I'm curious what you liked about Hellgate. Because, I thought it was a less than average game that had some fundamental design flaws.

Now, I wish all the Flagship guys well in their future endeavors (it sucks to lose your job, after all), but the game plainly wasn't good enough to sustain the company. Yet, your rag suggests that you LOVED this game. What am I missing?

Hmm...

1. The controls. I don't know how the "Diablo" (just stealing a convenient name there) method of gameplay ever became so popular. Giving what is essentially a hack n' slash RPG a "shooter" feel was an awesome idea.

2. The Party system. Flawless! This is how multilayer gaming should be; rather than being penalized for partying up your get a bonus, though all the monsters get tougher. All loot dropped client side and always with the same regularity. Party portals worked great getting in and out of zones.

3. Weapon mods/effects. Just thought the system was damn cool and incredibly fun to mess around with.

4. A lot of more subtle design choices like how your equipment related to your attributes (the idea of stat-drain). How skills were implemented in the control scheme and how your mouse skills could be set to change for different weapon setups. Health/shields.

5. Where else are you going to find guns, broadswords, spells and Hell? I admit the subject matter itself is a huge draw; the combination of three totally dissimilar player archtypes was always cool to me, on paper as well as practice.

The game failed because of all the reasons Goldstein lists, not just because it "wasn't good enough to sustain the company"; They made a lot of bad choices. Though releasing a half-finished game to a firing squad of hype-adled fans was itself a definite mother among screwups.

What did you find so bad about it? Besides the plethora of bugs and relative lacking in depth of content? (basically to say, I thought "the fundamentals" were the one thing they actually got right).

My main problem with the game was, when in first-person mode, you don't get first-person gameplay. Like, I could have my crosshair aimed RIGHT AT a baddie, but because that baddie is a higher level than I am or because of some other statistic, my "bullet" will fire out of my gun at a right angle (or whatever). It really broke the immersion for me.

From there, it was all downhill.

Well, you get first person gameplay but subject to some behind the scenes die-rolling. Though the targeting reticule is a pretty accurate depiction of "how accurate" you are at any given moment, I find.

It's nothing new to me, I mean I've always loved the FP-RPG thing so "failing because your stats suck" wasn't that much of a turn off. Though at least, compared to games like Morrowind/Oblivion, when you DO hit an enemy its a hit and doesn't miraculously fail to do damage because you botch some automatic ability test.

Personally I didn't even like the FP perspective in Hellgate and always played from third.

It's just that fine line between representing both aspects of game design in the gameplay. But even in your typical FPS there are mechanics which arbitrarily foul your aim. Its just that with the added RPG element, some of those are entirely beyond your control. But hey, that's an RPG right?

I remember a lot of people positively hated this about Deus Ex but that title has gone down as one of the greats regardless.