Goodbye to Hellgate: London … MMORPG on 56K dialup! (Part 2 of a series)

Since this editor has been examining ‘MMORPG on 56K dial-up’ for our last exploration into Age of Conan, Lord of the Rings Online and World of Warcraft, he finds he has been hooked! By narrowly confining himself to mostly single player experiences and occasionally joining-up with other small bands of mostly broadband-challenged players that are open to a 56K-er, I have been exploring other massively multiplayer role playing online (MMORPG) games.  My recent fond memories as a beta tester for Hellgate:London – just over 18 months ago when I had wireless broadband for a short time – were jogged by an email from Namco.  It was a reminder that Flagship Studios declared bankruptcy and that Hellgate:London servers were closing on January 31, 2009.  The email also mentioned that all the subscriber content including “Stonehenge” Expansion was now free. Intrigued, back to Hell I went to “finish” the online game that I left as a Level 33 “Engineer” on ‘Nightmare’ difficulty (for my second play through) and here is my farewell report – the real closing of the Hellgate.

At any rate, I need to digress a bit and explain how this editor got to be stuck on 56K dial-up.  I am one of the unlucky ones who has had to live on 56K dial-up for the past nine years – No cable and no DSL are available [period!]. I have missed out on a lot of online gaming. Of course, I live in a high-desert paradise near a major resort, so I would not give up my rural “horse property” home with acreage for an apartment and a T-3 line in any major city. However, over the years, I desperately searched for other Internet connection solutions besides 56K. For a few months I had wireless Internet broadband, but the company that set it up for my rural area, provided terrible service, constant disconnects and unacceptable down times; coupled with no service, it ended in a couple of months, and back to 56K dial-up I went. Afterward, at the end of last year, I actually did try to play Hellgate: London on 56K dial-up but it was impossible to play and the multiplayer game was pretty buggy anyway.

Exchange this rural view from my patio for a city apartment .. and crowds?  Never!!

So, I learned to live with dial-up. And I even started to play some MMORPGs on 56k dial-up. Guild Wars went okay and I was able to play through the beginning of it without annoying the other players that I teamed up with, but I soon lost interest and I went looking for the latest popular MMORPG games. Fast paced multiplayer games like CounterStrike and Unreal Tourmanent are out of the question for us 56K’ers – or satellite players. I first got hooked into Lord of the Rings Online by a friend who first encouraged me and then himself soon dropped out right after I started to play. It was unfortunate for me, as I believe Lord of the Rings is all about fellowship and teaming up to complete quests. So I had a subscription for a few months although I rarely played it because it bored me with all the crafting and attention to little details it apparently requires; after months, my avatar was still only Level 14. So that subscription ended recently.  I believe I am one of the true fans of the entire Toklien series devoted to Middle Earth and I would much prefer to leave that world in my imagination, undisturbed by what the LotRO devs did to it.  Even the three very excellent films by Peter Jackson did Lord of the Rings very little justice, as in my opinion,  Middle Earth is mega-rich and almost beyond comprehension of all but the most devoted readers of J.R.R. Tolkien.

I also ran into the Eidos reps at NVISION08 in San Jose and I asked them, half in jest, if Age of Conan would run on 56K dial-up. They took me seriously, I guess, and they said they didn’t know as they didn’t test it; but evidently playing on 56K dial-up had crossed their minds. After I introduced myself as the editor of Alien Babel Tech, they gave me the game trial DVDs and asked me if I wouldn’t mind trying it. For my last article [here], I also decided to add the venerable World of Warcraft to a short review also as I then recently received a free 14-day trial with my ASUS 4870 from NewEgg. So I ended up comparing World of Warcraft, Lord of the Rings Online, and Age of Conan – all on 56K dial-up!  Then as before, we are not looking for hardware comparisons or frame rates; but rather “playability” of the mostly the single-player online experience of Hellgate: London over 56K dial-up. It is very subjective and it largely depends on my personal experience which may differ from yours. To that end for playing Hellgate, I chose a BFGTech GTX280  as my test card and I ran it in DX10 mode with every detail that was possible to max, maxed out – including 4x AntiAlising and 16x Anisotropic filtering whenever possible. General performance was excellent and there were no slowdowns due to the graphics card that was used. My PC’s CPU is e8600 at 3.99Ghz and 4GB PC8500; with Vista32. DX10 was used exclusively alth0ugh I also ran a 4870 1GB which would not run in DX10 at all and would crash the game.  Single player had no such issues, just the online experience.  So I stick with Nvidia graphics for playing Hellgate: London.

Age of Conan - Real Wide-Screen - at Nvision

So thanks to Eidos reps, I go back into the world of MMORPG – still on 56K dial-up!  Thankfully. Wildblue Satellite makes it tolerable for huge updates.  Read on as we examine Hellgate: London, bid them a sad farewell, and take a superficial look at what went wrong to cause their failure – especially from a gamers perspective.