Profile: chemical_rex
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• • Broker at Mark Lane Station

  • The Broker's quests are infinite I think.  As quests they aren't that great anyway...

  • Posted: 8/16/08 2:17 PM
    Hellgate: London
• • Which Game(s) Got You Started?

  • I guess I got started with CRPGs technically before PnP RPGs.

    Two CRPGs stick out in my mind - Phantasie and sldo the Bards Tale (the old one - not the new one which just shares a name...).  Played them both on the Commodore 64.

    While the bards tale had prettier graphics, I found Phantasie had a better sandbox feel to adventuring.  Plus I just enjoyed watching the little characters in my party jump up and down to swing an axe.  And of course they'd all jump up and down when the battle was won.  :)

    Some older kids in the neighborhood turned me on to PnP RPGs with a cool little title called Top Secret.  The rules were kind of complicated, but it made a good primer before I found DnD.

    The rest is history.

  • Posted: 7/14/08 11:25 PM
    General Discussion
• • Help me stomp on the ashes

  • I purchased Hellgate London in mid-November 2007.  I was psyched to play a game that was essentially a combination of DOOM with RPG elements.

    Then my initial installation was essentially a self diagnosis hell.  After much effort and requests on their forums I got NO helpful replies from ANY employees whatsoever.  Indeed I eventually self diagnosed a bug in their DX10 programming dumped a bug report into a folder upon crash.  Upon restartup the contents of the folder were read as meaningful data for use in the game which would then gimp my program permanently until I removed it.  Additionally, successive problematic attempts at using their update/download system additionally continued to half install the game that I would have to remove or delete each time.  Even after informing them of these errors, they failed to fix these game breaking bugs for the average gamer with no computer programming experience.

    BUT I was finally able to play the game and enjoy it for a time.  I even subscribed, looking forward to the promised updates.  Delays delays delays.  This is nothing new in the game industry.  Annoying - yes, but not new.  I was patient.  They swore they had all this cool new stuff just barely around the corner.

    Boy was I a sucker.

    Financial commitments convinced me to de-subscribe a couple of months back.  I consider myself lucky to have gotten out at about twice the cost of the game.

    In retrospect, I should have trusted my instincts concerning troublesome Flagship forum behavior that never bodes well for a company:

    They kept the general discussion area of their forums locked from the public.  To access them you had to purchase the game.  For a company interested in selling their game to me, I typically go to their forum and see how the people like it.  Here was a company blocking people from checking out reviews by their own player base - seemed strange then. 

    Not so much now.  There were a lot of complaints of bugs then, and it seems like a tactical effort at damage control. 

    Infact, there was so much damage to control on the forums that it was well known that they were deleting posts in a whole-sale slaughter approach to anything that remotely sounded negative.  Here today, gone tomorrow.  Threads would pop up about how other threads had been deleted - along with screenies of said deleted posts - only to have those threads then get deleted.  As a witness, at first I thought threads about these deletes were probably concerning some expletive filled garbage post.  I found this wasn't the case the more I payed attention.

    In the end the game was a great concept, with decent gameplay but poor implentation with the updater that had a too many game busting faults that should have been easilly cleaned up, but weren't.

    So Goodbye Flagship!

  • Posted: 7/14/08 11:14 PM
    Hellgate: London