Hellgate London: The Return of the Game that refuses to die

Three weeks ago I wrote about Hellgate London returning yet again. As I wrote the announcement wasn't very clear and it sounded a bit like they are going to release a single player only free-to-play title (which would have been very weird). It was released yesterday and here are the good news: it is not, it is a single player game, which you buy once and there are no microtransaction, loot boxes or whatever. Right now it costs €8.09, but it's 25% off, so the base price is €10.79, which is OK, considering that games which were originally realeased in the same year like Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare or Crysis cost €19.99 respectively €14.99, 11 years after release. But still, especially after reading what people are saying about this game, it's still too much for me to give it a try. When I first bought this game, I bought it for the launch price of €50, only to find out one week later that the price was reduced to €30. I already paid more than I should have once. The changes and improvements made do not really convince me enough, to buy it again, I still have the original DVD and can use it to play (btw. I tried to activate my original CD key on Steam: it didn't work, if it would have it would have been like Christmas, Easter and the release of Star Cititzen all falling on the same day :D But yeah, since the current developer isn't the original one, it is not really surprising).

The notion that it could be a free-to-play title comes from miscommunication: "premium items" suggests, that there is some kind of microtransactions involved. In the first updated of HabitSoft, they clarified that those items can be purchased with in-game currency, but this time they called them "Gameplay Essential items", which is again misleading, since those items are not essential, but rather a nice addition. So "special items" would have been a more accurate name.

Being "lost in translation" brings me to the first point of criticism people have stated in the reviews of the game: apparently the developers just took the Korean version and translated it into English ... poorly (and maybe even done by a machine). Sure, it's not a deal breaker, but still strange that a game which once used to have proper translations (I used to play the German version and I had no reason to complain about the translation) is nowadays not even having a proper English translation. In general, it seems like the developers had no access to the original version of the game (or maybe thy just ignored it) and used the "forked" Korean version as their basis (which makes absolutely sense, since they already worked with that version). The biggest change, apart from the language of course, is that the Korean version has apparently different hairstyles for the character models (I can't really verify it myself, but @roundbeargames: Would it make any sense to adapt the hairstyles for the Korean market?). Btw., I really like the following quote from this review:

Other than that, it's Hellgate. The best game ever made, worse release in history. A gourmet meal dropped on the floor just as it was reaching your table.

I think I've never read such an aptly written description of what happened to Hellgate London before. Unfortunately this quote seems to be also true for this version of Hellgate London: it has no support for DirectX 10 (which the version released at launch in 2007 had) and apparently still some bugs and technical issues, which is quite ironic for a game that's now over 11 years old.

To not only complain, I also have to point out what novelties this version brings to the table: probably the biggest one is, that it is the single player version of Hellgate Global (the relaunch from 2011), which was basically an MMORPG (although I have to admit, that since you always could play it solo, it's not that fundamental of a change), HabitSoft added the post-lunch content that was released throughout 2008 as well as the Tokyo update, which was as far as I recall the only additional content for Hellgate Global. I have to point out that this content is not available right now, as HabitSoft wrote in their second update (which stated very clearly that the game has no microtransactions), which is yet again a letdown, since this content is probably the strongest argument to buy the re-release for people who already played Hellgate from 2007 to 2008. They also changed the difficulty and made the game easier and increased the loot drops, my first thoughts when reading this were: "WTF? Are they sure that they are not breaking the game?", but since Hellgate has no multiplayer mode any more, maybe it was the right thing to do, to give the player interesting things to find.

As you can see, the list of changes and improvements is rather small and makes you wonder whether you want to pay €10.79 for a version of an 11-year-old game that's not even the best or definitive one. Currently the answer for me is clear: no. But if HabitSoft adds some new, interesting content to the game, this might changes. But honestly, as a fan since the very beginning, I'll keep my expectations rather low (something that Hellgate fans have a lot of experience in). Looking at the state in which this version of Hellgate is right now, it really just seems that HabitSoft or their publisher T3Entertainment remembered that they have this old game that still has some passionate fans lying around somewhere and decided to re-release it with the least possible amount of effort required. Releasing it as a single player only title has the nice side effect that you don't need to maintain servers and therefore have no running expenses. Even 11 years after, the IP Hellgate London is still strong enough to get some old fans to buy it and generate a little passive income for the owners. So far the peak amount of players was 1156, which made it number 5 in popular releases on https://steamdb.info

I have to admit that I don't know any other games from HabitSoft or T3Entertainment, so I can't say how much support they put into their games after launch, but in my opinion Hellgate received very little love and attention once it was re-launched, so I don't think we will see any new content. But at the same time I really hope that I'm wrong with this prediction.