hellgate-resurrection posts

US fans of the original Hellgate London will be able to play a new version of the online action-RPG very soon. Today Habitsoft has announced that it has obtained the publishing rights to the Hellgate franchise from Namco Bandai for both North America and Europe.

The original game was first developed by Flagship Studios and released in 2007 but the game had a number of issues that made it unplayable for many. Flagship shut down in 2008 and Habitsoft then bought the rights to the series. However it was unable to relaunch the game in the US and Europe due to Namco Bandai's previous publishing agreement. Now that barrier is no longer an issue and Habitsoft plans to relaunch the game in our neck of the woods in the near future. A revamped version of the game, titled Hellgate Resurrection, has already launched in Korea.

We've already reported this week that the now defunct Flagship Studios' casual MMO Mythos is getting a new lease on life. However, the developer's main title, Hellgate London, is also getting its own revamp very soon along with an expansion. Unfortunately, we here in the US won't get a chance to play it.

As we reported over a year ago, the rights to Hellgate London were bought by Korean-based Habisoft, which turned the game into a free-to-play online title. On December 8, it plans to launch an open beta for Hellgate Resurrection, the newly retitled version of the game set in a modern world overrun by extra-dimensional demons. That's not all - according to a trailer posted on GameTrailers.com (which you can see after the jump), the game will be getting an expansion in March 2010 called Hellgate Tokyo. We presume the demons can jump across continents.

US and Europeans still won't be able to play this new version game. Namco Bandai, the company that holds the publishing rights to the game in both territories, shut down the local online servers for Hellgate London earlier this year and have apparently shown no interest in selling those publishing rights to Habisoft.