Hmm, mulitplayer...
And now we come to the multiplayer side of Hellgate: London which is probably the most controversial aspect of the whole game. First and foremost, Hellgate: London is a single player game, but there’s a multiplayer component that strikes a middle ground between an MMORPG and a single player RPG. You meet up with other players in one of the safe hubs and then, once you’ve formed up a party, head off into one of the portals for a bit of instanced dungeoneering.There’s plenty of fun to be had forming a party of balanced players and for sure, you can really play your role as it’s meant to be played if you’ve got a couple of Guardians, a summoner and a Marksman in the team. One of the problems I have with the online mode is that you can’t take your single player character online. This, for me, is immensely disappointing and despite having a good look through the manual, I can’t find any mention of this restriction…
Click for larger imageSo your choices are to either carry on adventuring through London’s tubes and ruins on your tod and start anew once the desire for a bit of MP action grabs your… OR, just play in MP the whole time to get yerself a decent online character going. Yes, I know that sounds a bit terminal with the whole ‘do one or the other’ thing but you really do need to be warned. I invested a good 12 hours or so of game time into the SP campaign before going online to find I was back at square one…
But the biggest issue is the subscription charges for the online mode, which, if this were a true MMORPG wouldn’t be a problem. Sure, Guild Wars has proved you can do fee-free inline MMOs, but that’s an MMO, not an instanced online multiplayer, which is a different thing. Sure, there’s a free section in Hellgate: London’s multiplayer that’ll serve most people and the subscription part is an optional extra but I’m not so sure that many people will bother seeing as the extras you get don’t at this point in time, seem worth it, not when you’ve got pretty much infinite instanced adventuring on hand for free.
Click for larger imageEA need to really have a look at what they’re offering up for the subscription service to make it worthwhile for anyone paying for it. Stuff like the ability to form guilds or have extra slots in your inventory aren’t, in my view, worth it. You want a guild? Just use Teamspeak or some other third-party VoIP app and you can have all your team-mates right there. Of course, there is the promise of extra content and the like later on, but in a game where randomly created areas are the order of the day, we’ll all get new content every time we play anyway.