Flagship Studios closes doors News
PC MMO News by Robert Purchese
Hellgate: London and Mythos developer Flagship Studios has closed its doors and made all staff redundant.
Work came to an end on Saturday, according to Voodoo Extreme.
The specifics behind the decision are yet to be made clear, but fingers point toward Flagship trying to do too much, too quickly with Hellgate: London.
"Flagship bit off way more than they could chew and made a lot of development and structural mistakes in how they went about things. They had a lot of big dreamers on staff, but not enough nitty-gritty people who knew how to get poo poo done. It sucks, but that's life I guess," "GLC", a former Ping0 (digital publisher of Hellgate) employee wrote on the Something Awful forums.
"I think it's less that they aimed too high than that they tried to aim that high and do it quickly, and they didn't do anything the easy way. It was like picking everything that's hard to do in a game, and then putting it on a brand-new company (two of them, really) with people who hadn't worked together before."
The future of Hellgate: London is unknown. No one has taken over responsibility for the game, with the rights falling into the hands of US money firm Comerica.
Currently there is no option to unsubscribe from the online portion of the game, but apparently there will be no charges applied.
Mythos, on the other hand, will be picked up by Korean company HanbitSoft, which aims to develop the MMO internally.
The closure of Flagship Studios comes after programmer Guy Somberg talked on his blog about staff leaving their jobs in "droves" - a sentiment later covered up by developer bosses as "inaccurate".
Related Games
Hellgate: London
Mythos
Latest Features
Latest Videos
Hellgate: London - Dessicator [0] 26 March, 2008
Hellgate: London - Blademaster tutorial [0] 4 March, 2008
Latest News
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Hellgate: London still dead to the west [12]
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Hellgate to return with new expansion [10]
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Hellgate: London to close in February [3]
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Roper opens up about Flagship demise [9]
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Hellgate and Mythos live on [4]
Latest Screenshots
10 October, 2007 [29]
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Comments: 1-29 of 29 in total
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Mentalist(air)
14/07/08 @ 08:28
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Hellgate is quite an entertaining 3D singleplayer roguelike. I can't imagine wanting to play it as an MMO, though. Perhaps they should have put that out as just singleplayer or coop on its own before trying to build a whole MMO out of it.
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@Eldritch
"but, come on, the game itself sucked big time and looked terrible. " I'd have to disagree on both. I don't think it looked terrible there were however just 4 or 5 different area types and so every area (and every monster) looked very familiar. The game was fine for what it was; a first/third person Diablo, it was fun to play through in coop but I could never see how they could really justify charging a subscription for it. I guess I wasn't alone there. Edit: removing repetition
Edited 1 times,
most recently on 14/07/08 @ 10:36
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PlugMonkey
14/07/08 @ 09:45
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What a shame. I just picked up Hellgate and am rather enjoying it. Like someone else said though, fun single player slash'em up but can't imagine playing it online, especially not for a subscription.
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To me, randomly created levels with crude texturing are terrible. Half-Life 2 is years older and looks way better. Or take Titan Quest. And what about that voice acting in Hellgate?
I really, really wanted to enjoy that game, which is why I bought it despite lukewarm (pre)views, but I put it down after approx. four hours. A lack-lustre game that should've been so much more. @Orange: Yes, "dated" sums it up quite well. |
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HGLs render intro was NOT made by FSS. It was outsourced to Blur Studios (http://www.blur.com)
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ExplodingClown
14/07/08 @ 19:46
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Eldritch +1
Hellgate looked so promising. I so wanted to love it. The premise was sooo good and the character designs oozed cool... Unfortunately bugs + pitifully weak stabs at humour + serious failures of imagination killed this one for me. For example, the 'hell' mini-levels were dull as shite! Just big marble halls or floating island type affairs. Where was the Hieronymous Bosch/Breughel/Clive Barker style madness? Even a generic Giger rip-off would have been better. All that dreadful, dreadful unfunny crap with 'Techsmith 314' made my toes curl. The voice acting was often *horrible*, amateur hour at it's worst. Plus we didn't even get Satan for fuck's sakes, just generic nasties, it could have been 'Space Mutant Invasion: London' for how it felt! At least Doom gave us proper pentagrams and inverted crosses! |
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No mention of Flagship fooling everyone into thinking this was a full blown MMO and getting people to pay a subscription fee when in actual fact it was a decent single player game with optional multiplayer components.
The company would still be alive if they had marketed it as such and made the additional material available as DLC. I feel sorry for the FS devs for having bosses who were talking out of their arse holes. |
Comments: 1-29 of 29 in total
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