After finding myself itching to play a little bit of Hellgate each night I was in the beta, I decided to got ahead and pick up the retail version. Here are some thoughts after about four hours of play.

My nit-picks:

• Animations still not great, but things do seem a much smoother than before.
• Needed to patch vista before I could even play on that machine. Ouch.
• A couple of out of memory crashes in XP, and a buddy I played with apparently crashed a few times
• Terrible chat interface; actually a whole lot of the UI could use some polishing. It is just not user friendly.
• Example: open your chat window then open any other UI window and byebye chat
• Voice chat via X-fire?? Huh?
• Why would a game that has a warning in the manual about running background apps require me to RUN a background app. Is built in peer to peer voice chat that hard? (it may be)
• Apparently NO skill respecs:
• In this day of game design, not allowing your customer to fix a perceived mistake they might have made but instead ask them to reroll a new character is just un-fun.
• Then to charge for extra character slots makes you come off as greedy.
• Subscription
• I am willing to pay for a subscription if you give me something for my money every month; content, server support, etc. and right now I do not see a value in a hellgate subscription,
• actually do not believe any game studio can produce enough content every month to make a subscription worth it. They want to call this an MMO, but I do not see where they need my money to operate each month.
• There are really no massive mixed player areas it feels like guild wars
• I think they should ditch the subscription fee and switch to micro/macro payment system.
• Buy the content they release that you want. Want more character slot, ok ~$1 each, bigger vault $5. New raid zone and character class, $20.

What I like:

• Simple additive game play
• Game overall looks pretty.
• Fighting lots of Mobs, could use more but it’s still early in the game. Heck at one point Marcin and I were fighting two named mobs and several minions it was crazy.
• Lots of loot and you only see your loot, no ninja looting 🙂
• Classes seem to play different enough that I needed to spend a little bit of time trying to learn how to be effective with a new class. I like this.
• Seems completely soloable, but grouping of course added to the game play (as most games do)

I rolled up an Evoker, since I wanted to play a class I had not tried in beta, and it’s an interesting class. I am still learning how to be the most effective since it plays a lot different from the marksman and guardian. I was actually feeling a bit under powered.

Then this morning I found an interesting combination of weapons, a laser pistol and focus item, which have a great synergy. That along with more, effectively using the evoker weapon sets and now I feel much stronger.

Overall I am looking forward to playing and grouping again.