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Hellgate London: Staff Is Jumping Ship
Hellgate London: Staff Is Jumping Ship
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After finally having released the new big content patch The Abyss Chronicles on the test servers for critically not really well acclaimed Hellgate: London, the news about the game developed by Flagship Studios don't seem to get better. The game was criticized from the beginning on because it wasn't able to meet the high expectations that had been set before launch, and this hits back on the developers, as can be concluded from these lines:
Work is depressing right now. Never mind the fact that Hellgate isn’t as popular as anybody had hoped. Never mind the fact that there exists a term "Flagshipped", meaning where a company basically overpromises and then screws you. Never mind the fact that the forums are totally populated by people who do nothing but complain and talk about how much the game sucks. Never mind the fact that people do the same thing in the game itself. [...] The reason is that people are leaving. In droves, they're leaving. We've had programmers, accountants, HR people, and artists leave. [...] Thing is, the way things are going I'm likely to be the only programmer still working on Hellgate left from the original crew.
Words of Guy Somberg, audio and gameplay programmer at Flagship Studios, who wrote this in his personal blog. Sounds pretty hopeless, doesn't it? But not all hope is lost. Hellgate: London seems to have good sales numbers in Korea and the game has not yet seen a full release on the Asian market. Probably it will hit the nerves of gamers there much more than it did on the rest of the globe. Guy Somberg also states that he still likes working for Flagship Studios, but he admits that he definitely needs some new projects to work on. The most recent contestant for being a Diablo in 3D he has now been working on for so long understandably doesn't seem to be too good for his mood anymore.
The future for demon-infested London therefore can't be considered as very bright, because
[e]very time a programmer leaves, it's more work for me. Every time an artist leaves, it’s less content that we can create for Hellgate in the future.
But still, we think that the game is not really as bad as everybody says.
Guy, did you read this? There are at least some people not only complaining. Good news, eh?
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If somebody is interested, here you can find the term flagshipped on the Urban Dictionary, as proof that he didn't make that up in his despair.