Today was spent mostly in Hellgate: London. Despite its current bugginess (and I did experience a number of crashes, hangs, network disconnects, and falling-through-the-floor bugs), I’ve been rather eager to press forward. Partly because, well, I caved in and got the subscription. The current subscriber-only Guy Fawkes event ends tomorrow, but the major quests that are part of it were in an area I hadn’t gotten to yet. After working my way through various other zones, I’m finally at the Templar base where the quest-giver is, and I’ll try and finish the quests off tomorrow.

Hopefully these event-specific quests will be worth it. So far, about the only direct differences the subscription has made is that my stash is twice as big (which is admittedly rather useful), and that various subscriber-only recipes and crafting components have been dropping. The problem with those is that I keep seeing the same few recipes over and over again, haven’t seen enough of the other pieces to even use very many of the recipes yet, and there’s no hint as to what the resulting foodstuffs even do. I’ll be kind of glad when the event is over just so I stop getting so much of that junk.

The combat zones are getting rather repetitive in style and layout now, but along the way to the Templar Base there were actually a couple unexpected twists that gave me a new area to play in for a while, and a chance to control another squad instead of myself. They were brief sequences, but it did help break up the monotony a bit.

I also only just realized tonight that my drone has attribute points to spend when he levels up along with me, and I’ve also added the skills that let it carry a weapon and bit of armour now, which has helped a lot. I’ve given it a sniper rifle for now, which is fairly powerful, but I’m starting to have second thoughts — the screen shakes whenever it fires the rifle, which gets annoying quickly. Especially when I sometimes switch over to my own sniper rifle, and the screen never stops shaking.

I played a bit more Hellgate: London tonight, making it to Charing Cross Station. It’s been pretty much more-of-the-same so far, advancing through tunnels from zone to zone, killing ‘x’ number of a certain critter or activating ‘y’ of a certain item along the way in order to complete quests. There were some pretty frantic battles along the way though, especially when the tunnels opened up a bit and there were a flood of imps with ranged attacks, forcing you to seek cover. Loot has been plentiful, though I’m sticking mostly with my automatic rifle as my main weapon. The blasters require too much manual tapping of both mouse buttons, and the rocket launcher fires and reloads too slowly.

The biggest problem so far remains its relative bugginess, though. There was a small patch today to correct a minor problem, but after the patch was applied, restarting the game caused it to crash instantly every time I tried. A reboot eventually cleared it up, but upon selecting my character and entering a station, it froze a minute later. The /played time reported appears to bear no relation to time actually spent on the character, preventing me from even trying for the level-x-in-y-hours achievements. The framerate dips horribly at certain points in some stations, even though there’s nothing visually strenuous around.

There’s still a pretty decent game at its core, but damn, they really should have applied another six months or so of debugging and polishing…