Well, I just came back from a presentation of Hellgate: London, a project under development by Flagship Studios. Nine core guys from the Diablo 2 team, including the Blizzard VP Bill Roper, who is now Flagship's CEO, decided to form their own development company and make an RPG/FPS hybrid in every sense of the word.

Fear my gun!

OWN3D!

First off, here's some PR mumbo-jumbo on the game. You can skip it if you're not a PR mumbo-jumbo type of guy. Seriously though, this is useful if you want to learn more about the game. God knows we haven't really heard much about it in the past few months. To be honest, I didn't know anything about it before now.

Set in the near future, Hellgate: London introduces a world devastated by a demon invasion. Players are thrust into a desolate city scorched by hellfire where the few survivors must meld science and sorcery in order to gain a foothold against the minions of darkness and save the bloodline of humanity. Hellgate: London combines the depth of Role-Playing Games with the action of First-Person titles, while offering infinite replayability and an individualized gaming experience through dynamically created levels, monsters, items, and events. Players create a hero and then battle through innumerable hordes of demons while completing quests and advancing through experience levels and branching skill paths. A robust, flexible skill and spell system, highly-customizable items, and a massive variety of randomly generated equipment allow players to create a hero that is truly unique.

The first thing I noticed is how much better the game looks in real-time than it did on the screenshots I saw a while back. It's not at all that dated, and for some reason I liked the post-apocalyptic urban motif they had going there. The monsters are all right too... as far as monsters go anyway.

In a word, the game is supposed to be an action RPG, just with FPS gameplay mechanics, and as such it does exactly what it's supposed to. It's extremely easy to get into, and most importantly, I had FUN when I played it and it had ADDICTIVE gameplay. Seeing how the folks behind the project are actually the same people that made Diablo 2, I can see a couple of reasons why this project, as unlikely as it may seem to some nay sayers, has a great future.

Basically, the whole thing is like a yo-yo. It's simplistic in a way and some would call it mindless, but it's ultimately fun and you're having fun with it. Not that yo-yos are that much fun, but I had to use an analogy and I'm too tired to come up with a better one right now, so screw you.

The character development systems seems rather simplistic too and from what I've learned from the developers, the focus on character development will be more on RPG stats than on actual player skill - though you still have to have plenty of skill to survive at the start of the game. I guess the idea behind it, is to have the action RPG fans get into Hellgate: London just as much if not more than the FPS fans.

Finally, only like 15-20 percent of the game is done at the moment, so the guys at Flagship still have ways to go. Smapdey didn't like the game at all, but then again he likes men, so there you go.

-- Uros "2Lions" Jojic