Hellgate: London - playable demo

[Ilex]

http://www.ggmania.com/?smsid=24377

Electronic Arts, Namco Bandai Games, and Flagship Studios have released a playable demo of Hellgate: London, allowing you to try out this action RPG due to ship on October 31st in North America and November 2nd in Europe. The demo lets you play through part of the full release's first act using the "Blademaster" and "Marksman" classes. Although this is a single-player demo, a good broadband connection seems to be in order, as the download weighs in at a hefty 1.46GB

Dunno if it's any good, but it's a pretty big release. Thought you'd like to know.

 

[13 Spider Bloody Chain]

Well, a good chunk of the old Diablo team made Hellgate, so it ought to be pretty good.

Its addictiveness, regardless of its quality, is almost guaranteed.

 

[Cleaning agent]

Yeah, it looks to be fairly awesome, only the download size is about a sicth of my bandwidth limit this months, so i'll pass on that one

 

[Oubliette]

I must admit it sparked my interest, although I'll wait till the morning to download it (I think the bandwidth of my university ethernet connection is shared, so with few others online I'm able to download things like this in under ten minutes).

 

[Nak Nak the Merciless]

I found it pretty disappointing, although my expectations were fairly high. Very unpolished. I suppose it is just a demo, though.

 

[Ilex]

I found it pretty disappointing, although my expectations were fairly high. Very unpolished. I suppose it is just a demo, though.

I too, found it disappoiting, although my exceptations were not that high. And also, the game is to be released  AFAIK by the end of this month, so I am guessing we won't see much improvement as it has probably already gone gold.

 

[Merentha]

I found it pretty disappointing, although my expectations were fairly high. Very unpolished. I suppose it is just a demo, though.

I too, found it disappoiting, although my exceptations were not that high. And also, the game is to be released  AFAIK by the end of this month, so I am guessing we won't see much improvement as it has probably already gone gold.

Remember that the first quest of DiabloII wouldn't be that fun either.  The game only gets good with the item collection, runs, etc.  A game where you kill Blood Raven over and over again wouldn't be particularly interesting.

That said, I had a lot more fun with the Marksman than the Blademaster.  For a character that needs to use combat skills repeatedly, the interface wasn't well suited.  Now you can't set it up so that you have two skills set to use on the mouse, instead you have to activate them with button presses.  Now, when I'm busy moving and slashing, I don't want to have to press "3" multiple times just so I can activate my Surge of Restoration.  Pressing 3 so that it went to right or left click (like D2's F# function) would work a lot better, in my opinion.  It wasn't too bad for the marksman, since I didn't want to use the grenades anyhow, so just bound burst to right-click, fire to left-click, and had the tactical mode set to shift (when not moving).

Still, I could easily see the potential for a good game.  Might give it a purchase, depending on what people end us saying.

 

[Instag0]

If it was coming out in five months, maybe I'd buy it. It's far too unpolished for my taste.

 

[AgentSword]

erm...does the demo have an ending?

 

[Nak Nak the Merciless]

I found it pretty disappointing, although my expectations were fairly high. Very unpolished. I suppose it is just a demo, though.

I too, found it disappoiting, although my exceptations were not that high. And also, the game is to be released  AFAIK by the end of this month, so I am guessing we won't see much improvement as it has probably already gone gold.

Remember that the first quest of DiabloII wouldn't be that fun either.  The game only gets good with the item collection, runs, etc.  A game where you kill Blood Raven over and over again wouldn't be particularly interesting.

That said, I had a lot more fun with the Marksman than the Blademaster.  For a character that needs to use combat skills repeatedly, the interface wasn't well suited.  Now you can't set it up so that you have two skills set to use on the mouse, instead you have to activate them with button presses.  Now, when I'm busy moving and slashing, I don't want to have to press "3" multiple times just so I can activate my Surge of Restoration.  Pressing 3 so that it went to right or left click (like D2's F# function) would work a lot better, in my opinion.  It wasn't too bad for the marksman, since I didn't want to use the grenades anyhow, so just bound burst to right-click, fire to left-click, and had the tactical mode set to shift (when not moving).

Still, I could easily see the potential for a good game.  Might give it a purchase, depending on what people end us saying.

You're right about the quests, of course. I wasn't disappointed with those, I was disappointed with how the  game "felt". The interface and combat don't feel natural to me.

 

[Dain Ironfoot]

I was disapointed... dual wielding a pistol and sword and killing demons in the ravaged streets of london was fun for a while (more games need a sword/pistol combo!) ... then that was it... I'd wasted 1.4 gigs..

Prehaps I was expecting somthing deeper... I mean even diablo had some sounds and a bit of story... this could have been set in any zombie infested place.. they didn't take advantage of the great idea for a setting at all.. I expected a block button as well for some reason (too much M&B) sword combat was quite good aside from that, probably as good as M&B foot combat in terms of what you could do (slash left, right, overhead, uppercut.. yup thats it... fancy anims though)

 

[Archonsod]

Distinctly meh really. It looks like a PS2 game (yeah, I know it's only the DX9 demo, but it looks more like DX the levels were distinctly bland, and I fail to see where London comes into it, beyond the tube stations bearing a slight similarity.

Oh, the weapons and stuff look dull too. Seems like they've taken the standard "add meaningless bits to the name and increase the numbers" route.


Shame really, it sounded good. As it is, I think I'll pass on paying for the single player, let alone subscribing for the mutli.

 

[Merentha]

Oh, the weapons and stuff look dull too. Seems like they've taken the standard "add meaningless bits to the name and increase the numbers" route.

Not quite sure what you expected, seeing as how it was being marketed as the new Diablo 2. 

 

[Archonsod]

Oh I dunno, perhaps something a bit more interesting? Y'know, like every Diablo alike since has managed?

To be honest, the biggest thing I'm wondering is how they're going to persuade people to pay for the multi. Unless the first person perspective really does it for you, it's not actually offering anything you can't get free.

Think I'll just wait for Sacred 2 myself.

 

[Skyrage]

Tried the demo - didn't really impress me too much, and the demo was way too short to really give a real opinion as well. What the hell happened with demo's who contained a full act/episode/part/whatever like in the good old days?

 

[Ilex]

Yeah, the Full Throttle demo was about half of the game.