Hellgate: London

E3 2006 First Look Preview

Last year I had to look at Hellgate: London over the top of a rabid crowd, and I’m a short guy so I didn’t get to see much. This year I was lucky enough to have a couple of Hellgate: London’s developers personally show me around the ruins of London.

There were two character types at the show: a Cabalist, which is a more magic-based class, and a Templar, the melee-driven class.

Hellgate: London is a sort of first-person/third-person RPG shooter adventure action game with a large online community. When playing online players gather at subway stations; they serve as the “towns” of the game. Stations are where all the shops will be set up, players will organize parties, and trading will go down. There will be more towns as players progress, and each town has portals to the combat areas.

Combat areas will be instanced for the player or group that enters, so there won’t be any competition for loot or racing to kill a certain demon. These areas are also randomized from the layout to the scenery, so dungeon paths and the location of a quest item will be different each time you play. The developers were joking about how this makes it a little more difficult to show since they can’t learn quests and blaze through them for demonstrations.

I saw them run through a few different areas, some outdoor and some indoor. A lot of the areas were straight out of London, since the team actually went to London and took pictures for reference. Every place they went looked absolutely stunning, from the lighting to the textures. The indoor levels provided some intense scenarios because of the close quarters and as the character shot at enemies objects were getting knocked off tables and pieces of the environment were breaking apart. Dead demons displayed realistic ragdoll as they fell against walls and fellow hellspawn.

Hellgate: London can be played in either first- or third-person view, but when using melee you will always be in third-person. Players can equip two weapons at a time, so this means two guns, a gun and sword, two swords, a sword and shield, and whatever else you end up with. There will be 100 base weapons in the game, with most weapons having mod slots. Mod slots allow you to equip upgrades to your weapons, customizing them to do what you want them to do. So in reality, considering how many mods there will be, there is a possibility of thousands of weapon combinations.

Items are dropped from enemies, as you would expect. There are also different categories of items depending on their rarity. You may also run into rare monster spawns, which have a higher chance of dropping rare items. Questing is another way to get items. Hellgate will have main quests that drive the story, tasks that usually have you collecting or killing, and events that happen randomly in combat areas. All of these quests are marked with a “!” over the NPC’s head.

Hellgate will also feature level scaling, so if you’re in a dungeon by yourself it’ll be easier than if you were in a group. This also can happen on the fly, so if suddenly your group drops out while you’re still in a combat area the difficulty will accommodate for a single player.

Hellgate: London is coming along very nicely, and I know a lot of gamers are anticipating its release. When asked about a release date I was given the “when it’s done” answer, so it may still be awhile until we see it on store shelves. So far, though, it looks like it’s going to be worth the wait.

For All E3 2006 Previews