Developer says Hellgate London = failure, develoeprs jump ship en masse

CptStern

CptStern

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Hellgate: London may be in trouble as word emerges that staff are leaving developer Flagship "in droves".

Speaking on his blog, Guy Somberg, one of the original programmers on the project, talks of work being "depressing" as the population does "nothing but complain".

"Work is depressing right now," began Somberg. "Never mind the fact that Hellgate isn't as popular as anybody had hoped. Never mind the fact that there exists a term 'Flagshipped', meaning where a company basically over-promises and then screws you. Never mind the fact that the forums are totally populated by people who do nothing but complain and talk about how much the game sucks. Never mind the fact that people do the same thing in the game itself.
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"So why is work depressing? (Other than all of those other depressing things, that is.) The reason is that people are leaving. In droves, they're leaving.
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http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=149500

ouch
 
Lol, guess the people who complain will soon disappear after the game itself has disappeared :p
 
Ouch.
That's terrible, they're just giving up?

Cowardly game devs, imo.
 
That's a shame.

What is it that made them excel under blizzard, but failed so greatly by themselves?

Blizzard is like a gaming messiah, it's crazy. I'll be interested to see how Starcraft II turns out.
 
I knew the game sucked, but shouldn't they be hearing WHY the game sucks, and fixing it, instead of just pissing and moaning about it?

Oh well, I guess Mythos will be infinitely times better.
 
xlucidx said:
Ouch.
That's terrible, they're just giving up?

Cowardly game devs, imo.
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well the devs I can understand because they're just paid employees who would have moved to a different project anyways ..however this is cowardly:

He goes on to mention that Flagship founders Peter Hu, Dave Brevik and Tyler Thompson have all but moved away from Hellgate to work on different projects.
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well it makes perfect sense from a business perspective , you need to know when to pull the plug on a project instead of sinking more funds into it.
 
They probably lost the contract they had with their producers, so they really *can't* continue working on it.
 
Man, this game sounded so ****ing promising originally too. They had the devs, some cool concepts, and a solid background. Too bad it just... sucked. After playing beta, I knew I wasn't making the purchase.

Pretty ridic they're jumping ship, though. I'd expect them to stick it out for a year first--people never know when to quit, so I'm honestly shocked they did so while they were ahead. Sort of commending them and bashing them at the same time, I guess.
 
Has the game even improved since release?
 
I think that is pretty cowardly , saying people complain too much. What were they not expecting to do any work on patches after or something? EVERY game has patches so its not like they cant try to fix it.
 
xlucidx said:
Has the game even improved since release?
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Not really. They failed at trying to fix some bugs that bothered everybody. Also, they tried to make it more interesting by giving some of the "paying" parts of the game to the free parts, but that just wasn't enough, and then the people who are paying a month were pissed because they didn't feel as unique and special.
 
I can attest to how horrible the support was for this game. I was in the first phase of Alpha testing, and it seemed even then that Flagship was not to concerned about many of the crucial bugs. I remember this one bug, in which engineer drones would lose all their stats, that went unfixed throughout all of Alpha and Beta, and lasted into release I believe. I jumped ship right before the end of beta, because you could tell how bad it was going to be, despite the hordes of naysayers defending flagship.
 
Yes its so cowardly. They should be like the Star Wars Galaxies team and just spend shit loads of money trying to fix a game that had basic design flaws. Man, those guys are brave. They may have ultimately wasted every bit of effort and money and ruined themselves by sticking with it, but it was much better than the alternative of quitting while they were ahead (relatively speaking).

Man, they're cowards. They're just as bad as shop owners who close because their store isnt profitable and nobody wants to go there. God damn pussies!


I mean, God damn! Hearing people bitching and moaning every where you go about your game should really motivate you! I mean, when some customer comes into a store and bitches at the manager because the store isnt that good, the manager is totally like "**** YEAH I KNOW RITE?! IMA FIX IT UP LICKETY SPLIT! DUDE!" and hes never like "****, this sucks. What a waste of money and time, its going to be too costly and difficult to completely re-structure the store and re-purpose whatever assets we dont just throw away." **** no! That shit just doesnt make sense! Crews should always go down with the ship! Even if there is a rescue helicopter telling them to get in and save themselves while letting the ship sink, they should just be REAL MEN and say "**** you helicopter, you're not even alive! We built this ship with a hole in it, and we're MEN so we're going to patch that god damn hole while we sink deeper and deeper into the depths of the ocean, even though it will mean we die!"
 
Krynn72 said:
Yes its so cowardly. They should be like the Star Wars Galaxies team and just spend shit loads of money trying to fix a game that had basic design flaws. Man, those guys are brave. They may have ultimately wasted every bit of effort and money and ruined themselves by sticking with it, but it was much better than the alternative of quitting while they were ahead (relatively speaking).

Man, they're cowards. They're just as bad as shop owners who close because their store isnt profitable and nobody wants to go there. God damn pussies!


I mean, God damn! Hearing people bitching and moaning every where you go about your game should really motivate you! I mean, when some customer comes into a store and bitches at the manager because the store isnt that good, the manager is totally like "**** YEAH I KNOW RITE?! IMA FIX IT UP LICKETY SPLIT! DUDE!" and hes never like "****, this sucks. What a waste of money and time, its going to be too costly and difficult to completely re-structure the store and re-purpose whatever assets we dont just throw away." **** no! That shit just doesnt make sense! Crews should always go down with the ship! Even if there is a rescue helicopter telling them to get in and save themselves while letting the ship sink, they should just be REAL MEN and say "**** you helicopter, you're not even alive! We built this ship with a hole in it, and we're MEN so we're going to patch that god damn hole while we sink deeper and deeper into the depths of the ocean, even though it will mean we die!"
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the three principles walked away from the project while it's still on lifesupport ...you wouldnt walk away from a horse with a broken leg abandoning it to it's fate ..no the decent thing would be to put the barrel to the head and finish the job
 
CyberPitz said:
I knew the game sucked, but shouldn't they be hearing WHY the game sucks, and fixing it, instead of just pissing and moaning about it?

Oh well, I guess Mythos will be infinitely times better.
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Developers like Constructive Criticism, but nobody in the world likes spotty teenage kids just shooting their mouths off at something so miniscule a problem.
 
I had some fun with it (actually still have it installed :O), but it isn't really that great of game. The whole subscription thing just made things worse in my eyes.

Lookin' forward to Mythos for sure, though.
 
DEATH eVADER said:
Developers like Constructive Criticism, but nobody in the world likes spotty teenage kids just shooting their mouths off at something so miniscule a problem.
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You're right, nobody does like that...too bad that's not what's happening on the boards. Legitimate problems that are plaguing the game are going unchecked, mainly because they gave up. When there is a bug that is in the game from the start that affects the way the game is played, then really, there's an issue. I remember when me and pesh and gang were playing it, we would get crashes constantly, along with going to a new zone and...HOLY SHIT EVERYBODY IS INVISIBLE!
 
Mech Man said:
I think that is pretty cowardly , saying people complain too much. What were they not expecting to do any work on patches after or something? EVERY game has patches so its not like they cant try to fix it.
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You can't patch bad game design. Not to mention it has to be cost effective in the first place, it's not a charity.
 
Never liked the look of this from the start.
 
I've always been confused about HG:L
There's like a free mode or something, isn't there? completely free? just download the game and have lots less privileges?
They need to better advertise that, I'm still not sure.
 
that's really sad to read. it's probably not nice to see all the morons complaining about something you've worked hard with for years.
 
As fun as developing games can be, the reality of commercial games design makes my stomach churn.
 
Don't worry, according to Flagship, nothing is wrong. He just had a bad night.

I definitely believe it. Really.

More like a bad year of working on a bad game, and not a bad night.
 
Heads up, Ventrilo going retail.
 
This game sounded half-arsed from the very start. Something about using London as a location but then opting for lots of randomly generated maps seemed bizarre to me.

Then pissing and whining about how your subscribers are doing 'nothing but complain' is bullshit. It is your JOB to listen to those complaints and redress them since those people are paying for the right to complain. I've played MMO's that have been transformed from a mediocre POS into something pretty damn impressive in the space of a couple of innovative updates. If there aren't the resources to be able to implement that, then that is a case of Flagship failing the game's subscribers. Hire some more people FFS.

Also if you're a dev and you want people to do nothing but fellate you over the games you have developed, you have 2 options: 1) be a better developer, on a better team of developers, and develop an amazing game right off the bat, or 2) Never get involved with developing for an MMO or a subscription-model in the first place. With a subscription model it should be your job to listen to people whine and to give them less reasons to.

Something about this 'it was less popular than we'd hoped' thing pisses me off. It's becoming de rigeur for companies to bail on projects now if they don't go double platinum in the first week (eg, Crysis). Maybe development costs nowadays make that a little more excusable for big SP games, but if you're releasing a game that is going to have subscribers, you should not pretend that it's all about the game being a huge Day Zero success. Suck it up, listen to the whiners, do your job and improve the damn game.
 
Jintor said:
Never liked the look of this from the start.
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Same here. I haven't even played it.

At the end of the day releasing a patch to fix everything won't make me want to buy it, nor will it sell them thousands of more copies, therefore it's not worth it.

I don't see what's so bad about the original coders now working on another game. They released a game, now move onto the next one and don't **** it up this time.
 
Gordon-Shepherd said:
I've always been confused about HG:L
There's like a free mode or something, isn't there? completely free? just download the game and have lots less privileges?
They need to better advertise that, I'm still not sure.
Click to expand...

You had to buy the game, but after you buy it, you could also purchase the monthly subscriptions for a larger stash, more items to get, things like that.

I had high hopes for the game, sadly :(
 
I didn't. I kinda always knew it would suck, but I did get a few hours out of it playing with friends (read: Pitz)

Let's go Diablo III!!! One MMO I would pay money for.
 
Pesh, LETS DO EEEET!

I've been wanting to go back and play some more DII recently :(
 
I played a few games with TCfromBN... I'd only play if we did no shop/no repair HARDCORE rules.
 
That's what happens when you release a content incomplete action RPG, charge a monthly fee for content updates and necessary features, and ship without proper QA or bug ironing. Take heed, development world. What's worse is Bill R's initial response essentially saying everything was fine and blaming a picky community. I would jump ship, too.
 
Go back to Blizzard and make Diablo 3.

You're wasting our god damn time, Flagship.
 
I don't believe flagship studio's is self funded. One of the great things about Blizzard Entertainment is that they are. Blizzards vigorously tests every aspect about there games. I'm guessing flagship studio's simply does not have the resources to do that.

Bill Roper you should have stayed with Blizzard.
 
CyberPitz said:
You had to buy the game, but after you buy it, you could also purchase the monthly subscriptions for a larger stash, more items to get, things like that.

I had high hopes for the game, sadly :(
Click to expand...
Damn, was hoping freeloaders like myself would be sated :(
 
Haha, sounds like the devs are just being pussies TBH, I mean, every single game and its creators/publishers have to deal with legions of faceless whiners and bitchers no matter how popular or good the game is.
 
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