Hellgate patch today

By Robert Purchese Published 20 November, 2007

More character slots for all.

Developer Flagship will be taking the Hellgate: London servers offline today to implement a new patch.

Downtime is expected for a couple of hours between 4pm and 6pm GMT, after which you should find some new features to play with and plenty of fixes to niggling problems.

Chief among them is access to 24 character slots for absolutely everyone, a privilege previously restricted to those paying a monthly subscription. It benefits those of you eager to tinker with class builds and that sort of stuff, although make sure you realise you cannot use your single-player character online but have to start from scratch - better to make an early start than realise this late on.

Elsewhere there are countless bullet-points mopping up chat, connection, movement, quest, item and other fixes - best pop over to the official site if you want to bone-up on these. Incidentally, Flagship does know about and has a solution to the invisible party member bug, but it just missed out on being included in this update, patch 0.5. Word is to look out for this one soon.

The other message is for you to keep your feedback rolling in, as it helps Flagship know what to address in its on-going patches. Oh, and Guy Fawkes celebrations will be brought to and end, but thank you very much for taking part and we have learnt a lot, says Roper and team.

Hellgate: London is an action role-playing game with a meaty online offering. If you enjoyed Diablo or Titan Quest in the past, then you might want to pop over to our Hellgate review and find out what it is all about.

Picture of Robert.

About Robert Purchese

Bertie is Eurogamer's Senior Staff Writer. When he's not hunting down news stories he's often found playing with his kids or gabbling about fantasy games and strange online worlds.

Read more articles from Robert by visiting the Robert Purchese archive page.

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Comments (12) Latest comment 4 years ago

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  • Blackloch #1 4 years ago

    Understand they want to make the customers happy, but so far subscribers are getting screwed: losing more and more exclusives.
    Anyone that is in doubt: no reason to subscribe at all atm.

  • UncleLou #2 4 years ago

    Yeah, agreed - there's not nearly enough content there to justify a subscription at the moment.

    Like the game a lot, but they need to really think of something. That said, there'll be an update in December with new levels (Stonehenge). Let's see how this goes.

  • RamblinSydRumpo #3 4 years ago

    Have they fixed all the horrible technical problems that put me off getting this yet?

  • Pirotic #4 4 years ago

    They are between a rock and a hard place, they need the subscription model to be able to afford to host an mmo considering they have only a small amount of investments and no previous games to make a steady income from. But at the same time, the game doesn't really warrant a subscription. It looks like they just keep pandering back and forth, one minute taking free things away and giving them to the subscribers as an exclusive (pissing off the freebie players), or getting subscriber only features then giving them away to the freebie players (pissing of the subscribers).

    I guess after the lackluster review scores they are a bit worried, and instead of trying to convince freebie players to subscribe, now just have to convince people to by the game at all, at the risk of seriously annoying all the subscribers who jumped the gun and forked over the cash before they even knew what they would get for it.

    bad planning really, hope they can sort it out as the WoW monopoly has lasted a little too long.
    Edited by 1 at 20/11/07 @ 11:19

  • UncleLou #5 4 years ago

    Good points, Piro. I guess what they're doing now is give all the "comfort" functions (character slots, difficulty modes etc.) to all players, and restrict just new content (classes, areas and loot) to subscribers - which can work well, if they provide enough new content. The game is cleverly structured with the stations as hubs, so constantly adding new content in small doses should be comparatively easy, but of course if sales/subscriptions aren't quite what they should be, it's bound to fail.

  • Ginger #6 4 years ago

    Don't see why they don't try ingame advertising on some of the posters in the stations and stuff - would mean they can do without subs for longer.

    And on Stonehenge, I wonder how you'll get there from London - quick train from Waterloo to Salisbury and then a long slog up to Stonehenge - doubt it somehow :(

  • UncleLou #7 4 years ago

    Don't see why they don't try ingame advertising on some of the posters in the stations and stuff - would mean they can do without subs for longer.

    Heh, look closer, they do. :) I've seen Alienware ads, for example.

  • Kropotkin #8 4 years ago

    Well I hope this fixes the game for me as I couldn't run it very well at all. A stuttering mess of an engine that made the game unplayable for me.

    Before you go yelling at me for trying to run the game in a 486 based PC my machine can run Crysis quite happily thank you very much not to mention UT3 demo and CoD4. So if my machine can run these why can't it cope with Hellgate London? Oh I know, because it was coded by a retarded blind monkey.

  • henneth #9 4 years ago

    Patch is tomorrow according to the link to the official site. Was wondering why I didn't have a cackload of character slots when I logged in...

  • Orange #10 4 years ago

    I've pretty much given up on it already.

  • Clive_Dunn #11 4 years ago

    I've given up as well, will come back in 6 months and see if they've actually made the game worth playing.

    No difficulty, poor graphics, lag, bugs, uninteresting story, dull quests = no play.

  • Trikk #12 4 years ago

    The worse this game does the better, they're so damn greedy that they don't deserve anything more than to crash and burn. Oh yeah I'll subscribe so you can afford your 3D lobby server. What's that, I have to watch ads even though I'm a subscriber?

    Thankfully they utterly failed to make a satisfying Diablo clone or this business model might have gotten a foothold in the gaming industry.