So It Must End. Shucks.

Rumors popped up on Friday that the end was nigh for Hellgate London and Mythos. Rumors that Hellgate London's Asian publisher was going to take over Hellgate, and rumors that there were massive layoffs. It was a long weekend for me to say the least.

One forum thread almost reached 1000 pages (at ten posts per page) before Flagship made an official statements on the rumors. It was a fun post. A post full of LOL catz, demodivational posters, responses on the rumors, Tiggs's (a cool forum moderator) myspace page, Chosen (another moderator) typoing his way out of the closet, Chosen making Tiggs mad by posting her myspace, and oh so much more. The community hadn't been so family like since beta. People had to resort to humor until Flagship straightened everything out. Well almost.

We had to wait until Tuesday. Flagship Studios confermmed that they layed off everyone except "... the core management and founding team members...". That's a lot of people who lost their jobs. I think they had about 100 employees. My best guess is that they would be lucky with 20 now. Flagship Studioes is still in operations. They still own both Hellgate London and Mythos.

Yes the picture is my character crying. No I'm a male. Yes she's a female. No I will not answer any of your questions regarding gender.

So what happens now? Well I'm gonna play some Hellgate London until the servers come down. I'm gonna wait for more in depth news on what will happen, but I imagine bye bye to servers. My guess is that the founding team members will update single player to the multiplayer patch. Many are hoping LAN support. Others are hoping that they can mod the game. I hope so also. Some of the people who've expressed interest in modding the game has some cool ideas.

I think Flagship took too much at one time. This was their first game, and it was with EA publishing it. Of course EA isn't going to give them much slack on the release date. When they said it was going to be released Halloween of 2007, EA wanted it so regardless of it being polished or not. I think they could've had a very successful launch (meaning keeping most of the players who bought the game, playing the game) if they didn't want to do so much.

For example, they could have saved both time and money if they did not release the game internationally. I think they should have stuck with North America, and maybe Europe for their first game. They wouldn't have to pay for Asian voice actors, spend time translating, spend money on servers in Asia, and wouldn't have to comply with Asian rules on things such as gore. It was rated "M" but most people thought it didn't look like an M rated game. So that's my opinion on where they went wrong.

I liked the game for several reasons, but the most important is because it was fun. I love the hack and slash of being a templar, the fun guns of the hunters, and the spells and demons of the cabalists. I looked, and there is no game that even compares to the gameplay of Hellgate. I tried the Witcher, and combat was too slow. Diablo is point and click.

The combat was just awesome in Hellgate because it wasn't indepth, in my opinion. It made it fun. I didn't have to worry about ammo, just what kind of damage I was doing. Which brings me to another aspect, the items. It was fun getting new items, upgrading them, modding them, and what not. It was fun going on Moloch runs (which I just started doing) and playing with friends (some of them just started getting into the game).

My three greatest regrets is not being able to kill Dessi (a freaking hard boss that came out with Stonehendge), beating the game on nightmare, and getting a character to level 50. I got to play all the classes, except the Guardian (which I really wasn't interested in after seeing the skills). So yeah I will miss the multiplayer. I'll always have Single player I suppose to get to level 50, and beat the game on Nightmare. *sigh*.

In conclusion, I would like to thank everyone at Flagship Studios, and wish everyone the best of luck in their careers. To the people still working at Flagship, I hope that you will take this as a learning experience and that your next game will blow me away. I'll keep my eye on you guys for future games. I wanna thank the awesome forum moderators, such as Tiggs, Chosen, Scapes, and many others for making the forums a great forums and enjoyable read, and for volunteering their time even though they no longer work for Flagship. You'll probably never read this, but hey, my thoughts.

To give you guys a heads up, After E3 over I'll post either a cool games from E3 type post, or maybe a new Games to the Video with a different format.

Peace Out.