Hellgate London – a title I actually “casually overlooked”, in the shadow of the impending releases of both Crysis and Call Of Duty 4 (Rumour had it that Singapore released COD4 2 days ahead of the US!)
It’s a mistake that shouldn’t have been made.
First off, it’s an RPG, not really an FPS. It really hits you when the first screen you see is the “Create A Character” screen, not a cinematic story like in FPSes. In the video later you can see that you can zoom out from first person, to third person view, and vice versa. I guess they did this because some people are MMORPG veterans and are very used to seeing their character’s butts 🙂
The second thing that they did, which reminded me of an MMO, is that they made Quest-givers have an exclamation point over their heads, like Everquest or World of Warcraft.
In the short time that I’ve spent inside the demo, I think I will like the actual game when it does come out. Checking out the options screen, I see controls for “Party” and “Friends List”, which imply that Hellgate London may very well be co-operatively played online! Like a modern-day D&D game!
Like all RPGs, you find loot on dead monsters, you can buy and sell your loot in “towns”, which in this game, are actually subway (or “tube” like the British would say) stations. It’s not shown in the video, but I actually managed to amass enough cash to buy a whole new set of armour and even upgrade my weapon to a more kick-ass version.
Ok on to the video. Before that happens, here’s the obligatory info:
My 4-year-old rig config:
P4 3.0Ghz
2GB DDR400 RAM
nVidia 7600GT AGP
And here’s a screenshot of the auto-detect graphic settings on my rig:
Remember to click to enlarge if you can’t see the settings. So, without further ado, here’s a short 6-minute snippet of me running around inside the game. It’s relatively smooth, I’d say between 15 to 30 frames per second. Very good indeed, considering my rig is 4 years old.
