Hellgate: London Hellgate London News

OK, here's a recap in bullet form... Some known but I'll just go through the factual stuff for completeness.
I'll add some scattered commentary around too...

• Voices: Bill Roper confirms he'll do some voices again. He was behind the Knights, Orcs (peons, etc) in Warcraft 1, 2, 3. Zug zug!


• Places: They mention Big Ben, St Paul's Cathedral, British Museum, the last with towering 10 meter tall demons.


• Monsters: Monsters are resistant to different kinds of damages, a bit like in Diablo II, for added tactics.


• Skills: Not much new info on the factions per se, but there might be some new skill names here , in English and all. (they only drop the names, not describe the individual skills)


• Skills (EDIT): Oh, they say a Hunter gains "boosts" when scoring critical hits.. Not sure if that's "new"... Guardians get "improved" the more enemies there are around him... Evoker does lots of damage in many kinds... Summoners can regenerate their minions and player allies


• Uniqueness: Bill Roper is more inspired by City of Heroes than WoW, although he "plays WoW a lot". He likes it especially because he thinks CoH manage to make the characters in that game end up as more unique than in WoW, so I assume that's a pretty big goal they have with HGL as well.


• Item color schemes: Guilds can have color schemes for their gear. (I'm a bit unsure what this implies, if there'll be an optional palette or something, or if people *have* to use the scheme... The latter sounds a bit too silly though)


• Item color schemes: FSS has earlier said that your gear will adapt to a common color theme to avoid a clown look, and they clarify here in that it sounds like if you have items of different colors, you can pick which item's color you want to use for your whole set. Personally, I'd prefer if this was optional too, but I'm unsure about that.


• Uniqueness: "We have noticed that at about level 10 and onwards, it will be extremely hard to find two characters looking the same".


• Difficulty: This was recently discussed on Guru, but reiterated again here -- the random areas outside the stations will have their difficulty decided by the number of players, not the players' levels. So it's not like Oblivion, but is like Diablo II. They've said elsewhere that there'll be experience constraints so a level 40 guy can't slay everything for level 10's.


• Graphics: DirectX 10 will give graphical niceties and there'll be more to provide for monster computers, but FSS strive to make the game "playable on 2-3 year old computers". I'm bolding that part because it's so common people get shattered illusions on these things once they get the game. So max 3 years old is the recommendation they give in the article anyway. I would lower my expectations if you have e.g. a "lowly" Geforce FX (= Geforce "5") or the ATI equivalent, and only hope for the least pain in that case. Since 1 GB RAM has been commonly recommended the past 3 years, I do that too. And a CPU not older than since 2004.


• Graphics: Graphics may be updated too, as other new content is released.