Unlike James Cameron’s Titanic movie, there’s no romantic story and Bill Roper won’t be yelling “I’m the king of the world!” anytime soon. Much like the movie, however, we do have the entire studio and staff being left floating in freezing water as Flagship is pulled under.
I’d written an article about this yesterday, since everyone else was distracted by the Warhammer content reduction announcement, but took it offline to verify a few facts in the story. Turns out more developments have occurred, and rather than re-writing the entire story, I’ll refer you to Hellgate Guru’s article which now has all the goods. Gamasutra and VE3D are also following the story.
The very short version: yesterday a Korean site published a story saying that HanbitSoft was attempting to wrest control of the Hellgate: London IP from its creators and developers (but apparently not owners), Flagship Studios. An attorney representing HanbitSoft issued a statement on the matter, which also mentioned Mythos, Flagship’s beta F2P Diablo-esque MMORPG. Simultaneously, Gamasutra was reporting that Flagship was allegedly laying off some of their Hellgate: London staff.
Today, it has been confirmed that it Flagship Studios has closed, all staff has been terminated, and their IP’s now belong to Korean companies. HanbitSoft now owns Mythos outright and will continue its development while Comerica now owns the Hellgate: London IP and promises to continue development and content updates for its large Asian market. Given HGL’s poor reception from English audiences and Mythos’ superior business model, future development of HGL for the Western market is unlikely at this point.
And we thought it was bad when the Sigil guys were fired in the parking lot…
I will say one nice thing: the story did say that three members (no names mentioned) of Flagship’s top management paid the employees an additional 30 days of salary out of their own pockets. Brad McQuaid couldn’t even be bothered to be present at Sigil’s parking lot party.
Tags: MMO Gaming
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I purchased Hellgate: London on its release, but only played it for two weeks or so (insert whinge about bugs). I thought the game had massive potential, but simply lacked the stability and polish that would push it up into the big time. It’s sad news that Flagship is going under, as I’m sure they would have got it right on the second try.
I play every so often, but my Marksman is only level 14 so that says a lot. I think, to a degree, HGL proves that a random environment is not enough to promote dynamic game play. One of Diablo’s selling points was random dungeons but seriously: did anyone actually give a shit? Diablo was about killing mobs and getting loot. The end. I’m a huge explorer but in those games I could give a crap what the environment was, the whole thing was a room-based hack and slash. I don’t care if it’s randomly generated or not, where’s the damn door so I can walk into the next room and slaughter all the monsters?
HGL very much feels that way, with all the sewer crawling. I don’t care if a zone’s map looks different each time, the zone looks and plays the same each time anyway because I’m always in some sewer tunnel or on some city street that looks just like the last city street. One of the quests I did last week on my journey to level 14 took me into a zone that was (for HGL) pretty damned amazing and I couldn’t help but wish the entire game had been more like that, and even better.
At least in the FPS mode, I thought HGL really nailed the feel of a shooter while keeping everything within the context (and confines) of an RPG. The 3PS mode, however, was garbage. Then again, I have yet to see a PC-only (ie. console ports don’t count) 3PS that wasn’t garbage.
I really haven’t come across any bugs at all other than the memory leak appears to be alive and well. When exiting the game it takes awhile for resources to be released.
I’ve still got my Hellgate disc, but I lost the keycode. I don’t remember how far I got, but not that far. I’d go back and play it from time to time if I could, but I can still play Diablo 2 and enjoy it just as much.
Very good of those executives to cover their employees… though less noble if their employees should have known about the company’s impending doom weeks or months before. This industry definitely has its share of horror stories.
It just didn’t do anything for me. It looked like a shooter, sorta. Reminded me of X-Com Enforcer. Heh.