Tales of the Aggronaut

Hellgate Disappointment

November 16, 2018 by Belghast

If you have read my blog for any length of time you will know that I have a hot burning and undying love of the game Hellgate London. I played it originally at launch and was of the few suckers who actually ponied up for the subscription plan as well, with its extra events. There were a whole slew of us that were playing World of Warcraft at the time, that took a break and started playing Hellgate as effectively our primary game. There was in fact a House Stalwart guild in game that was pretty damned active for awhile… but sadly a very short while. The game released on October 31st or 2007, and in 2008… Flagship Studios filed for bankrupt protection and all assets including the intellectual property of the games they were working on… were seized by Comerica bank. Namco Bandai kept the servers going through January 31st of 2009 and after that point it was effectively a single player only game. The assets were eventually sold to T3Fun/HanbitSoft a South Korean game developer who took the unreleased assets and spun up a few new areas of the game centered around Seoul.

In 2014 the game showed up on Steam as Hellgate Global which was being run by a HanbitSoft Connected company called T3Fun/Redbana Corporation. Hellgate Global was an MMOized version of the game and featured a number of micro-transactions that added some “pay for qualify of life” type features like an item that would identify all of the items in your inventory instead of having to do them one at a time. Similarly there was an item that would deconstruct every item in your inventory at the same time. I actually played this game for a bit, and noticed that the difficulty was massively watered down and these mini bosses were added in every so often that served as a loot pinata. It was entertaining but also nowhere nears a compelling as the original game, and it eventually shut down in January of 2016. Recently Hellgate once again showed up on Steam as a game that was coming November 15th… and last night I purchased it for myself and a couple of Aggrochat members. One to grief him because I sincerely doubt he will like the game, but he also once gifted me a copy of Bad Rats. The other however because I think she will absolutely like the game… that is if she can get past the frustrations with this version.

My hope was this would be an easy way to get people in and let them experience Hellgate London. Previously the best way to play Hellgate London was to either Amazon or Ebay a copy of the old game and then install Hellgate Revival to bring it up to more modern standards. There is even a side project called London 2038 that acts as a server emulator, allowing you to play online with others and restoring much of the functionality of the game. My hope was the Steam version would bring a lot of these improvements to the game and make it as easy as purchasing and installing to get in and play. Unfortunately after last night… the route I just described is still the best way to play the game.

First of all we have to talk about how HanbitSoft has seemingly changed the story of Hellgate London, by introducing a some equally questionable animation tacked onto the front of what is still the most epic intro sequence from any game. The original game is largely the story of Doom… rifts from hell open up and a bunch of demons flow into our world and decimate it. They however shifted it to be a battle between the light and the dark in ambiguous terms, that maybe work better for a South Korean audience than the biblical hell on earth story of the original. The other big problem is that seemingly this is a game that was taken from the original English… localized into Korean… and then has now been localized back into English. We’ve all seen the memes of what happens when you pass something through google translate too many times… in fact my favorite is a twitter account called Rosewatta Stone that does that with Magic the Gathering cards.

There is an awful lot of jank going on with this game, from the completely unskippable tutorial sequence that keeps popping up how to do everything… and then will freeze your character in place until you perform whatever the hell they are asking you to do. To the fact that the textures are extremely muddy and are way lower resolution in a few of the areas than the base install of the original game. Hellgate London was a game with a bunch of different tile sets for lack of a better term, and they were constructed out of a series of themed prefabs… and this one in particular seems to have fared the worst which is the cityscape with rubble strewn through it. Others like the train station tileset, seem to have gotten a much higher resolution texture treatment and as such look significantly better. The problem is however that this experience feels extremely uneven… like they got bored while working on the game and only focused on the areas that they liked the most.

This is effectively the same version that was released as Hellgate Global from what I can tell, and as such it includes a handful of classes that were not available in the original release. I am however a creature of habit and wound up rolling a Guardian again… which is the class I always tend to play when I play Hellgate. I am a sword and shield tank, but again you can see the unbalanced nature of the textures. That shield looks perfectly fine… the armor however is blurry and washed out. It also has the weird intro sequence where it places you in what used to be the cash shop hub of the game, before sending you to your first destination. None of the cash shop vendors still exist, but that was effectively a player lobby that allowed groups to gather up, and it seems like there is no real way to get back there once you have started actually playing the game. It definitely comes off as them quickly singlerplayer-izing what was designed to be a rudimentary MMO cash grab.

The thing that cracks me up the most is the inclusion of the Korean warnings about play time. After paying an hour you get the following message to pop up in the chat window “You have been playing for 1hour. Excessive game play may affect your lifestyle.” This is one of those loot pinata bosses that I talked about, and when you kill them you get a fountain of loot most of it blue or higher quality to come pouring out. All of this aside the game was largely playable once you got past that forced intro section. That is until I started encountering some more serious issues with the game. Shortly after the hour mark I started encountering some massive slowdowns, and at first I thought maybe there was a memory leak in the client. However upon restarting the game and getting into a fight the same things started happening again. I think this might be an issue with one specific spell effect from a specific type of monster, which are the the demons that crawl around and then throw fireballs at you. The moment one of these sends this spell effect in your direction my framerate bottomed out. This is coming from me playing on an i7-5820k with a Geforce 1080 ti… so more processing power than this game ever dreamed about having initially. I finally had to stop playing last night because it was impossible to do anything… because I kept hitting these framerate walls.

Ultimately I still love Hellgate London and I happily played for about two hours until I encountered the issues. I was hoping that the Steam release would have actually had some effort put into it, but unfortunately that is not the case. The positive side is that right now it is selling for a little less than $10, so it isn’t like even with the three copies that I bought I am out a significant amount of money. I am hoping that the modding community decides to fix these issues, because it is probably something as simple as the fact that the game inexplicably dropped Direct X 10 support and is only allowing Direct X 9 for some reason. If you really want to play Hellgate London, you are still better off digging up an original copy… installing Hellgate Revival and then using London 2038 to play on the multiplayer servers. I have a feeling in the coming days I will be doing this thing again just to see how different the experience is.

I hope that HanbitSoft will patch the game to make the experience less frustrating, because I still would love to see the Seoul levels as well as the Hellgate Tokyo content that supposedly was added in to the game as well. I am not however holding my breath that any of that is going to happen, and more than likely this was just a quick cash grab that I got suckered into by my love of this franchise, and the nostalgia of all that it could have been. I’ve spent thirty bucks on dumber things, so in the end I will be just fine.

Mobile Core

November 15, 2018 by Belghast

I’ve been on this journey of discovery, that largely started with the negative reaction the Diablo Immortal reaction had in the community as a whole. Sure there was the pent up disappointment that we had waiting for Diablo 4, but it seemed to go way further than that. There was a reaction that most of the Diablo fans had, myself included… that mobile gaming was somehow “not for them”. Right or wrong there has been an impression among PC and Console gamers that mobile gaming was something “casuals” did, and that serious gamers were playing games on other platforms. I am not even sure if this was ever the case, but it feels like things are changing drastically on this front, largely because mobile devices have improved greatly over when I was trying to play a Diablo clone on my Palm Pilot back in 2003. Like I have said before when I fail to understand something, I tend to pour myself into trying to figure it out, and as such I have been playing a lot more mobile games lately.

One of them is The Walking Dead Our World, which at face value appears to be a Pokemon Go clone for The Walking Dead. Sure I knew Pokemon Go fans were hardcore and established raids and such on a regular basis… but that more or less is in spite of the fact that Nintendo still refuses to accept that the internet is a thing that exists. Our World seems to be a game that takes the idea of PoGo but extends all of the things we have learned about clan/guild play and internet connectivity. As a solo player it is largely a game about clearing infestations, picking up supply caches and rescuing survivors. As a team however it changes drastically, and in truth were I not now part of an active clan I probably would have faded away from this game long before.

The game more or less suggests you join a group, and then suggests the ones that are active in your vicinity. The biggest problem I had was finding one that was not outwardly racist, trumpian, sexist or anti-LGBT. It was shocking to me to see just how many groups had something like that in their message, thankfully I found this one that seemed to be reasonable and largely focused on getting objectives done. Now I don’t know any of these people in real life, but they apparently live in the near vicinity of me… and a lot of the locations that get called out over chat are places in the surrounding communities. There is a Weekly Challenge system that involves performing a bunch of objectives and then unlocking rewards as a result. Last week I believe we made it through four maybe five of these challenge boards, each time earning really good loot and the in game “upgrade” currency. What I find the most interesting is that everything I see in the social chat that I largely just lurk in… mirrors the exact same behavior I have seen in MMO Guilds. They are all working together on a shared objective and focusing on specific things that they can bring to the table.

The game has this interesting system that allows players to drop a flare at a specific location, and then other players in your clan can teleport to that location and be able to farm the objectives there. I’ve seen this a few times when someone happened across an area with a cluster of epic missions for example. The game tends to follow the television shows, and if a character has a major role that week… then immediately following there will be a number of seasonal missions that show up awarding the cards related to that player. I’ve also seen my clan drop flares when they find a cluster of a specific type of walker needed for an objective… like over the last couple of days we have been working on killing armored walkers with Darryl, which as such lead to my load out in the above screenshot. It of course has a cash shop, and while it is pretty pushy about advertising what is for sale… it doesn’t appear like you actually need anything from it pending you are willing to wait things out. Similarly being in a clan tends to help make sure you are rolling in resources.

Mostly I found it shocking to see the exact same MMORPG behavior on a mobile platform. I will admit I largely thought that Pokemon Go and the dedication of those players… was more attributed to the source material and less something that you find on mobile devices in general. However as I have dug into Dragalia Lost I have run across some seemingly super hardcore players there as well. I think the tides are shifting, and maybe those of us who proclaim to be PC or Console gamers need to update our mindsets. Sure mobile gaming might be “not for you” but the low barrier of entry… and how well all of these games run on my $300 unlocked android phone… makes it accessible to a market that may not be able to purchase a Console or a Gaming PC… but is damned likely to have a mobile phone that they use as their primary source of internet access. As a developer I have watched the numbers skew over the last few years on the large site that I maintain professionally… and previously we used to see 10-15% of our users coming in off mobile devices. Now that has reached a point where 49% of our users are either on phones or tablets, which has created a massive shift in how we approach content. It is not shocking that game developers have started to do exactly the same thing. I may not be super happy with this trend, but I am now at least starting to understand it a bit more.

Leaving Flatwoods

November 14, 2018 by Belghast

Yesterday it turns out that I was not crazy, and that Fallout 76 was in fact active and fully launched for most of the day. When I popped in to get a screenshot for the blog post, I noticed that it was allowing me to hit play… and sure enough I got in with a half dozen people roaming around the map. The funny thing about this is I remember doing something similar during the launch of Elder Scrolls Online and getting into that game several hours early. I guess it pays to be patched up and ready to go when Bethesda launches a new game. The funny thing is though, since I knew the game was available it caused me to approach launch day with a lot more chill than I normally have. This is also helped out by the fact that I had a character with progress that carried over from the beta, and I didn’t exactly feel a rush to get to a point of sustainability quickly. Now that said I am always seeming to need a source of food and a source of water and weirdly enough a source of wood… to keep boiling said water.

For most of the beta I spent my time around the Flatwoods area, which is one of the first towns you encounter… if you actually follow the quest directions. However it is an area rich in resources and quests so in theory it is a pretty good idea to go there first. We did a jaunt to the far south at one point and captured the Poseidon power plant as a Trio, but I never managed to make it to Morgantown which was where the next major quest objective was directing me towards. So I set forth on a journey that would take me up Interstate 59 to Route 64 and on into the basic vicinity of Morgantown. I largely followed the highway system in part because I figured if I were doing this for real… I would wind up doing that as a way of keeping track of where I was going. Sure I could have set a waypoint off in the distance and made my way across the open terrain, but I was curious what attractions I might be able to find from the highway.

Roughly halfway down Interstate 59 I encountered a Slocum’s Joe which for the uninitiated is the Fallout Universe version of a coffee/donut shop. On the road beside it however was something magical… I am guessing this player spent every last minute of the beta hoarding resources to build this really awesome base, giving him one hell of a start for when the game launched proper. What was creepy however is that the mutated hounds were flopping stuck in the side of his fortifications. They were one of the random encounters I ran into along the road so I am guessing they attacked the base… and then got gunned down but the two turrets up above. My previous camp location had the problem of constantly being attacked by feral ghouls, and in one case they managed to damage the turrets and make their way into the base… and I logged in just as they were taking out my generator. So as such I started thinking more defensible fortifications… and this guy here seems to have a great design… minus the fact that the steps are wide open. Maybe the NPCs can’t walk up steps so good?

When I got to Morgantown I found this bridge with an eyebot moving back and forth across it playing its patriotic theme… and behind it was leading a trail of rat pups pied piper style. I watched the bridge for quite a bit and nothing else seemed to be pathing across it due to the fact that this neutral/peaceful event was programmed to take place there. This gave me a bit of an idea…

As such I opted to move my camp and reconstruct it underneath the bridge… thinking that this map feature might make for a slightly more defensible outpost. This was well and good until I realized that the ground was just uneven enough to make erecting a barrier of fences nigh impossible. I’ve built as much as I realistically can at this moment because I have run out of resources. However the area surrounding my camp is full of logs, so my hope is they will have re-spawned each time I visit the camp and can keep harvesting a decent amount of lumber that way. Additionally I am on the outskirts of Morgantown, which should serve as fertile scavenging grounds for parts to make more stuff. The camp being nearby will let me shuffle loads of things over to it and dump them in the machinery there to free up my inventory. I need to learn to pair down my weapons and carry only the things that I know I will be immediately using. The truth is I have largely settled on my serrated machette and my trusty 10 mm pistol… but in both cases I need to build the level 10 version of each I think. Unfortunately my building spree has run me out of other resources as well.

The biggest takeaway from last night is that this is in fact a Fallout game. My wife got home super late and as a result I largely played things other than fallout until around 7:30. By 8 pm however I was deeply engaged in the game and did not really look up or pay attention to the time until a little before 11 pm when I hurriedly scrambled off to bed. Another friend managed to play until 4 am without realizing it. When you are focused on this objecting or that while exploring this deceptively large and densely populated map… all other things in the world sort of fade away. I still have not really encountered any players in a negative fashion, and while they are out there… once I left the Fallout 76 proper area and Flatwoods especially… I stopped encountering them. That is not to say that there are not players out there… the above screenshot I took to show off where my camp is located and you can see a number of dots sprinkled around the map representing other players. That seems like a large number for the roughly 6 am when I took it. More than that however I learned a few key pieces of information about why the world is the way it is… and what happened to most of the people that were remaining. That however is a tale that I am going to save for another time, given that it factors on some serious spoilers.

Shock to the System

November 13, 2018 by Belghast

Yesterday I had the day off and I am sorta thankful for that. It means that I missed driving in the first snow of the season. It isn’t that the roads would have been slick or anything… it is just more a case of folks acting crazy in inclement weather. As a result I stayed home and dealt with the air conditioning folks doing our winter maintenance checkup on the system. I also spent a good deal of time playing various video games and also making a batch of Chicken Tikka Masala. My wife unfortunately did not get the day off and as such I wanted something to warm up her belly when she got home.

While waiting on the folks to get here, and while they were doing their thing… I played a lot of Diablo 3 on the Switch and have moved on into Act 2. I like this port of the game quite a bit, but as I have talked about… mobile gaming just doesn’t fit that cleanly into my life. If I have access to my other machines I would probably rather play them… and the switch is just heavy enough to be awkward to play while laying in bed. However I heard last night that apparently the Switch version is what Tamrielo needed to really get into the game as he now has a Necromancer in its 60s… which is significantly higher than I think he has ever gotten a character before? The controls feel good, but for someone who is super used to how things work on the PC… it is taking a lot of adjustment. I equate it to someone reciting a poem you know in a foreign language… you understand what they are saying but there is a lot of translation happening.

As far as most of the day… I spent a good deal of time playing Path of Exile… and I really need to figure out how to leave public channels. I also decided to spend a little money with the game and bought one of the supporter packs that they are just about to phase out when the new expansion releases. I figure at this point I have gotten enough joy out of the game that I really should pay something for it. This gave me a bit of cash shop currency which I then used to get a better looking weapon and shield… though I am wishing I had gone with something else for the shield because it does not match the outfit at all. Basically my gameplay tends to revolve around Molten Strike, Blade Vortex and Leap… everything else is largely superfluous and as such I am completely cool losing W as a keybind to give me back the move forward functionality I am used to in Diablo 3. I flirted briefly with binding leap to spacebar, but ran into issues with the game needing a close all windows keybind to replace the spacebar I took. Once I figure out a decent option for that I might go back to spacebar for leap since I prefer having a movement key bound there.

As far as Monster Hunter World goes… I am in an odd place where I need some Kirin+ items… but for whatever reason do not have access to High Rank Kirin. I spent a good chunk of the night trying various quests to try and whittle down whatever it takes to unlock the High Rank version of the fight, but failing miserably. Essentially I need a couple materials to get the last of my layered armor pieces from the Kulve Taroth event… and I am not sure if I will still be able to do the turn-ins after the event or not. I know that I can craft Kulve Armor without issue, and have gathered up more than enough mats to make a full set of that once I farm up the Elder Dragon gems. I’ve been sitting at Hunter Rank 49 for awhile now, which means that I have to take down a Tempered Kirin. Last night I made several attempts and while one came super close… there is always the problem of someone fainting. In this particular run it was me that failed… but in others I managed to stay alive 100% of the time and someone else got the carts. Ultimately I will get through this… but in reality I just want the parts from it and could care less about moving my Hunter Rank higher at this very moment. Time to research what exactly I need to have already completed to unlock the needed High Rank hunt.

There are so many games right now out that I’ve not had a chance to really devote much time to. On the 16th another one gets added to that stack in the form of Let’s Go Eevee… because Eevee is way cooler than Pikachu. I need to figure out a better way to spend time with the switch because I have quite the backlog right now… because I have not devoted anywhere near enough time to Monster Hunter Generations Ultimate or Starlink Battle for Atlas. The only problem with Switch games is that they look like crap on my 4K setup upstairs, and they are not quite comfortable to play in bed. So I need to figure out a happy middle ground where I feel comfortable playing the games and will also be willing to give up playing something on the PC. Yes I realize these are the first worldiest of problems.

Also in the extreme stack of games that need attention… Fallout 76 launches I believe tonight? Look when someone says Midnight I never quite know if they mean which specific night/morning. I believe it launches tonight at Midnight EST, but when I popped in a moment ago to take screenshots the servers were up. I am wondering if this was by accident, or if they are just going to let people trickle in that happen to try it. Sadly I have work, but I can in fact verify that everything from my B.E.T.A. character is there and functional… minus one turret that I placed on my base. I am not sure if it got blown up, or if something glitched and it fell below the world or something. Regardless Fallout 76 is either launching tonight… or has already launched and it will be tonight before I get to give it any attention. I had a lot of fun with Kodra and Tam running amok, and now I am left with the decision of… do I play my already level 10 character from beta or do I roll something fresh.