Problems With the Single-Player and Client Stability
The big question when you start Hellgate before you even look at classes to pick is whether to play single-player or multiplayer. It's an important distinction because you can't take your single-player character and move them over to multiplayer, and beating the game in single-player doesn't enable Nightmare mode for your multiplayer characters. As a matter of fact, the single and multiplayer have different game clients that require separate patching. I'm sure there are very complex and technical reasons for why this is the case involving communicating with the server, but from a consumer perspective, it sucks. As of now, the multiplayer gets all the support and frequent patches while the single-player remains in a broken state. As a big fan of the single-player RPG experience, I opted to try it first, which is a decision I regret.
It's important to note at this point, for those of you who have played the game, that I played through the single-player with an Evoker, which is a ranged-magic-based character class. This is yet another decision that I strongly regret. The Evoker class and the nature of the single-player experience conspired together to trap me in a coma-inducing nightmare from which I would not awake for some 40 hours. The entirety of the Evoker combat experience was made up of running backwards while casting spells. After playing some of the other classes and seeing that the Evoker is getting retooled in the next patch, it's clear that it is flawed. But the fact that it is this bad some three months after release is telling.
The boss battle against Abbadon takes place around the Tower of London.
I've already voiced my frustration with the storytelling so aside from that and my problems with my class, the big obstacles for me in the single-player were the save system and client stability. The two seemed determined to work in concert to undo my forward progress in the game at every opportunity. Listen up, game developers, and listen well. In any game on any platform that is not tied to communication with a server, I should be able to save anytime I want. If I want to quicksave every six steps I should have the option.
Here's an example of how Hellgate nearly caused my destruction: Let's say you have to get from point A to point E. You fight through points B, C and most of D, clearing out all the monsters before the game crashes. When you reload the game you start back at point A and the combat areas of points B, C and D have all been randomly regenerated and filled with monsters. This kind of thing was frequent enough but the worst was when I cleared three areas, killed a boss and talked to a quest person before the game crashed. When I reloaded, not only was I back where I started before clearing the three areas but it didn't save the boss kill or any of the quest progress. It happened over and over and it sapped my strength. The game crashed over 30 times resulting in a loss of progress and this doesn't count the times that it wouldn't start at all. Sprinting through levels avoiding combat and praying I can get to the next checkpoint before the game crashes is not what I'd call innovative gameplay.
The stability problems for the most part can be traced back to a memory leak in the single-player client. Most game crashes were followed by the error message: "Memory has been exhausted. The application will now close." After seeing this error message greet me so many times I started to read it as: "Patience has been exhausted. The application will now be uninstalled." Yet, I had to soldier forward for the sake of the review. The development team is aware of the issue and has been working to fix it, but as of the latest patch, it is still a problem. One of the stated fixes for Vista was to install the KB940105 hotfix from Microsoft but unfortunately my machine already had it. Last I checked one of the threads started by Cellwind - a developer on the team - on the official forums that outlined the problem was up to 111 pages and still going. This isn't the only issue that makes the single-player client unstable, but it's the one I ran into the most.
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