Tonight was mostly spent playing Hellgate: London for a bit, as I finally got around to it several days after installing it. And yes, it is pretty much a 3D version of Diablo, which isn’t too surprising when you consider that a lot of the old lead people who worked on Diablo at Blizzard were working on this as well.

It feels a lot like an FPS when you first start playing, or at least it does for certain classes like the Engineer I created. You’re in a first person perspective, you have a gun, you shoot at enemies… It doesn’t take long before the Diablo elements start seeping through though — you can move the camera back fairly far to a third-person point-of-view, and aiming is more of a suggestion of what to target than a test of pixel-hunting accuracy, and you can miss enemies by a fair bit and still register a hit. Or miss, depending on your stats, and your damage is determined by your weapon, the damage type, enemy resistances, and so on. You’ll travel through randomly-generated dungeonstunnels, pick up loot after monstersdemons die, have to identify it to find out what random bonuses it has, juggle a grid-based inventory, create town portalsteleport points to jump back to the last townstation, meet people who give you questsmissions, etc. It should be sounding pretty familiar…

It has its rough edges, though. The interface felt extremely sluggish until I disabled DirectX10 support and went back to DX9. Interacting with things and people is based on radial menus that pop up when you hold down the mouse button, which takes a bit of getting used to. Network disconnects and crashes are rampant, having one or the other occur at least once every hour or so for me so far. The chat interface is awkward — its pane is too big to leave up all the time, so you usually leave it off and wind up forgetting about it.

And, of course, there’s the controversy over its subscription model, where various features that some people think should be free are reserved only for players who pay a monthly fee. It might be worth it for the new content, but I think I’m going to wait a while and see what the word-of-mouth is about whether it’s worth it or not. There are also posters with actual ads for real-world stuff like Dark Horse comics and movies in the stations, which annoy some people. I find I’m not minding the way they’re done here since they don’t break immersion too badly, but the whole ads in games issue is a whole other rant…

It’s still fundamentally a solid Diablo-style game, though, and I’m having a lot of fun with it so far. I just hope they get some of those wrinkles ironed out.