/play Muppet_Show_theme

I haven’t been following any of the hype or expectations around Hellgate: London. But enough people who seem to know something about gaming were looking forward to it, so I gave it a try. Apparently, I tried day of launch. Well, here we go with my results. No background, just user experience. Don’t care I couldn’t subscribe to multi-player day of launch, or it was locked down etc. This is mostly from solo play and then a few hours from online play last night.

Memory LeaksIt seems to have 3 problems. See screenie below. This is after around 5 mins of solo non-online play with 2 zonings, some combat, log in/out, etc. Imagine after an hour. Well, you can do the math from the possible results below.

This is a silly freeware tool, but I don’t have access any more to a real workbench to inspect how Hellgate runs. At any rate, three modules didn’t free memory after a graceful exit. Which was a “well-duh” moment, since the app runs very very poorly on my rig, which stood up well to LotRO and a few others like the fun of OrangeBox. On all lowest of low settings there’s terrible lag for me in solo non-online play.

UIFor some strange reason, there’s no documentation on how to group, how to look for groups, or even how to chat. Mostly because I still have not found how to unhide the chat log box. However, a brief forum search showed I wasn’t alone. There’s strange graphic lag in inventory, with vendors, poor rendering in the skills window… I can forgive graphics if it’s my fault (which was my first impression), but when there’s no chat bar… Come on.

Borked Linear QuestsSo an other final discovery has ended my HG:L play. Like a lot of new MMO’s, there’s an over-arching background narrative, hallmark-like quest which delivers characters between zones and introduces them to the world. In my case, and a few others, we got stopped at this point. After completing the fight with the boss, there was a new quest giver that was needed to be met to complete that task. Normal herald-quest like stuff. Unfortunately, when the guy is not available you are stuck. Normal fix procedure, and recommended, is to abandon the quest. Logic dictates you can repeat the whole boss encounter again, or just that herald task, to avoid sploiting on boss loot etc. Imagine. Reboot, relog. Nothing happened.

Thus, myself and other folks are left with no way to advance. The hallmark quests unlock the next zones, and the quest needs to be reset and probably complete redone. The issue here is HOW CAN YOU RELEASE A GAME WITH A ONE WAY DOOR? How can a company release a title with an effective doorway which locks behind gamers once they leave? It’s not as if we did something even wrong — it just broke. Regardless, we literally can not continue the title in multiplayer until it’s fixed. Or unless we reroll. I mean, COME ON!

The only player invented recommendation is to group with someone else who has not done the quest and hope it works. Unfortunately, the lack of a chat window, and known mechanic to group makes that also rather difficult. So, I went off to watch a rerun of the Muppets and was more entertained.

Flagship’s crack deployment project management

“I thought you outsourced the QA.” “No you did, you old fool.”

Oh, and “Tiggs” of SWG fame is in charge of the community. So, yeah. Enjoy. Yeesh.