Stonehenge Chronicles Released

As we reported yesterday, the Stonehenge chronicles patch was released yesterday. Subscribing players can now enjoy all of the aspects of Patch 1.0, and all the other Hellgate fans still get class changes and bug fixes. Hellgate has officially gone gold!

Hellgaters! We march to Stonehenge!

Hellgate: London's first major content update, the Stonehenge Chronicles, launched early this morning. After a day's pause to exterminate two pesky bugs, brave Hellgaters have already ventured out into the hellspawn-infested realms beyond the safety of the monolithic ruins built by druids long past. Sending back word of their conquests in forms both written and visual, reports from the front lines are unanimous: Stonehenge shall not fall into demon hands. Putting their rivalries aside, Templar, Hunters, and Cabalists have banded together to seek out the enemy in its lair, felling minions and masters of hell's castes to reach an eternal evil.

In addition to this new subscriber content, all players get to enjoy a host of fresh features, gameplay tweaks, and a reworked Evoker class. Buddy lists are now account-based, the crafting system has been streamlined, and the user interface now has scaling elements. Add in abundant bug fixes and improved textures on party members and you've one heck of a giant content update. The Stonehenge Chronicles patch notes can be found here and the patch itself can be downloaded here.

It's time to take the fight to the demon. We march!

Hunter Model Tutorial

CGSociety has just publshed a feature article by Alessandro Baldasseroni, who is the designer of the Hunter model for Hellgate London.

CGSociety states:

Alessandro Baldasseroni created the Hunter model. He tells all on CGSociety.
Baldasseroni is one of the most prolific artists in the industry, submitting
works since the original Character Modeling d’artiste title, and the original
ELEMENTAL Autodesk book. Alessandro submitted the Hellgate: London ‘Hunter’
image to Ballistic Publishing’s ‘EXOTIQUE 3’ last year. The Hunter model was
made for the Hellgate:London cinematic, made by Blur Studio Inc. The Hellgate:
London game was created and developed by Flagship Studio.

The guide shows the steps that were taken to make the hunter along with a number of concept illustrations. It is three pages long and is a great read for any 3D modelling enthusiast.

Q&A: Bill Roper opens up on Hellgate

GameSpot has published up a question and answer session with Bill Roper, where they mainly chose to talk to him about the upcoming patch as well as how the team at FSS feel about the game so far.

GS: Hellgate launched with more than a few serious bugs. Was this a matter of staying true to the ominous Halloween date, or were outside forces to blame?

BR: Honestly, we tried to do too much with the game. We created our own engine, tools, and online destination from scratch in just a few years. We are really proud of the work we did, however we were perhaps a bit too ambitious.

If we could have waited another three months to ship, we would have, but the challenges of an independent game studio are much, much different than what we had during our days at Blizzard or the guys at Arena.net face (since we often see comparisons with them and Guild Wars) as they were owned by NCsoft before they had to ship. We don’t shy away from the fact that Hellgate: London was far from perfect when we launched, but we’ve also stayed dedicated to the game and our players and have been exerting every effort to make amends and get the game to what we envisioned. We’re thankful to our fans that have stuck with us, and encourage people who maybe tried the game when it launched or never checked it out because of early concerns to give us another look with The Stonehenge Chronicles.

It is interesting to see that FSS has more or less admited what a lot of fans have been saying of them being too ambitious, however they also seem to confirm a lot of people’s reasoning for why they couldn’t delay the game much longer.

While the entire interview is a very intersting read and I recommend everyone to read it, here is a snippet I found particularly interesting:

We’re continuing to give all of the classes in-depth evaluation and will be making everything from tweaks to whole-sale changes as required. We’re also very close to starting up a “Team Advocate” program where specific members of our community will be organizing feedback in several areas from our player base and then speak directly with the design team to see these issues addressed. We have a lot of very passionate players in our community, and we think this will be an invaluable way to best get their feedback and improve the game.

As well as:

If you look at a game like Eve Online, for example, they started with a very small number of players, but had enough to sustain themselves while they grew the game. Today, they have a healthy and dedicated player base that makes them a success story.

Really the entire article is worth a read, so go read it now!