Small pet peeve of mine, not mentioning the following when recommending a game like this: the company that made this is dead and so are the official servers. They did include single player, but the whole, super-cool, Battle.net like thing they were going for (even though it turned out like ass) is gone. It also never got patched to what I would consider release quality, so buyer beware.

On the up side you can probably get it for pennies.

That's great and all, but it was intended to be nearly a MMO and there's no servers for it right now (unless there's a pirate server scene, no idea). I'm not saying don't recommend it, just you should add the caveat that part of the game isn't there due to the servers being gone.

Actually, I believe a South Korean company has bailed out the game and they are slowly setting up servers in the US and Europe.

I didn't know that, though I knew Flagship had their IP owned by a half dozen creditors or more when they folded. A bank ended up with their MMO code, iirc, and had to hire a shop somewhere in Asia to start working on it.

I guess that puts it in APB territory, it might get a lifejacket. If it ever does, there will be digital copies available. I don't know, I didn't think much of the game itself, I was in beta, they launched very broken to the songs of their fanboys. I watched the news a bit as Roper's reality distortion field slowly collapsed (what a tool that guy is!) and the assholes preaching about how they were so great watched their founder's editions go up in smoke.

Did they even patch all the gamebreaking issues? I don't actually think they did, monsters teleported around, instead of animating they just kind of quivered in front of you, hovered in the air or under the ground. You'd go into a randomly generated dungeon and walked through the exact, same room 6 times in a row, the list of problems with this game was legion.

At any rate, given what state the game is currently in a small caveat is always worthwhile, "Hellgate: London is X, note the official servers are down and there's some unpatched bugs, but the community is still active" kind of thing. If people just go by the hype (and this game had a ton of it, they might be misled.

Also, as usual, PA to the rescue: http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2007/5/11/

You people are awesome.

Thank you so much for the suggestions. I've got quite a bit to think of for the next purchase(s).

Once again, thanks guys and gals, you rock!

Hellgate: London is somewhat of a sore point to everyone involved. Especially those who thought the product held so much promise and potential, but was ultimately the victim of corporate over-milking. I couldn't even find the patch after the servers went down. And would you believe I found the Collector's Edition for pennies?

Weren't Flagship working on a pseudo-sequel called Mythos, before they closed their dooors?

Mythos was their MMO and I believe it was an unrelated property. It got leveraged as collateral to a bank, I think. It's the one of which I was speaking. The word was that it was a mess.

Seriously, these guys were famous, but they actually didn't have any talent that knew the ins and outs of making a MMO, how they thought they were going to pull this off is beyond me. It was a bunch of Diablo guys that failed to make a decent Diablo clone.

Those founders edition folks paid well over 200 dollars (maybe close to 300) for their lifetime subs and game boxes.

I have never played a pen & paper rpg but from other posts in the RoA forum i do think they are a faithful interpretation of the rules. Although this does translate into a lot of useless skills in the original; there is a skill for driving wagons for example, which is never used. Even the character traits don't really have much impact in the original (such as violent temper) but more effort was made in the later games to include these into the game mechanics.

RoA:Blade of Destiny for all it's good points does not make a great first impression. Here is a link to a gameplay vid on You Tubular. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IWr2a9Yakns

And this from the third game http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MyrLbI2Rfrs&feature=related


If the idea of deep character creation and development appeals, plus a real sense of making your way across the land (picking herbs and making potions, hunting game, camping and setting watch, dancing for pennies, dealing with infected wounds and disease) then you might be able to look past BoD's worst offender which is the horrible and convoluted interface. The game is full of incident and random events which is presented through text descriptions and pictures, the gameworld you move through though will be towns and dungeons.

As you can probably tell, i love 'em. They are an acquired taste though.

i only played HG:L singleplayer and unlocked elite on there servers... mainly i played Mythos... it was the most fun i ever had... Torcjlight 2 is going to play alot like Mythos... but i digeress...

Hit up RedBanana they have a beta for the US version of Mythos thats triple the world size of the original and adds in 2 more classes and 2 races...

its going to go open beta or straight free to play by years end...

this is what the dev cycle for the us version of hellgate wil be like... there going to basically launch it as an entirely new game but as free to play in America with a store the basic format..

you can find some amazing fan patches for hellgate, there out there and they add in some of the lost functionality from the online era.. eg pets, attack pets, the cube, and a few extra zones and tons of custom quests... not to mention tweaked cell pathing and better random generator... and thousands of new items and sets that use new prefixes and sufixes EG diablo style adding in tons of items just by setting a new pre/suf and givgin it a value range