Flagship Studios boss Bill Roper is adamant the developer isn't ripping people off with the subscription-based access to Hellgate: London online multiplayer.
"We wanted to have the best of both worlds: to give people the free experience they're expecting, because this is from the Diablo team, but at the same time to provide continuing content," Roper told PC Zone magazine before discussing exactly what players will get for their $9.99 a month.
He continued, "We want to be able to stream things into the game continuously - additional gameplay modes, mods, quests, monsters and environments, special events for special days, weekly events, things that are ongoing and that go above and beyond balance fixes and bugs - even up to including new factions and character classes".
Roper explained that a fixed, regular schedule won't be applied to such updates but provided an example of how "at the end of every quarter or something, we do a big thing such as adding a new character class or some story".
The subscription, he said, is a way for Flasghsip Studios to be able to maintain the live team that produces the updates for the game and to interact with the community to see what they'd like added.
The latest trailer and screenshots from Hellgate: London can be found here.
So, if you get the paid for content, and then cancel your subscription, do you get to keep that content or what?
It seems a little grey doesn't it? I think if you stop paying, you get to play with the stuff you've already received.
Stupid pricing really, I'm not paying for that, when an MMO would be a better use of a monthly subscription.
Its supposed to be kinda MMO though, but i dont agree with the pricing either, thats 120 quid a year and effectively 3-4games, and i very much doubt if you would get 3-4 new games worth of content
Id need to see it up and running to really comment, but i would never pay for any of those monthly subscription thing's, its a license to print money
I wonder how that leaves the bog standard patches and normally a patch will include some free content no matter how small, e.g. Lost Planet is getting new MP characters and maps, RB6: Vegas is getting the 2 console map packs, BF2 had 3 extra maps and a new game mode etc.
1. Buy the game with the intention of never shelling out for the extra features.
2. Realise that the game is actually a p**s poor fraction of a full game.
3. Either buy into the monthly fee for the full game experience and cancel your current monthly subscription game for the n'th time and try to forget that you've been suckered. Or, alternatively, tell the game to f**k right off and get back to Guild Wars; a game which manages to have first rate dev support, servers and updates paid for by real expansions that are a full on game in themselves.
Sorry lads. Game looks tempting, but with a 1/4 % rise in interest rates, that equates to about 2 MMO subscriptions worth of cash. (Ok, I'm on a long term fixed rate because I'm a genius with a crystal ball, but the point is valid for other people).
Bah! Humbug! Guild Wars
Oh, by the way, have I made the point about Guild Wars and it's non-subscription based goodness? Just checking.
I have never sat down reading a review and decided not to buy a game for any other reason than it was crap....until PS3.
This is now the 3rd game i will not buy because its a scam. Warhawk, GT5 and now this. Effecitvley a blank disk you have to pay extra for content.
Im sick of fanboys, if it wasnt for them the PS3 would have died a death worse than the Atari Jaguar by now.
Didnt realise Warhawk was a monthly deal? what a rip of, and it looks nothing like the original E3 movie.
I was 100% set on buying Hellgate, theres a better article in PC format from last month detailing the online fee and it sounded grand, im gonna wait until it comes out and what is being said before i touch it though,f i got 20hours out of the SP for 35euro id be happy enough
Im not sure if warhawk has monthly fees. They are definatly giving downloadable content for it though.
The reason it doesnt look like the original E3 demo is because they have cannibalised it since the original. Its now a sole multiplayer game, no single player at all. Theirs every chance it will be a monthly fee from the sounds of it.
It was the GT5 thing that really got on my t**s. GT5 will apparently have 400 cars ready on the disk with another 600 available for download AT LAUNCH!!. I dont mind paying to give one of my favourite games longevity. Say new cars come out after 12 months or so that they are supporting, i would buy them and be chuffed about having the latest Ferrari Sex'erossa to pan the online competition with. But to do it at launch just reeks of scam.
Sony really have to start thinking about putting their consumers first rather than their wallets. Their not giving us any reward for paying the £400. Home for example could have been a great idea as a mini MMO you get for purchasing a PS3. Meet freinds on there, setup games, free demos of your freinds games (Like PSP, DS) all kinds of things. Instead, you have to pay for a bigger house, items, clothes, access to different areas. Yes some of its free, but it should all be free!!. Its rubbish!!.
Shame, as the game looked fairly good, but, y'know, there's a hell of a lot of difference between an MMO, and this game, so why are we being charged as if it were an MMO?
Release the full on game, but instead set up a marketplace, for those who have the money and inclination to pay real world cash for ingame items. Don't cut chunks out of the game, as otherwise what you're doing is charging me full whack and for a glorified demo of what the game could be.
When I first heard of Hellgate, I was very interested in it. Then I saw the reports about the fee for on-line. I was still interested, but warily cautious. Now? Sorry, but someother company is going to be getting my hard earned cash.
Roper explained that a fixed, regular schedule won't be applied to such updates...
But yet Roper expects a fixed regular schedule of payment from me?
I've been a follower of Hellgate London for over 2 years now, I guess you could call me a fanboy. But I want to share with you some straight up honest truth about Hellgate London, and the people making it.
Out of the box you've got a 40-50 hour singleplayer RPG (on normal difficulty) no online required, no fees, if you want to play online you get the same 40-50 hours at no additional cost or subscription and you get to play with your mates, you'll get any and all bug fixes and balancing updates as they happen.
This'll be a secure online enviroment with a healthy game economy and community.
If you're really into the game and want to enhance/extend your experience you can pay 10 US dollars per month which works out at a little more than a five quid sterling in todays money.
This buys you straight away more storage space and more character slots, you get the ability to play hardcore mode (if you character dies there's no coming back) if that's what floats your boat.
There'll also be PVP in some way shape or form if that's what you're hungry for.
You also get rolling content so they're going to come out with progressive story and side quest content which will extend your play time, there's like to be new weapons and armour and game modes as time goes on as well.
And likly a bunch of stuff that I don't even know about because these are the guys who invented Diablo. If it doesn't sound like your cup of tea fair enough, don't damn it because there's an optional subscription if you want more it's going to cost money, a fiver a month IS a bargin.
The important thing to understand is all this subscriber content will be balanced against non subscriber content, so none of it will be inherently better than what anyone can find, only different and balanced accordingly.
Trapp - don't forget VAT, and secondly, don't forget that all these 'added features' have no valid reason NOT TO BE FREE.
Flagship Studios boss Bill Roper is adamant the developer isn't ripping people off with the subscription-based access to Hellgate: London online multiplayer.
VAT, didn't factor that in true enough, still working out at £5.74 maybe be a little more than that in the final analysis. No great sum though.
Proof is it, ok i'll give that one a shot. It is an interesting dilema; gamers have expectations I know this because I am one, hi there
What you want then is too feel you're getting your monies worth, I'm right there with you. So I'm going to pay me £26 quid on Amazon and look forward to a very replayable highly customizable minimum 40 hours of singleplayer or online multiplayer goodness.
That's not too shabby out of the box I'm not too big on playing with peeps I don't know anyway, if I want to mix it up I can continue to solo or go online and repeat this experiance, try out the different character classes and play the game through a couple of times and take a crack at the higher difficulty levels (more risk equals more reward, nice).
So that's going to be maybe 150 hours spread over a few weeks, I feel good because that's worked out at 17p an hour, I can put this down and never touch it again if I so choose, but wait the fun doesn't stop there.
If you're familiar with Diablo 2 you'll know for all it's simple interface there's some real skill in complimenting the items you find find with the skill paths you choose, a gameplay dynamic that lends itself to casual and dedicated hours of replay alike.
Chances are if you've played it this much you might want to see what all this subscriber business is about if you decide to take the plunge pay for a month see if all the new stuff is worth that money.
If after a month it's not pushing your buttons or you want to cut your subscriotion you can just stop I think any subscriber stuff you've collected will be locked and you won't be able to go to those places or play those game modes or use that equipment.
But you can keep playing online as much or as little as you want, and maybe after a while a bunch of the subscriber content will become freely available in updates, you're not going to get all of it and you'll no doubt wait a while but if you don't want to pay there's still going to be new stuff for you to do over time.
I myself work in the Games Industry not for Flagship mind you, but as much as I love the work I gotta live.
I'm not saying I blindly agree with all flagships decisions because I don't know them all, I don't know how well the system will work in practice but I have a lot of faith in them because of their community interaction and there track record.
These guys like to break the mold, it's what they're good at. Hellgate London isn't going to be for everyone but it's going to tick a lot of boxes with a lot of people.
My only suspicion at this point is that they will do what Blizzard did. What am I talking about?
Well, we learned from playing multiplayer games online that when the option to host our own servers wasn't available, the developer/publisher provided them(Battle.net for example). This was a completely free service to those who had a proper copy of the game.
With the rise of MMOs, we still had the understanding that we were not paying to *access* the provided servers, but to fund further continous development of the game we had already purchased 'as is'.
At some point when Blizzard realised they were making tons of money off World of Warcraft, this moral understanding which had been ingrained in the subscribers through all previous experience with online games(Blizzard certainly never said in open and certain terms that the relationship would be any different) got forced aside. The already fairly slow rate of content release in WoW then became as fast as a howitzer retro-fitted with pogo-sticks in a boggy field. Now apparently we were paying for *access* and not the *content* in development.
The content, we then learned we had to pay for completely seperately, with the release of the expansion which outrageously did not come with 30-days to off-set the £20-£25 shelf price. The content WoW subscribers have had in the last year and a half has been a disgrace and the patch-content since the expansion has been worse still; in fact the main content patch was actually to fit *some* of the stuff in that was promised for the expansion itself.
Journalists remains pathetically soft with Blizzard. Flagship really don't have a very good role-model; one that knows it can get away with anything.
lol sounds like trapp the hellgate lover works for bill if you ask me
I for one am not buyin this game now was 100 percent going to get NOT NOW it just shows you the greed thats out there no way does it cost that money to keep it up to date when guild wars shows you it can be done with regular updates you can by in the shop WHICH WORKS
so so so sad bill how could you so many people wont get this game now
I can certainly understand trapps point of view. It is only just over a fiver a month, which seems small. However (how often do I use that word?), these days, it's common for gamers to already have one MMO account which they regularly cough up for, and that fee is generally for games like WoW which do actually need some (but not a lot - see above post about promised content) monthly revenue for all the folks working behind the scenes. Guild Wars (the marketing model from which all others should learn) doesn't need as much backroom staff because of the nature of the game, and the fact that they release stand alone expansion at full price.
The way I look at it is, Hellgate is similar to Guild Wars; without going into too much depth, there's less bandwidth needed, and fewer permanant man hours required to support the game in contrast to something like WoW. Also, what you get in the basic package for Hellgate has been sytematically stripped of features vice the full package having added featured. They've deliberatly 'clipped the wings' of the basic package, practically forcing you into the subscription.
As for the amount of hours gaming you can get out of the basic game, irrelevant! Last time I checked I'd well over a thousand hours in Guild Wars, and must have spent about £60-70 only on that game, sorry, three games.
I think for a lot of people the proof of the pudding will be in the playing, and even then the bulk of Hellgate's player base will be probably be non subscriber; the first few months are bound to be a time of awakening as the nature of the rolling content becomes more apparent.
The value of ongoing content versus a paid subscription will only become clear in the fullness of time, if what you want from Hellgate is a full rich online experiance with all the bells and whistles of an MMO then yeah you're probably going to find yourself paying for it.
Guildwars has a good online model and flagship have taken a lot of que's from it and have ultimatly distilled alot of what works into their own; if it doesn't work in practice they're going to be the first to know about it and act accordingly.
I think the quality and quantity of the out of the box package will sell itself to players and not leave people feeling forced to pay a subscription.
Lets not forget you don't need to go online to play this game, it exists in it's entirety a full offline singleplayer. I think Flagship is trying to deliver the best of both worlds to casual and hardcore gamers alike.
In todays market place where server overheads and development costs are higher than ever. I don't think Flagship are greedy for wanting to see a return on their sweat and tears, they've been working on this for nearly 4 years and are going to great lengths to make this game one seriously tight package come ship day.
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