Hellgate London returns (again)

Hellgate London is a game that I was super hyped before its release and unlike the popular opinion, I was not disappointed. Sure, it had its flaws and shortcomings (it was very repetitive with a lot of backtracking and quite buggy and lacking polish when it was released), but I still loved it just because it was the first combination of shooter mechanics with a Diablo style loot hunt. Well, shooter might be an overstatement, since it was still mostly an action RPG. In general, I think that the developers had difficulties communicating what the game was and so created a lot of different expectations for different people which it only managed to partially fulfil (even I wasn't sure if it was more an MMORPG or a single player game, I mostly played it as single player game though). In my opinion it was way ahead of its time (e.g. it had a kind of freemium model five years or so before this became common practice in gaming) and unfortunately this wasn't helping the game either and so it shut down its servers at the end of January 2009, only 15 months after it launched and its developer filed bankruptcy. Luckily you can still play the single player part, since it came out in a time before single player games required you to be always online and even Steam wasn't nearly as big and omnipresent as it is today. But for a game that is already rather repetitive, this was practically a death sentence.

Well, almost, since in March 2009 Korean publisher HanbitSoft announced that they have the rights for the game, and they are going to relaunch it as a free-to-play multiplayer game, but unfortunately only in Korea. Luckily for me this relaunch was be successful enough, that it was also relaunched in North America and Europe in 2011. The problem was that it only got very few content updates and as far as I can recall the relaunch wasn't even using the latest version of the game, but I still had such a big craving to play this game again that I ignored this flaws. In September 2014 it was put on Steam Greenlight, but in January 2016 it was shut down for good (I'm going to ignore the weird VR prequel, that was supposed to be released this year, but after its 2015 announcement, not much was heard from it).

There is a very interesting and lengthy documentary on Hellgate London and its multiple deaths, which I can highly recommend:

After Hellgate London (or Hellgate Resurrected as it was called) shut down for good, it was thought that this was the final chapter for this game, but no. Funnily enough a game which is about killing undead refuses to die: last week it appeared on Steam and it will be relaunched again on November 15. Informations about the relaunch are rare, but what surprised a lot of people is, that it's marked as single player only. Apparently it is going to be a freemium single player game (if this does make any sense), like this quote from the description implies:

The game provides single play optimized scenario contents and premium support items.

Honestly "premium support items" doesn't sound too promising, but if its free-to-play, I might still give it a shot and maybe write about my experiences with it.

The really interesting thing is, that I'm most likely not alone with this opinion: even 11 years after its launch and almost 9 years after it was first shut down, Hellgate London still has a very dedicated community that believes in the game and wants to bring it back, one way or another: last year passionate members of the community launched a server for the original Hellgate London, and it gets constant updates. A different group of fans tries to create a spiritual successor in the Unreal 4 engine, unfortunately this project hasn't picked up much steam yet.

Anyway, even though loot based shooters (or games in general) are rather the rule than the exception these days, in my opinion there is no game quite like Hellgate London and that's really a pity because even though it had a lot of flaws, it still made so many things right (e.g. the crafting system is in my opinion still better than what most games offer today, also the general flow and ways to play the game are unmatched). I for one am very happy to see this game returning, and maybe one day it will get the recognition it deserves.