I was planning on taking a break from World of Warcraft to try something else in the PC-RPG genre for a change so for the past few weeks I'd been following the release of Hellgate: London with much interest. The game seemed to have all the elements for a fun dungeon romp; an experienced and successful team that gave us the original Diablo, a cliche but workable premise of a demonic apocalypse set in the future as an excuse to provide both magic sword wieldy characters and gun toting hard asses, and of course the promise of much multiplayer action with a blend of FPS twitch play and RPG loot hoarding.
Watching the following trailer had me salivating at the thought of roaming the randomised streets of London burning, slashing and shooting the waves of hell spawn.
Sadly, a pretty trailer does not a good game make.
Thankfully I didn't have any of the problems registering for my account that seemed to be plaguing others. I rolled up an Engineer and entered a zombie infested side street. Flicking through the menus immediately highlighted a few dubious design decisions. The skill tree seemed oddly bland, the chat window toggled between obtrusive or invisible with nothing in between, and a quest text window which had a 20 word limit and forced you to click through each abbreviated page while the undead chewed on your extremities.
The winning menu for flawed implementation in my opinion however has to be the inventory screen and it's probably just my anal-retentiveness coming to the surface here. I've gotten used to having each item take up single slots regardless of their 'size'. It's not like having a gun take up 3x2 slots in your bag is any more realistic than a stack of twenty zombie hearts which take up one slot. Fine, I can still deal with bigger items. What I can't understand is why they didn't include the SORT button they had in Diablo 2 ten years ago. Playing inventory Tetris in my bags just so I can pick up one more rune inscribed sword I want to sell back in town does not sound like a feature I'd expect to see in a 2007 game.
Killing a few zombies and soldiering on I was soon treated a soporific story line presented in tear inducing disjointedness thanks to the aforementioned quest menu. It's a crying shame too as the basic storyline seemed to have some potential. To make matters worse, any narrative satisfaction you might glean from the main quest line is immediately squashed by the banality of the side quests. In fact, completing side quests often feels like an exercise in serendipitous slaughter as they fall unapologetically into the tried and true categories of "Kill X monsters", "Kill monsters for X items" and "Press X glowy things while you're out there killing monsters". Given that you're more than likely going to be shooting/slashing/burning everything in sight when out in the wild in the interest of self preservation, completing these goals is often unintentional and devoid of any sense of accomplishment.
That said, the combat engine itself is actually the game's saving grace. Killing monsters is undeniably fun which it should be and configuring your weapons, armour and skills to test your setup out on the mobs gives you a glimpse of what the game could have been like. The formula definitely works but once again fails prey to sub-par execution. The Engineer I rolled makes use of drones and bots for assistance, but the game offers no control over them. Entering a room results in the activation of every mob as your drone wanders off and unabashedly shoots at anything it feels like. The graphics engine while pretty in most cases also has lackluster presentation with some skills. Shoddy particle effects on leveling up, ugly HUD like skills used to mark mobs and a myriad of clipping issues result in an experience that sometimes feels like you're just playing a well developed MOD for Half Life.
The lure of multiplayer combat has not been especially strong either. A crappy chat window aside, there's no means to look for other players on the same quests. Not that you really need to as the game scales all the randomised levels to the number of players. Since all the levels are instanced there's no chance of meeting another player while prowling the streets. Chat bubbles over player heads are also missing so visiting Stations/Towns (which are also instanced) feels far from the social hubs they're supposed to be. While you can see other players walking around town there's little to suggest what they're doing unless you have the chat window obscuring half your screen and compare the floating names against what people are saying. I certainly can't see myself teaming up with anyone in the game that I don't already know in real life which is a shame as I've made lots of friends playing other MMORPGs like WoW and Guildwars.
To top it all off I've had about five system crashes in the past two days. The last of which was the proverbial straw on what had been a lame camel to begin with. I haven't uninstalled the game yet and still hope that Flagship Studios can salvage what must have been a labour of love.
It's back to WoW for PC gaming for me. Aside from that Alsie and I are both really enjoying Zack and Wiki on the Wii and look forward to the impending release of Guitar Hero 3 this week. Rock on!
No comments:
Post a Comment