Hellgate: London (PC)

- So I recently started playing this regularly with 2 friends (picked it up for $25). This game has the worst patching/update system ever!!! Having just come off of about 1000hrs of guild wars (and pretty burnt out) this was quite a shocker.
- I'm only a level 10 marksman so I haven't spent that much time with it yet.
- It's not bad so far but still running into a few odd bugs. Like last night one of use couldn't pickup a required quest item even though he could see it right in front of him. Then he moved up to the floor above, and the item was in the exact same place(except on a different floor) and this time he could pick it up.
- DX10 at 1920 X 1200 ran perfectly fine (8800GT) until we hit our first boss in hell and then it felt like single digit frame rates. I switched to dx9, went back to the exact same boss and it was very smooth so stick to DX9.
- After the great Jeremy Soule music in guild wars I almost hear no music in Hellgate. What is up with that.
- Lots of generic fetch/kill X #/collect X # item side quests. Guild wars had a few but at least they try to spice it up with some prose that I never read. It seems like very little effort went into the story telling/writing/quest designs. Hopefully when I hit one of the hand crafted (not randomly generated) levels it will improve.
- Playing on normal has been pretty easy so far.
- The partying/portal system is pretty convenient.
- Inventory tetris is a bit annoying though salvaging items (at least that's what they call it in guild wars) is free and pretty quick to do.
- No respec which is just nuts.
- Silly things like killing those bat things leaves the bodies floating in mid air.
- Less silly I had a some loot drop underneath a prefab train. I could see it but couldn't pick it up.
- I had one hard lock last night and so did another friend. I had to alt tab, kill process, and restart the game. Thank goodness for the portal to teammate feature. This was my first and only lockup so far since I've started playing. Also, this was after some mysterious patch that was pushed down.
- The time before I got disconnected from the server multiple times. This only happened that one night and hasn't happened gain.
- Yeah, I'm ok I guess with these problems as long as you have a set of people you can play with. Having the party portal is a life saver since if at least one person in your party doesn't get booted from the server/crash out then they anchor that instance so people can get back in who have had issues.
- So far content wise (just from an art assets perspective) you really have to wonder what they spent all this time developing this game on. I mean I think there is probably more art assets in Guild Wars pre-searing than in probably all of hellgate (I'll hold final judgment until I at least finish the non-subscriber game content). Eh I'm playing it more like a shooter so I'm enjoying it for the most part. I get to shoot lots and lots of things and napalm helps satisfy the nuker in me...a bit.

So far I think I'm getting my $25 worth of entertainment from it. I can't even begin to imagine how buggy this game must have been at launch. We will probably play this game one time on normal to completion without subscription, and that's probably all the repetition we can handle.