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Hellgate F2P relaunch this year

The North American free-to-play relaunch of Flagship's ill-fated Hellgate: London is on track for this year, with a beta test in June.
Alice O'Connor
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Back in January 2010, HanbitSoft announced that it had secured the worldwide publishing rights to Flagship's ill-fated action-RPG Hellgate: London and would be bringing it to North America. Until today, it hadn't had much more to say on the subject.

Hanbit confirmed today that Hellgate will be brought back to North America under a free-to-play MMO model later this year. A curiously short closed beta test will run from June 3 to June 5; details on how to enter are promised "soon." F2P MMOs are typically supported by optional microtransactions for in-game items and bonuses.

Hellgate: London shut down in North America in February 2009, having been kept alive by its publisher for several months following the closure of developer Flagship Studios.

However, Hanbit continued to develop and run Hellgate in South Korea, turning it free-to-play. Hellgate was in desperate need of more development time when it launched, so hopefully this extra time has made a meaningful difference.

Hellgate, if you missed it the first time around, was a largely first-person action-RPG set in a demon-infested near-future London. Launching in October 2007, it was developed by Flagship, the studio founded by Diablo veterans including Bill Roper, Max Schaefer, Erich Schaefer, and David Brevik.

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  • Shacknews legacy 10 years legacy 20 years
    reply
    May 19, 2011 6:10 AM

    Alice O'Connor posted a new article, Hellgate F2P relaunch this year.

    The North American free-to-play relaunch of Flagship's ill-fated Hellgate: London is on track for this year, with a beta test in June.

    • baron calamity legacy 10 years legacy 20 years
      reply
      May 19, 2011 6:23 AM

      Whatever happen to Hellgate Tokyo? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7TLULi90iWY

    • Dynotaku legacy 10 years legacy 20 years
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      May 19, 2011 6:37 AM

      That's potentially good news. Hellgate was my most anticipated game for a long time, and obviously one of the biggest gaming disappointments of all time. It needs a lot of fixes, like inane NPC dialog needs to go, but it had so much promise.

      • [deleted] 1131495975 legacy 10 years
        reply
        May 19, 2011 6:40 AM

        [deleted]

        • fractured_sanity legacy 10 years
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          May 19, 2011 8:14 AM

          Crashing every 15 minutes due to memory leaks didn't help it any.

        • Entity legacy 10 years legacy 20 years
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          May 19, 2011 8:31 AM

          People dogged it for terrible performance and alot of crashing bugs. The game underneath when running properly was actually a good deal of fun, with solid controls and nice graphics. They just butchered the QA and online components so badly.

          • Rotten Deadite legacy 10 years legacy 20 years
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            May 19, 2011 8:52 AM

            DX10 had just come out and you couldn't use it because it ran so badly. I mean the DX9 engine would run at 100FPS but DX10 ran at less than 20FPS in the same scene. Also the DX10 engine had rendering bugs like the sky would clip through some, but not all objects... it was a wreck.

            Many players, including myself, had show-stopping bugs that kept the game from even running, sometimes for the duration of a patch version, at one point for me it took them two patches to fix the problem.

            During one patch I had to uninstall the game after playing it, delete a bunch of files left over from the old install, and then reinstall the game the next time I wanted to play it. If the game crashed I had to uninstall and then reinstall again.

          • [deleted] 1131495975 legacy 10 years
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            May 19, 2011 10:16 AM

            [deleted]

        • walker270 legacy 10 years legacy 20 years
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          May 19, 2011 10:48 AM

          The game needed another 1-1.5 years of work, but had some good fundamentals.

    • barichnikov legacy 10 years legacy 20 years
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      May 19, 2011 6:39 AM

      sweet! I probably won't have time to play it, but it was a neat game. mind you, it should have been f2p back then too...

    • valcan_s legacy 10 years legacy 20 years mercury super mega
      reply
      May 19, 2011 6:40 AM

      Awesome I still play SP for the original game every now and then, it has a EPIC loot system.

      Question: Is there a SP component or is this strictly server based and you can not play a SP mode with out logging onto a server?

      • Alice O'Connor legacy 10 years
        reply
        May 19, 2011 6:41 AM

        I'd be very much surprised if there were any offline component.

        • valcan_s legacy 10 years legacy 20 years mercury super mega
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          May 19, 2011 6:53 AM

          Hmm, yeah thought it would go this way, the orig had MP server base as well and you could SP the whole game.

          I would just like to have a permanent copy of the new build like the original so that when the servers die I can re play it when ever I want.

          Thats my beef with server based stuff, it will eventually die and you can never play it again.

      • jason bergman legacy 10 years legacy 20 years
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        May 19, 2011 6:42 AM

        You could probably just solo, but since it's free-to-play, I assume it's totally server based.

    • peasofme legacy 10 years
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      May 19, 2011 6:43 AM

      this game was one of the biggest disappointments in history

    • [deleted] 1271987451 legacy 10 years
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      May 19, 2011 6:49 AM

      [deleted]

    • hatchet165 legacy 10 years legacy 20 years
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      May 19, 2011 8:31 AM

      I knew my lifetime subscription would pay off! ..... =[

    • Epsilon Sector legacy 10 years
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      May 19, 2011 9:39 AM

      Anyone who bought the game prior to Flagship closing should be exempt from microtransactions and have all the content. Otherwise, it's like having purchased a game, having it being taken away from you, and being told that if you want your game back, you have to pay for chunks of it at a time, at an inflated cost. I actually enjoyed HG:L, and didn't have any of those crashes, etc. that everyone seems to complain about. Not a single crash or memory leak, etc. Some parts of it needed to be completely reworked, I can't deny that, but overall, the game did have some elements that were plenty of fun.

    • rivalbo legacy 10 years
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      May 19, 2011 11:34 AM

      I am so digging this. I enjoyed the first one.. really cannot wait to try it out. d('-' )

    • Miller_TYM legacy 10 years legacy 20 years
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      May 19, 2011 2:39 PM

      Loved the story line of this game.

      Hated the implementation. 8-20 NPCs standing absolutely static in a tiny Subway outpost is not my idea of a cool atmosphere from which to imagine the survival of humanity vs. demon invasion.

      Making those outposts bigger and more "city like" with people moving all over the place and some hub-bub going on would have moved the game from fairly lame up to good all by itself.

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