Hellgate: London looks like it will be ready for an October release based on the rumors going out. The forums have a wonderful post with a lot of in-game footage videos. According to an interviewwith Flagship CEO (the developer of H:L), there will be significant “free online content,” which could mean anything, but there will at least be co-op play a la Diablo 2 multiplayer.
Not sure what PVP content will be available, but they will definitely have premium (read: subscription) content, which will include raiding. Now, the interesting thing about raiding in H:L will be that the “dungeons” will scale based on the number of players who participate in the “dungeon.” This has the potential to exceed World of Warcraft raiding significantly in that you can work on the same content with 5 people that you can work on with 15, and the difficulty scales. 2 people don’t show up that evening? No problem, the monsters get a little easier to defeat. At least, that’s the current theory.
There seems to be lots of concern over the copy protection that the publisher will force on the product (a la 2K Games and BioShock being married to StarForce). Since I was lucky enough to purchase BioShock via Steam, I evaded the StarForce genii. Of course, if I knew that a game was going to include StarForce (or some other uber copy protection) before I purchased it, I would skip buying, and so would a lot of other consumers. Why? If you have to uninstall your anti-virus to install the game, or you’re limited on the number of times you can re-install without asking for a keycode reset, I’m just not going to spend my money. Not to mention all of the problems with customers who have had trouble installing the game and end up using an installation instance even if the game didn’t properly install (and the installation problems are caused by interactions between the system and the DRM software during first install of the product.)
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