hellgate posts

The best gaming franchises never die. They just get new development teams! Fans lamented after Hellgate: London and Mythos went down due to Flagship closing its doors. They should lament no more! T3 Entertainment, an asian publisher that recently acquired HanbitSoft (who, as we all know, took a look at taking over development themselves), recently started posting job search requests on sites such as DICE.com and Gamasutra, looking for developers to work on the franchises. An excerpt:

"T3 Entertainment is searching for creative minds to passionately continue development of Hellgate: London and Mythos, along with other new games, which are being published by HanbitSoft Inc."

The studio will be in San Francisco, and they are currently looking for programmers. You can find the job requests on Gamasutra.

Since Flagship Studios' staff exodus, the fate of Hellgate: London, the company's debut title, has been uncertain. Some rumors suggest that Hellgate has been re-acquisitioned by Comerica, an American bank who granted Flagship a sizeable loan. The game's forums went offline last week, effectively silencing the game's vocal community.

Now, quite unexpectedly due to the forums supposedly being offline, a recent forum post on the official Hellgate forums suggests that Namco Bandai will be stepping in to ensure that the game's servers are able to breathe without their current life support.

"I know everyone is looking for an announcement, and we'd love to make one," reads the post, which appears to have been made by an official Namco Bandai representative, "but right now, many things are in flux and we don't have all the information yet."

Though brief, the post suggests that an official announcement regarding Namco Bandai's position on Hellgate is forthcoming.

During a recent interview with Eurogamer, Flagship Studios COO Max Schaefer admitted that not only did Hellgate let down more than a few gamers, but the developers weren't exactly thrilled with it either. "When you're starting with a brand new game studio with very limited budget and no existing technologies, that was probably biting off too much," Schaefer said.

Schaefer also touches on a variety of other subjects in the interview, including initially planning to use Mythos as nothing more than a test for Hellgate.

"We decided that we wanted to go back a little to a gameplay style that we were very familiar with, so we could pretty quickly and easily generate a compelling experience for people to actually test this stuff, and in a way that was efficient to make. A lot of Mythos is about efficiency of production. Computer games, especially MMOs, cost so much to make and take so long, so anything that you can do to increase the efficiency of the process is just going to help you out. So since it was just going to be a test first, we thought we'd stay relatively simple, use a Diablo-style camera, relatively simple, cartoony graphics and concentrate on gameplay and features, more so than complex graphics and the latest technologies."

Big Download's sister site Massively.com has all the news you'll need about MMOs. Here's the best, brightest, and most interesting stuff from the last week, all in one convenient place for your MMO minute.

	Age of Conan newsletter previews new PvP, dungeons, and dancing! It's only been a short time since Age of Conan launched, but it has already seen some troubles. The newest edition of the game newsletter hints that good times are just over the horizon. Above and beyond bug fixing and regular patches, Funcom has announced they have a slew of new concepts and content ideas on the stove.
	Exclusive images of the new Legends of Norrath: Oathbreaker loot cards A week from today the next set of cards for Sony Online Entertainment's Legends of Norrath TCG will be released. Digital packs of cards will be noisily slotted into virtual racks, to be pawed over by players ... metaphorically.
	First trailer for Square/Enix's new MMO Concerto Gate unveiled Unfortunately the trailer shows almost nothing about what the actual game will be like, but we can make some guesses by looking at Concerto's successor, Crossgate.
	Hellgate staff abandoning sinking ship We never like to see a developer start to go on the down and out. Even in the rare event where we find few redeemable things about a game, we understand that the developers behind the project are generally good people and we hope that they continue to be fruitful in their endeavors.
	EVE Online blazes into The Empyrean Age Massively has been beating the war drums as EVE Online enters a new era in PvP: The Empyrean Age expansion. This time of factional warfare will sweep players of all four races in New Eden into a whirl of conflict never seen before in the game.

While the gate (presumably in London) to hell was open, swarms of demons poured out and ravished the earth. Unfortunately, quite a few unwanted bugs slipped through as well. A teaser for Flagship Studios' Hellgate London Abyss Chronicles has been released, demonstrating some of the new features and fixes players will find in the upcoming Patch 2.

The trailer contains ruin, devastation, and fire, lots of fire. In short, it's pretty much everything you'd expect of a demonic invasion in London or anywhere else.

Download the HD Hellgate London Abyss Chronicles trailer from Big Download.