Debating on buying, couple questions.

xenogias

My biggest question is, About how many hours does the single player, offline, non sub content give? This seems like it could be a fun mindless killing game, but I'm not dropping 50 bucks on 10 hours worth of content. Not when I have D2.

How many diffrent areas are there? What I am asking here is does the demo give me a pretty good idea on what ever place looks like?

The demo only shows 2 classes. How many are there actually?

I'm not asking for "This game sucks dont waste your money" type responces. I am looking for thoes that have beaten it that can give me a general idea on how many hours the base campain is. And the variaty of classes areas.

rev_lazaro

Please take note everything I say here is coming from someone who loves the game, bought it when it came out, and also purchased a liftetime sub at the very last minute (last day of January 08).

I originally bought the game for the singleplayer content, had beaten it with an Engineer.

Game Length:

Depending on your play style, I bet you could tackle it in normal mode offline in about a week. I work full time and I have another game I'm usually active with a Guild with, so I play Hellgate mostly 1-2 hours a day tops and then get a few in over the weekend. So it lasted me about a month or so. That's with me just plowing, not repeating areas to grind nor caring about items. I was just wanting to kill stuff.

There isn't much tilesets; you've seen probably a good quarter of the "environment" styles in the demo. It didn't bother me though because how many variations of a demolished post-apocalyptic city could you do? I know people demand more of it but considering how dark the game is, I actually enjoyed the simplicity since it was very moody, very creepy and kept me focus on fighting nasty demons.

When the tiles do change, it's usually pretty impressive and drives home the point you're in a different scenario here. Like when I first got to an open Park area with trees and stuff...I knew this wasn't going to be a sewer crawl. Or passing a portal into hell, and then another into a huge castle-like place....it's effective for how it's used. Remember this is a Diablo-ish design; a lot of maps are randomized and the simple tilesets are usually the best way to keep these areas coherent looking.

Classes:

Six of them. Blade Masters and Guardians for Melee junkies, Marksmen and Engineers for gun/tech freaks, and Summoners and Evokers for caster types.

Guardians are the shield-baring, aura casting paladin type tank class. Engineers were kinda like Marksmen except their skills focus on droid building...a pet class with guns. Summoners summon demon pet stuff, kinda reminds me of Diablo-II style necros. Evokers are pure blast caster types.

Replayability

I think the game is highly replayable on the fun scale; I like tinkering with new classes and different builds. I don't mind re-running the missions again; but then again to me it's like replaying Diablo II or the old Hunter: The Reckoning console games. The plot is pretty paper-thin but it's fun.

As a single player game I enjoyed it; also Elite mode difficulty is available to non-subscribers after you beat it. They technically open the Elite mode up at level 25; the level cap is 50. 50 is not where you'll end up by the time you beat the core game on Normal.

Final Notes:

I felt it had more to offer than 10 hours. One thing I do want to bring up is Single Player doesn't get the love Multiplayer does. To be fair, give multiplayer a shot even if you're playing Normal mode by yourself. Sometimes the replay value is just meeting up friends in elite mode and hosing down some goons. You still get the bulk of goodies online with a non-subbing account.

Aside from that, it's still got some bugs in it. It does require a bit more Hardware....

I'm on a single core Athlon clocked a 2 Ghz, 2 Gigs of RAM and an old ATI Radeon 9250. I'm running it in Directx9 Client with most settings turned low in low resolution. Single player and online solo or with 1 or 2 people it runs fine for me but I still get some processing hiccups.

 

 

xenogias

Thank you for the reply, its exactly what I was looking for. I can go anywhere and find 100's of posts trashing HGL. I like to try games before I make up my mind and I did enjoy the demo thats why I had my questions. You awnsered each of them and verry well.

Granted it may not have the length I was hopeing for but you brought up a good point. Regardless of how long it is, if its fun its replayable. I mean hell after all these years I'm still playing Diablo 2 lol.

Again thank you for awnsering my question, especcialy as someone who loves the game. Its a nice change from all the "This game sucks" threads.

rev_lazaro

Not a problem.

I'm not going to lie when I say they still have some kinks to iron out, but Flagship has been working to iron them out. A lot of people gripe and say they're not listening -- personally, changes to the UI and the performance in my opinion has been more important than the damn in-game mail system the community foams at the mouth about.

If in the end something is there that annoys you about the game, just don't sweat it and I promise come back in a month or so and it'll improve. I've had it since launch, and it's improved dramatically.

 

baff

I've done about 20 hours of single player so far.

I haven't finished it yet although I think I am within an hour or two of doing so.

I bought this for multiplayer, so while I have enjoyed the single player quite a lot, I haven't been possessed to finish it yet. I fully intend to at some point. (Perhaps when my ISP goes down one day). I'm looking forward to seeing the finale movie clip.

I too have had it from launch, but unlike Rev, I haven't seen any improvement whatsoever. As a single player game, I don't see that it has ever had any technical issues aside from the memory leak which will cause it to lag for a while and then crash to desktop after a little while longer.

I feel this is an emminently fixable problem too. To my mind it's a question of when, not if. (I am suprised however that this bug has survived through 3 patches).  

Again, unlike Rev, I think single player has the best of this game. I and some friends bought it for multiplayer, but have no intention of spending any further time on the MP. The SP however has been enjpoyable so far and I have spent more time with it in this mode.

Unknown

20 to 25 hours in normal non-elite normal sounds about right.  Maybe a bit quicker if you're more of a power gamer.  As others above me, I just played to play, not to powerlevel through.  But after normal non-elite there is nightmare non-elite, then of course both normal and nightmare elite.  So in theory you can play through the game four times, each increasing in difficulty and time.  I personally skipped normal nightmare and went straight to elite normal/nightmare, and reached 47 elite nightmare in about 3 months online (mostly solo).

The bad thing is there's about six tilesets to the base game, and to me they grew old quickly.  The game could be good, as it is fun to play and pretty creepy in the better dungeons, but the lack of tilesets really grows old after a while.  I know Diablo didn't have that many tilesets either, but in the end Diablo was such a better game that it could get by with less tilesets.

Xenduli

I've completed the game on all difficulties even though I hated it I wanted to see what the differences here. I guess I'm masochastic for playing a game I ended up hating, but I thought things might improve. They didn't. The Necropolis level is IMHO the best level design in the game (with that guys brain being a good second), you keep going underground.

Why was necropolis my favourite level? Because it was quite late into the game and it was the only part that felt like I was playing a game made by the makers of Diablo. If the entire game had that same feeling I'd have no doubt HGL would've received a better reception, it really was a good design.

Sadly good moments were too intermittent and there wasn't much cohesion between the Acts, nor was there any real reason to play on a higher difficulty level aside from the better loot. What you saw in the demo will be pretty much what you see through 80% of the game. Chocolate Park was pretty unique too.

Playing on harder difficulties, really depending on your playstyle I'd say there is between 30-50 hours. Possibly more depending on how unlucky with drops you are or which class you play.

Shatter

I have been playing this game for about two weeks and havnt gotten very far at all. And that is only because i am trying to figure out which class i like the most. I would say the engineer and summoner are the easier of the 6. I am haveing alot of fun with the evoker right now. Anyways, i recomond this game!

Unknown

If we are talking non-sub offline, which is all I have done, then yeah you have 20-30 hours probably for a normal person.  For one class on the first difficulty.

 

But you can definitely replay it with each class and have a very different experience.  The engineer and marksman classes are FPS aiming.  So the Cabalist shooter is quite different than the technology based shooter and the two pet classes are very different too.

 

The only two classes that maybe you wouldn't want to play both of is the two Templars.  One yeah but maybe not both.  However they are sufficiently different to do both.  Its just not as big a difference as say Engineer versus summoner.

 

So in the end if you like the game it should give you plenty of play time.

 

I am not sure about bugs and sutff.  I only got stuck which is annoying, I never had the bugs many people report.

 

There are what? like 6 different tile sets?  I dunno i don't really care since the game is randomly generated.  It still has some cool stuff, like one mission completely in the dark and you need to use a headlamp spotlight type thingy to see.

 

Yeah it could have alot more, but so could everything.

 

 

fantaros

I found the game to be very repetitive and boring. I even rerolled to another class in case my chosen class was the problem. I still couldnt get myself to play. Its been a month now i havent touched it all and i am debating of uninstalling. This game only offered me about 10-15 hrs of gameplay. I hope if u or any1 else buys it they end up loving it and getting better value for their money.