Hellgate: London gets F2P relaunch

By Fred Dutton Published 19 May, 2011

Closed beta kicks off next month.

Hellgate: London, Flagship Studio's ill-fated fantasy MMO, is gearing up for a relaunch after it was taken offline back in 2009.

New publisher Hanabitsoft has announced a closed beta will run from 3rd to 5th June, with a full North American release following on after that. A European release hasn't been confirmed yet.

No further details have been announced, other that the game has switched over to a free-to-play model.

Developed by former Blizzard employees, the game launched back in November 2007 picking up a 7/10 from Eurogamer.

However, it struggled to make money from the get-go, with publisher Namco pulling the plug in February 2009. South Korean distributor Hanbitsoft then secured the worldwide publishing rights back in January 2010 and set to work on the relaunch.

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About Fred Dutton

Fred Dutton is Eurogamer's US news editor, based in Washington DC.

Read more articles from Fred by visiting the Fred Dutton archive page.

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Comments (20) Latest comment 1 year ago

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  • Demiath #1 1 year ago

    Now that's not exactly a game anyone thought we would ever see again...

  • X #2 1 year ago

    Back from the gates of hell!

  • DrMGinius #3 1 year ago

    It was an MMO?!

  • JediMasterMalik #4 1 year ago

    For free I might get on board.

  • Kami #5 1 year ago

    I liked the game. It made me all poetic.

    It's nice to see it back, there was bugger all wrong with the game - it just needed something else, and better management, and perhaps a good F2P model will go a long way to sorting this out...

    Colour me super interested!

  • jumpdeveraux #6 1 year ago

    I wanted to try this back at the original launch but somehow I got distracted by other titles (and it was billed as an MMO yet all the media didn't really make it look like one).

    I'd be tempted to download this just to satisfy curiosity from days gone by but I want to see a little more detail on how it's been "freemiumed" i.e. what are the constraints (level, weaps etc.) before they expect me to spend $2 for a new gun or a pair of atomic rollerskates.

  • dirtysteve #7 1 year ago

    Colour me interested

  • crackhed #8 1 year ago

    If you liked it before, just wait until you've seen what the Koreans did to it! More like Hellgrind

  • UncleLou #9 1 year ago

    Loved that game, it was Doom mixed with Diablo, never understood the flak it got. Fantastic monster and armour design, too. Ill definitely keep an eye on the relaunch.

  • cnlfailure #10 1 year ago

    Right with you UncleLou. I loved Hellgate to pieces. The maps got a bit repetitive, but it really did a great job of onscreen carnage.

    Most of the criticism levelled at it came from its subscribers who felt they weren't getting value for money, and it was pretty damn shaky online to begin with. But playing over LAN it was sheer joy, a wrongly maligned game.

  • Inmediasress #11 1 year ago

    What was it that made this title sink?
    I remember I wanted to play this but somehow didn't get around to do it but I know it looked fairly interesting from gameplay vids.

  • MaxiSleep #12 1 year ago

    F2play is the perfect model for this. Has great mechanics but the campaign was very short.

  • MatMan562 #13 1 year ago

    I remember playing a demo of this ages ago. I had no idea it was an MMO but back then I probably didn't even know what an MMO was. I will probably give this a try when it's released.

  • UncleLou #14 1 year ago

    What was it that made this title sink?

    It wasn't terribly polished at the beginning, and it really wasn't a proper MMO - like the others have said, the campaign was very short (although replayability was high, as you'd keep on levelling etc.) I subscribed at the end to show some support, and the one new area/addon (Stonehenge) was excellent. Shame there wasn't a patch that made Stonehenge available for the single-player. :-/

    It's not the kind of game/MMO you'd want to play constantly like, say, WoW, but it's a game I would keep coming to regularly if it had new content. Really hope they find a way to make this survive without relying on subscription fees.

  • Kami #15 1 year ago

    Imediasress; I think what sunk it was, as said, the subscriber/early F2P management was so appallingly bad that most people stopped subscribing, not least that the whole project was in the red at the time as well - it was a multitude of bad choices and financial arsebuggery that led to its demise. But it managed to survive for many, many more months after it all went down the tubes before the plug was cruelly pulled on it.

    I liked Hellgate because it was a nice change - it was more instant, more immediate, had some great design touches and a genuine sense of humour about it. As Lou said, the armour design and monster design was spectacular, and even snuck in a few RTS segments to mix things up. The boss fights were suitably large and impressive, and the areas themselves challenging and interesting.

    I think the only issue I may have had with it was simply - it wasn't really a multiplayer game. You could play it multiplayer and damn fine it was too. But for the most part, it was a single-player game where in the hubs you would run across other players. The further you got, the less people you tended to stumble across until it really did become a rather lonely affair. And of course, why subscribe to a game for perks when they were giving them away for free to a demanding and whingy free-to-play userbase? Didn't make sense.

    I hope these issues are fixed and Hellgate is as good now as I remember it being.

    @ Lou; I wouldn't mind a subscriber option tbh - I'd get a good month or two out of it at least, and as long as they throw in some perks with it I'd say it may be worth it. But of course, this is where it failed initially - by not knowing where to draw the line. I can't see why they'd do anything differently to the successful F2P models out there and offer a subscriber option.

    However, none of this will compensate those who took out a lifetime subscription...
    Edited by Kami at 20/05/11 @ 10:57

  • UncleLou #16 1 year ago

    @ Lou; I wouldn't mind a subscriber option tbh - I'd get a good month or two out of it at least, and as long as they throw in some perks with it I'd say it may be worth

    Neither would I! I am just afraid that it would die another premature death if they relied on subs to keep it afloat. :)

  • Sandown #17 1 year ago

    Whats changed then? Once you had bought the game DVD for the Single player game the on line was F2P unless you were suckered in to paying a Subscription or bought the "lifetime" founders thingy. It will be interesting to see what T3 in Korea has done with it since it was pulled from the rest of the world. I enjoyed it at the time the quests were all the go kill 6 million of this rare spawning daemon type. but it was a FPS mmo.

  • UncleLou #18 1 year ago

    It was just so boring and repetitive, and all the locations were small and claustrophobic and ugly, and it was grindy too. It was like a really lame version of Fallout 3.

    Yes, it was repetitive and grindy - it's a loot-em-up, it is supposed to be, it's what makes people who enjoy this sort of thing get into "the zone". And Hellgate worked perfectly in that regard.

    It was like a really lame version of Fallout 3

    It has absolutely nothing to do with Fallout 3 whatsoever. Might as well say Gran Turismo is a lame version of Mario Kart, or vice versa.

    Anyway, your complaints aren't exactly unique - for some reason, the game attracted a lot of the "wrong" audience who thought it was something entirely different. I don't know why, maybe the marketing? I got exactly what I expected.

  • Ternon #19 1 year ago

    I remember playing Marksman class, enjoyed it very much.

    Not sure why it ended. Perhaps it was a mistake to tether it to online experience. It should have been single-player only.

  • jimr9999us #20 1 year ago

    Nobody has ever gotten rich under-estimating how cheap the game playing public is.