Evidently hell had no vacancies for Hellgate: London

The history of Hellgate: London is a bit of sob story. It was a wildly ambitious Diablo style PC dungeon crawler with a very heavy emphasis on online multiplayer that was launched WAY back in good ol’ 2007 by Flagship Studios. Unfortunately it was considered by many to be somewhat of a mess, with critics lambasting everything from the monotonous gameplay to the overly complicated subscription model. Of course this is usually bad news for any developer, but for Flagship it was a total disaster; they’d taken out at least one very large lone in order to fund the title’s development and maintenance, and now the repayments were quickly starting to catch up with them. With their only published project being a total failure they had no way to pay any of it back, leaving them no choice but to close their doors in 2008 and give up Hellgate to Korean publisher HanbitSoft as collateral.

But after a very long hiatus Hellgate: London is set to return as a “free to play” title in North America this June with HanbitSoft now taking the helm. They’ve actually be running the game for several years over in Korea under the rather appropriate name of Hellgate: Resurrection, but this will be the first time English speaking players will be able to experience the online component since the western servers went down in 2009.

I don’t know about you, but my big question is simply WHY? I’m all for games being given a second chance and all, but coming from someone who played Hellgate almost 4 years ago I can’t really say it was a game that’s actually worth saving, and judging by a lot of the reviews on Metacritic I’m far from being alone in that opinion. I suppose some of the ideas in there were neat and all, but without a significant shake up I can’t see it being being that successful in the incredibly crowded free-to-play market. That said,  it’s a very complicated sector of the market where crazy stuff happens all the time, so I guess only time (and a bunch of ridiculously expensive microtransaction offers) will tell.