The painful and short history of Hellgate London is about to come to an apparent end. The action-RPG from the now shut down Flagship Studios will have its online servers shut down on January 31, 2009, according to a press release from its co-publisher Namco Bandai Games (Electronic Arts was the other publisher). Namco Bandai states that online play will be free until the shut down date.
Launched just under a year ago, the game had received tons of pre-release hype thanks in part to the founders of Flagship's previous work at Blizzard on the first two Diablo games. However, Hellgate London suffered from massive bugs and issues indicating a rushed product. Sales plummeted as a result and in July Flagship Studios shut down operations. While there was some hope that the game could be kept alive via another company there doesn's seem to be any hope of that anymore.
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Good lord what a sad tale Hellgate and Flagship are. So much potential and promise, so much bad luck and so many mistakes. Hopefully other can learn from their trials though and avoid the same missteps.
...bysmittyPosted at 3:26PM on Oct 24th 2008 by bysmitty