TOM FRANCIS
REGRETS THIS ALREADY

Hellgate London Thoughts

It might not have been Bill Roper, but there was someone who worked on the Diablo games who had a direct line to the pleasure center of my brain. World of Warcraft suggested to me that he had either left, or was working on something else now: it could hook me with its grind, but never excite or enthrall me the way a few tiny gold letters could in the Diablo games. Hellgate London clinches it: he must have left Blizzard and gone to Flagship. And started drinking heavily.

The exciting stuff is there, it’s just adrift in a very messy, empty, grey game. A very repetitive one, too – this is only the demo, and even in the short time it took me to exhaust its sliver of content, I got incredibly tired of the identical warehousey tunnels.

It’s a myth that Diablo was about grind. The environments and enemies were diverse, even in the first game, and though you repeated interactions, they were interactions you wanted to repeat. The comedy clunk of a blunt object stoving in a zombie’s skull, nailing a scampering monster with a single arrow at twenty paces, pulling fire from the Earth and streaming it through your hands. It wasn’t grind, it was caress.

Hellgate is rather vague – nothing has to connect to hit, and though the sounds are satisfying, the interactions aren’t clear or physical. One-hit kills still feel right, because the soft ragdoll enacts an appropriate response to your blow. But against tougher enemies, you’re either waving your sword back and forth or holding down fire to make a health bar go down, and there’s no other visible response to your attacks. It’s not an interaction I want to repeat, and that’s fatal for this type of game.

The exciting stuff is that it’s clear they’ve developed the best concepts nascent in Diablo 2: slotting and Horadric Cube recipes. Slotting is more sophisticated, and integrated with a crafting system, and the Horadric Cube’s magical recombinatorics have evolved into a device that can keep re-enchanting your favourite weapon to keep it up to your level.

But the loot harvest is made a lot less interesting by the abundance of class-exclusive items, something Diablo 1 & 2 had no concept of whatsoever, and even Lord of Destruction had the good sense to hold off on until later levels. Most of what I find is junk that I can neither use nor understand, and again, that’s fatal to this type of game. The loot harvest is the intravenous drip of dopamine here, you can’t afford to stem anything like as much as this.

So Diablo is dead forever, I fear. The genius who can tweak the equations to make me smile has left to join a team that don’t have the art talent, coding precision or design focus to let him shine. And the people who can still do that at Blizzard don’t seem to appreciate what it was that endlessly delighted me about Diablo, only what addicted me to it.

Has anyone played and liked this yet? I’m interested to know if it has charms I’m missing – I’m entirely guilty of not taking it on its own terms.