I have been having a pretty good time playing Hellgate online with my drinking buddy. We’re both old-school RPG players, and we remember the days of playing Diablo (the original, 1998) online on Battle.Net. Incidentally, some sounds we even recognised as being used in Diablo, are being used in Hellgate too! Listen carefully the next time you open a locked box in a dungeon. When the items flip out of the box, listen for the sound. It’s the same (we could almost swear) as the one used in Diablo!
Hellgate The “MMORPG” has done things that a real MMORPG (ie those that charge subscription) should emulate. Here’s a run-down:
Instanced Zones
Instanced zones mean that you and your party are ALONE in the whole zone. No other players outside of your party are going to be in this area at the same time you are. All the monsters and loot are yours! Mob farming and camping by other players like in other MMORPGs are eliminated. You don’t have to wait 18 hours or 48 hours for the Boss mob you need to respawn to complete your quest. In Everquest 2, I knew I hated getting quests that require a damn rare boss mob to complete, because someone will already have gotten a raid party together and killed him, and he won’t respawn for 7 more days (yes, a week in real time!).
Yes some MMORPGs out there already have instanced zones, but not all. Mob farming and camping are still prevalent in a lot of the MMOs out there that do not implement instanced zones.
Consentual PvP
Personally, I hate PvP in all its forms on MMORPGs. In Hellgate though, I wouldn’t mind. It’s not that I don’t play PvP games, it’s just that if I’m in an RPG, I’m not looking to kill other players, and I expect other players to leave me alone to enjoy the story and quests. Having an Open PvP system invites PKers – Player Killers. Usually these are high level players that kill other players for fun. Can you imagine a level 200 guy killing a level 1 in just 1 hit? Yes, it happens on MMORPGs with Open PvP systems! If you’re the level 1, just starting out to kill rats to earn your first 1000 xps, and along the way you get whacked by a level 200 guy for no reason other than “it’s funny har har!”, you’d be pissed too.
In Hellgate, you need to actually form a party with your opponent, select him and pick DUEL. When he accepts, both of you head out to an instanced zone.
Also, Hellgate isn’t technically all just stats. Player skills also are taken into account, thus PvP is not just about building a uber cookie-cutter character for PvP. If you can’t shoot straight, you can’t hit the player. If you can’t hit the player, you’re dead. No amount of dice rolls is going to tell you you’ve “hit” the other guy and he took amount of damage.
Loot
Thus far the BEST system I’ve seen yet. When a mob dies, he drops loot. What you see, and what your friend sees, are DIFFERENT. You are free to pickup anything that falls from the mob without worrying whether your friend will grab it first. I’d call this “instanced loot” too 🙂 On other MMORPGs, various systems are used. Some use the round-robin thing, ie first guy gets the loot.. next mob dies, the next guy in the party gets the loot etc. Some MMOs use the auto-distribution method. If 100 gold coins drop from the mob and there are 5 in the party then each get 20 gold coins. Yet another system I know in use on MMO is that the party leader gets to pick up everything and then after the “adventure” is over, he distributes it to his party members. Yet another system in use is – “Every man for himself”. Be the first to grab what you want from fallen mobs!
As you can see, every system I described above has some kind of flaw. There will be arguments arising from loot distribution. In Hellgate, no such thing. You don’t even know what the other guy has picked up since you don’t see it – only he does.
Death
Ahhh death, the perennial debate. For subscription MMOs, their aim is to try to keep you playing, so that you’ll keep subscribing to their game. Yet, death needs to be “punished”. Various methods of handling deaths in MMOs are in use.
The first, and most lenient of all, is the “xp debt” system. Your character, after revival, “owes” some xps. In other words, you earn xps at a slower rate, be it half the normal, 1/4 the normal or whatever. If you earn 100 xps from killing this mob, perhaps 30 xps go to the “debt” and 70 to your “normal” xps, so you advance slower.
The second, made famous by the original Everquest, is the “corpse run”. You revive naked at the nearest spawn point, and RUN BACK TO YOUR FALLEN CORPSE. Needless to say, some players find it thrilling to have to avoid all the mobs just to get to your corpse so you can retrieve all your gear and uber weapons. With this system, other players MAY be able to loot your fallen corpse too! Me, I hate this system. Being a naked level 60 running back to your corpse THROUGH level 10 mobs that can kill you with one swipe without your gear isn’t fun.
The third, revive in town for a fee. Very few MMOs have this system in use anymore, and the higher your level, the more you pay. Thus, this system hurts your pockets, not your character. Also, variants of this system might make it such that your gear degrades each time you die, and you have to seek out a craftsman in town to repair your gear.
Addendum (28 Dec 2007):
It has been brought to my attention that this section is not too clear, as such I will elaborate. In Hellgate, they offer you 3 choices of death penalties.
1. Restart back at the station you just left
2. Restart as a ghost in the current zone at the entrance (and hence do a corpse run).
3. Resurrect yourself by paying a sum of money. I presume it should be to resurrect yourself at the spot you died, but I am not sure since I have not personally chosen this option at all.
Personally I have always used option 2, and in Elite Mode, you only get option 1 and 3. When I wrote this post, I had intended to emphasize that option 2 seemed to be the best option available, and I proceeded to describe how option 2 worked below.
In Hellgate though, you can CHOOSE which type of death you want each time you die! In Hellgate, I don’t mind the “corpse run” because as a ghost, the mobs can’t hurt you. You only become physical once you get near your corpse (or tombstone in Hellgate). Also, once you become physical, your gear automatically gets equipped. Once you become “alive” again, Hellgate implements a variant of the “xp debt” system. You earn less xps for a set number of minutes. Once this time frame has passed, you earn full xps again. Although this system is slightly flawed, it still is much better than other death systems out there. It’s flawed because if I were to stand around for the set amount of time, without killing anything, I won’t be earning less xps. I’ll just wait for the timer to expire before I start killing stuff again.
Similarities to MMORPGs
Hellgate has adopted many of the “standard” conventions of MMORPGs. By “standard”, I mean generally accepted and recognised by players. For example, quest givers have exclamation points and question marks over their heads to denote new quest, or a quest that has updates. Different colours of these denote different types of quests – completed, in progress, main quest or sidequests.
Party-member names turn green (the “standard colour”) and the chatbox shows party members talking in the party channel as green too. Again, “standard”. Players who are not in your party have names in blue (another “standard”).
Chatbox colours are also pretty much standard colours (in my experience at least) too. Global shouts are red, private tells are magenta, vicinity (or “local”) chat is white. I haven’t joined any guilds yet so I don’t know if guild chat is gold-coloured (or dark blue).
Also, the player is free to choose first or 3rd person view when playing (except melee chars, which are played only in 3rd person view). I know, many people on MMOs make female characters because “if I’m gonna be looking at a butt all day I might as well look at a female one”. Being able to go to 3rd person view makes this feel more like an MMORPG.
Differences From MMORPGs
Well, the only gripe I have about Hellgate is that…. 12 hotkey slots aren’t enough! Everquest 2 allows the player to have up to 10 rows of 12 slots! That’s 120 hotkeys! Even then, we complain we run out of slots. In EQ2, I have 4 rows up on screen, with the remaining 6 rows hidden but accessible via mouseclicks.
In Hellgate though, I guess part of the challenge is trying to get your most-used skills/spells onto the hotkey slots and leaving the rest as clickable buttons on the skill-tree screen. Oh yeah, Hellgate allows you to assign skills to your weapon slots too, so I guess it’s 14 slots in total (left and right hand weapons).
The chatbox is also non-resizeable and non-moveable, which I think is bad. I might want to make a flatter and wider chatbox so that it doesn’t cover the trading screen, for example. Or, I might choose to move my chatbox up into the top left hand corner of the screen instead of its default position.
And So….
I am having a blast on this free “MMORPG” with my buddy. He’s never been on an MMORPG before and he’s adapting very nicely to it. In my opinion, paying $50 for this game is probably very much worth it, because if I play online, I’m going to be playing for a LONG time.
