I'm Going to LondonI played Hellgate London for eight hours yesterday. Yeah it was that awesome. A friend brought his computer over and played together. It was a process though.

First off was picking it up. We ran down to Gamestop to pick it up. They gave us a huge box for the collectors edition. It made me happy. It came with a poster, 106 page graphic novel by Dark Horse Comics, A DVD of the making of the game, an in game pet, the sound track and the game. I also preordered it, so I got a Lava Dye kit, which just makes my character's armor Lava colored, and a founders offer, which is you pay 150 bucks and you get subscription for life. I thought it was a good deal. It's ten bucks a month to subsribe (it's optional but you get a bunch of stuff if you subscribe). Alright Let's move on to what I think about it.

Hellgate London is a mix of feelings. I read some user reviews, and there were two types: Really good or really bad. I see where they both came from. The people who gave it a really good score, looked passed all the glitches and realized how fun the game is and reviewed it really good, which is a bad way to review things. The people who gave ita bad score saw all the glitches and what not. So I'm going to give it to you straight. First I'll start with the good and then I'll go to the bad, and then I'll give you what I would add to the game.

The good. The game is really fun and really addicting. It's the same addictive game play as Diablo II. I love hacking up demons, and the undead, and shooting them. It's even more fun playing with friends online.

How they did it was great too. When you go online, when you are at "Stations" which are safe havens and where you buy goods and get quests and stuff, othere people that are online are there. You can trade with them, chat, invite them to join your party, etc. Once you get into a battle zone, you are by yourself or with your party. I thought that was cool.

The bad. Flagship Studios needed to spend more time ironing out the glitches. Holy crap. Betas should not go until 5 days before release. Betas are there to tell you what is glitchy, and then you fix ALL of the glitches. Wow. My friend and I fell through ceiling and floors so many times. For some reason, it took him longer to load whenever we switched to and from different areas.

I don't know if Electronic Arts rushed them or not. If they did, it's another reaosn to hate EA. The thing is though, their producer was NamcoBandai, but then EA bought part of NamcoBandai (oops it's Bandai Namco).

Another glitch is that it apparently has a memory problem that people are talking about. When i closed the game finally after about 4 hours of playing, I had an error saying that my memory was full... I have 4 GBs and my video card has 756 MBs. So neither were low on memory for this game. I dont know if this was the game's fault or not, but for some reason my friend kept getting dropped.

Now my router sucks and has dropped just me on several occasions when we play Unreal Tournament 2004 at my house, but this is wierd. We both have the same network card, so I know it wasn't that. I was even further away from the router and I was fine. I can't explain it. For the most part, those are the main glitches.

People have complained about the graphics. I think it looks really good. I think it's close to Oblivion. You have to have the settings on high. I didn't get to use the DirectX 10 features because for some reason my video driver kept crashing whenever I did that. I was to retell you that I have an NVidia Geforce 8800 GTX. Not GTS, but GTX. That's a 756 MB video card. It's awesome. It can handle DirectX 10. It's been done with the Unreal 3 demo.

Anyways back to the graphics. I did notice one thing. If you turn down the settings to medium, the game looks like complete crap. There's a huge difference. My laptop could almost handle it on the recommended requirement. So I installed it on my laptop and It was kinda laggy. I looked at the settings, medium for the most part and some low. I get to the character screen and it was laggy and it just looked so horrible. So I can see how people say the game looks bad, but if you have it on the best settings it actually looks great.

What I would change. This is what I think they should have done. First, fix the glitches before you release the game. Some people pay 70 bucks (collectors edtion plus one month of subscribing) for the game. They shouldn't have to beta test it again for you.

I also wish it had full voice acting like Diablo 2 (NPCs say what's on the screen when they are talking about a quest, etc.). They have some generic voice acting for greetings and good byes, but that's all they are: generic. It has some good voices, but I wish I was talked to. That's just me though. Kinda on the voice acitng note, have some Gossip like you did in Diablo 2. If you are doing a quest for someone and you talk to someone else, have them give you a little more information about your quest. I'm not asking for another Diablo 2, but those were good things that you had there. Would have spiced it up more.

Well those are my early thoughts on the game. If you haven't bought the game yet, maybe wait a month or two so they can patch it up. It really is a fun game. Personally I can look past the glitches, and enjoy it.

Good Night.