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Hellgate: London - Gripes and Possible Bugs
Ok, so as if I hadn't complained enough about Hellgate: London, I have some more gripes. They all relate to the single player game, as mentioned before, I'm not interested in shelling out a monthly fee for multi-player experience.
Gripe # 1 – Ok, so I've finished the game in regular mode and now I'm playing on "Nightmare Mode". At first "nightmare" was anything but, as I was able to wade through hordes of monsters with nary a scratch, in fact, by the point I was done with Covent Garden Station, I was selling off Advanced Health Injectors, because I had too many.
Then all of a sudden, all hell broke loose, I ended up using nearly 20 AHIs just to get to Charing Cross Station, then when I started to do the first Charring Cross missions I got totally ganked, I must have died about 30 times, just trying to get a foothold into Piccadilly Approach. I couldn't figure out why the monsters had suddenly gotten so damn tough and by the time I actually got to Piccadilly Square, I was nearly out of Advanced Injectors and was getting into my supply of shiny new Nanodyne Health Injectors.
Then I noticed that the monsters I was fighting were all level 39 and 40, while my character was still only level 32, holy unbalanced game Hellgateman! I'd done all the sidequests to get to this point in the game, so I have no idea why I ended up so far behind. The only solution was to backtrack and do some levelling, so I went back to Covent Garden Station and started to do runs on the Covent Garden Portal and the Sewers, trying to collect Health Injectors and Experience. After a couple of days of messing around, I was up to level 34 and had made back all the Injectors I lost in Piccadilly, so I was ready for another shot at it. This time, success!
I was able to get through the Square no problem this time and did several more missions, like the Death runs in Green Park Station, but all of a sudden, "Poof!", I've hit another wall trying to carry on at Charring Cross. I've level 35 now, but all the creatures are level 42 and higher, yeesh! It seems that when there's a disparity between monster and character level, of 6 to 7 levels, the monsters get some kind of extra boost when it comes to getting through the character's defences, bleh!
Gripe # 2 – Ok, the best items in the game are the five star gold "unique" items, which drop very, very rarely. In fact, having gone through the game once and now into Act 2 of Nightmare, I can say that I've seen less than 10 gold items, only 3 of which have been usable by my character and of those 3, 2 were shoulder armour.
That's no big issue, I expect good items to be rare. What really sucks is that the item drops are suddenly not random, in fact, the last 3 "unique" items have all been the exact same item, not very unique there, boys! It's been something called the "Subtle Converter", a mind-control weapon that's absolutely of no use to my Blademaster. Is this a bug? I think so! Double Bleh!
Gripe #3 – Here and there I've decided to use skill points in an unwise manner to try out new abilities. There's absolutely no way in the single-player game to get these points back. However, if you play the multi-player version and have a paid account, you automatically got a "respec" token with the last multi-player patch.
This totally bites and is something that Titan Quest totally got right, with TQ, there's a special merchant that allows you to buy back skill points, he starts off fairly cheap, but soon has exorbitant prices if you want to respect too much. This is a great game balance feature, it lets you try out skills, but not be punished, except in the virtual pocket book, which keeps things balanced.
It's obvious that Flagship knows that people should be able to respect somehow, as they're offering the option to subscribed players, which is basically admitting that there's a lot of useless skills. But they are totally deciding to punish folks that want to enjoy the single-player game.
What's the big deal? Why punish single players? If I'm happy I'll totally being into buying the inevitable expansion pack(s), so stop pissing me off and don't make me turn to third party hacks to correct minor errors in judgement. TRIPLE BLEH!
Posted by Dylon on January 31, 2008 9:00 PM |
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Comments
Hey, I'm still trying to beat Diablo II. I'm a Level 32 Barbarian with a defence helper who does a great job, except when he wanders too far ahead of me! My problem now is that I'm at Diablo's Lair but as soon as I touch the first of the 5 seals the bad guys just come out of the woodwork and swamp me and my buddy within a couple seconds. I'm going to try to work up a few levels and go at it again later in the week. See 'ya!
LOL! I'm just peeing myself waiting for Diablo 3!
I finally gave up on Hellgate and switched back to Titan Quest after picking up the Immortal Throne add-on. It's pretty cool, with more options for creating interesting items.
I'm also giving Dawn of Magic and Loki a try, both of which have received critcism for being too Diablo 2 like. (like that's a bad thing?)
What I really want to see is an Action RPG with a really rich item creation system that doesn't make it feel like you have to play for hundreds of hours waiting for not-so-random item drops!
April 2008