Hellgate: London news from CES 2007 - Beta, Release and MP details
Posted by inpheaux on January 10th, 2007 at 2:41 pm
The 2007 Consumer Electronics Show has been going on all week out in Las Vegas, and - surprisingly - there's actually been some gaming news coming out of it. Not a ton of earth-shattering stuff, but still, something is better than the void of nothingness we've been over the holidays. There has, however, been some pretty dramatic stuff coming from Flagship Studios regarding their forthcoming highly-anticipated first game Hellgate: London. Unfortunately, it's a mix of good news and bad news.
First some good news, we like good news. They've got some estimated dates for us, finally. An extremely closed Beta is expected to start later this month, and is expected to expand as time goes on. As previous founding members of Blizzard, we should probably expect the beta to get pretty wide, as Blizzard always seemed to like huge betas. The other estimated date is release: Flagship is shooting to get it on shelves by Summer 2007, previous guesses have been Fall/Winter 2007.
Now for that bad news: though nothing has been set in stone yet, Bill Roper has stated that right now they're looking to make online multiplayer fee-based. Previously, we had been told that MP would be either using a Battle.net or Guild Wars approach, where MP is effectively free, you just pay a one-time cost of admission. Roper says that this was actually never the case, and that the game had been designed as an MMO from its inception, just one that has an offline mode that you can play single-player. It would have been nice if they had told us this earlier. Why they decided to drop the "lol it's just another MMO" bomb on us this late in the game is anyone's guess.
To further complicate matters, Shacknews is also reporting that Roper told them that even if they go the route of fee-based MP, there will be some kind of free or trial option. Make up your mind, Bill. Is it an MMO or isn't it? Is MP free or fee? These aren't things to leave people guessing about until the last minute, these are important core aspects of the game, which will influence many people as to if they'll be purchasing it or not, and thus if they should worry about paying attention to it anymore.
Soon as the guys at Flagship make up their minds about these things, we'll let you know.
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