Hellgate: London Patch 0.7

Patch 0.7 for Hellgate: London came out Wednesday. It’s conspicuously missing the promised holiday subscriber content. In fact, besides The Transmorgifier and twelve world weapon drops, the patch doesn’t include any new subscriber content. Instead, it fixes a memory leak and some miscellaneous bugs. I haven’t heard if FFS plans on even releasing their major holiday content. If they are, they better get a move on because it doesn’t make much sense wearing a Santa hat in January. If they aren’t, then they’ve got egg on their face because they already teased the HG: L community with talk of holiday dye kits and pets.

I have to say, FFS has now officially been caught with their pants down. Their launch woes cannot be written off as a miscalculation of server usage or a few miscellaneous bugs. The game was clearly not ready for release. And FFS clearly didn’t have their content pushes lined up for steady updating. It’s easy to blame EA for the untimely release, as that parent company has a well-established history of releasing games that weren’t fit for beta testing, let alone the retail market. But I’m going to heap most of the blame on FFS, as they penned a deal with EA and had to know full well the pressured timetable they’d be under.

I think Roper and company are counting on a forgiving gaming community. And maybe that’s what they’ll get if they can fix what’s wrong with HG: L. But not only do they need to move at a faster pace, they also need to start dazzling us with content updates. If they don’t, they’re user-base will continue to shrink to the point that market economics will kick in and they’ll no longer be able be economically viable. As much potential as I think HG: L has, there are just too many good games out there to have to play a mediocre one.

***Edit***

Here's the link to the 0.7 patch notes.