriously, it's balancing, who the hell gets it right first time), they need to start making movement on it. Otherwise you have people like s3rial getting bitter (and rightly so) that their character is nigh useless in that difficulty.
I seriously want to know what the fuck EA's QA teams were doing for the 6 months or so leading up to release. There is no fucking way that a team of that size could have contributed so little to game feedback given the mechanisms and methods available today for game testing. I get the impression that there was no multiplayer testing of the game aside from the beta, because Act 4 was atrocious for grouping.
Flagship also needs to communicate far quicker and clearer. Ivan is very good at getting the information out and cutting through the bullshit, but it doesn't look like he's given that opportunity very often. Tiggs seems hamstrung by something, to the point that she often doesn't post the downtime soon enough for many people to realise. Putting a news item reader in the launcher and making sure that someone, somewhere has the responsibility to keep that updated 24/7 would go a long way to sorting out some of the frustration coming out of the playerbase at the moment.
The things I'd like to see addressed (in no kind of order) are:
1) UI. Hire a UI programmer or three and let them fix it. Paperdoll displays, chat interfaces, the whole lot.
2) Guilds. I hate being the only one able to guild invite. I'm sure that there are people I have simply been unable to invite because of the timezone issue, despite the inordinate amount of time I spent logged in over the weekend.
3) Quests in multiplayer. They just fixed the CIC quest for multiplayer. After how many goddamn months of it being that way, all the way through alpha and beta.
4) Balancing. Harder difficulty should not be a case of just jacking up all the numbers, more monsters instead of harder hitting monsters is generally going to be a more satisfying experience. At the moment battles mean that characters with low shields and low health get minced very swiftly.
5) Communication. Have someone who is just a player advocate. While the communication has been better than say Blizzard's was, there's still a significant sense of detachment between the interests of the playerbase and the response from the community management team.
6) Travis Baldree. Give him a week off Mythos and let him redesign the skill trees in HGL. And don't let egos get in the way; whoever's responsible for the skills in HGL didn't succeed in making it a crowd-pleasing aspect of the game. Regardless of how balanced it might be from a spreadsheet point of view, or how it's matched the internally-stated goals, it needs to go and Travis has demonstrated he knows how to make it cool.
7) Engine. The engine programmers need to fix heavily for the next two months on absolutely tracking down the most widely-impacting memory leaks, graphical glitches, geometry issues, etc. Just get it done, there's no way you can allow it to continue. Yes it runs great for a lot of people (including me), but the game is getting by in spite[/I] of those issues because of the novelty and goodwill. Both of those will burn out quickly if the issues continue or (as has been suggested by some posters since the latest patch) get worse.
Or it should dammit.
Just to reiterate, that locked to subscribers is a glitch, they know about it, they are fixing it tomorrow, here's the post from the main site.
http://www.hellgatelondon.com/underground/halloween-item-fix
The reason why the Halloween content was unlocked for non-subscribers was because of the billing issues they had. If you want to access subscriber content, you need to subscribe. Edit: Apparently all people get access to the Halloween content on and ongoing basis, which is a nice exception.
You brought up Diablo. No respecs there. Why do you need to respec at level 10?
Have you:
1) Defragmented.
2) Updated Windows/DirectX. Especially with the Vista memory hotfixes (that are not available through Windows update) if you are running Vista.
3) Updated all drivers. Not just graphics card, sound drivers have caused performance issues before. Network card ones can have an impact as well.
4) Stopped any and all internet security programs while playing.
Holiday events are not what the $10 is for. Implying so is petty. Also, expecting that you're going to get the full value of Founder's right here and now seems very short sighted.
What vibe? People have ridiculous rose coloured glasses about Diablo that leads to all sorts of airy-fairy talk about how Diablo was better without any kind of examples.
They've made a great start and during beta it was a lot better. There's no reason it can't improve from the lull it's dropped into.
Steam id: skoot LoL id: skoot
I'm curious, does it help you to call game designers immature names?
You can get way more +crit% from items and mods than you ever will from deadeye.
pleasepaypreacher.net
I've asked Captain K to lock this one as it's hitting 100 pages. I'll make the OP pretty in a bit.
Because it is so-so. People are desperate to play anything that isn't WoW and are putting a better face on this game than it deserves.
Animations are jumpy and clunky.
Skill trees and powers are boring and ineffective.
Dialogue and quests are ridiculously cheesy. I have skipped all of the dialogue after seeing the first few examples, a first for me in an RPG.
On the plus side futuristic post-apocalypse is a plus and a welcome departure from genero-fantasy.
The atmosphere is almost scary at times but things are just too bombshelled all the time, there is nothing to break up the monotony of rubble and subway tunnels everywhere you look.
Well there are some things like rare pockets of Hell and Hellships floating around in the air which is cool but the cheesiness of the quests and dialogue just kill the mood.
You're there collecting fangs for some guy to make beer out of or generally some other fetch for just as lame a reason. They needed to stick with the material in the original cinemas.
It's like Naruto might be a good anime except for some annoying kid screaming believe it every five minutes.
Here you basically have Olarf and Co. going "Ooer thems is some scary wossnames they is." and farting while behind you in the theater while you are trying to watch Aliens.
:roll:
Yeah, tricking the player into thinking they have something valuable to put excess early points into which can't be maxed till level 40 is genius. Treating a level 10 skill like a level 30 skill IS retarded. And sorry, but % to do X based off a % based stat is uninteresting and uninspired.
Steam id: skoot LoL id: skoot
"Wait... is that... grass?"
And it was totally awesome because it was the first time I'd really seen something normal.
I doesn't. Someone was saying they couldn't get the rights to use it.
... man what? No respec's, but getting level 10 didn't take 4-5 hours either. You could be level 10 in like an hour. What do my updated graphic drivers/defragmenting have to do with "I have 3 character slots max, which isn't enough to even play out all the classes, let alone all the specs, let alone to account for the developer's changing skills (or even bug fixing that requires a change of some sort), etc, etc.
I just said "Perhaps one day it will be", but, y'know, whatever.
The vibe that this isn't nearly as polished a product at release as one that was released nearly a decade ago, by a team that had at least some members in common. To beat the horse; skills.
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