Diablo, Titan Quest and Sacred had the charm of being played from some variation of axonometric perspective–the “three quarter view.” You always had a full view of your avatar’s actions and witness her impact on the world as she killed monsters at the push of a button. The view allows developers to design attractive visuals for skills that would otherwise go unnoticed in the first person view.

Although it’s commonly accepted that a first person viewpoint serves to build a more ‘immersive’ experience for the player, the disconnect between the player and the avatar can be caused by a poorly implemented first person mode. This dissociation is inevitable when the player feels like he is experiencing the world not through a set of eyes, but through a mounted camera, with a lack of peripheral cognizance. This rarely happens with well-designed first person shooters, which immerse the player through highly detailed visuals of the avatar’s hands, arms, legs and personal shadow–giving the player the feel that he or she fully inhabits the avatar. Hellgate: London lacked most of these nuances, and many weapons featured only the tip of a gun, stark and untreated by the detail of animation. In effect, you had this static piece of plastic from which projectiles emerged, with no flare. A powerful weapon ought to look, and feel powerful.

Monsters died with very little fanfare, simply turning into ragdolls as they fell–a feature that would have looked amusing during the early days of Max Payne and its implementation of the Havok physics engine. It looked so out of place by the time Hellgate used it. While the deaths were in themselves presented as gory, with monsters being ripped apart and torn to shreds under a hail of bullets, the description I just provided would probably enliven your imagination much better than how the game itself depicted these visuals. Everything looked cheap, and budget quality. A stark contrast to the CGI cinematics provided by Blur Studio.

Our time with the game came with an end as systems running it started to crash and the network went down. We were then lead back into the meeting room for another round of Q&A, and to talk about what we experienced. We shared our outlook about Hellgate: London, and what we expected to see in the retail release.

A couple of representatives from Intel and Microsoft walked in at the end of the feedback session and presented us with a bleeding edge CPU and a motherboard to go along with it. They added that such a powerful system would be incomplete without a copy of Vista Ultimate to go along with it, so they threw that in as a bonus. I was ecstatic.

Interviewed on camera by one of Flagship’s community managers, I called the event “one of my most awesome experiences” and threw in an empathic “Hell yeah!” As a final surprise, the game’s producer, Bill Roper, announced that he had added our nicknames as unique items into Hellgate. If you’ve ever played the game and found a unique Templar breastplate called Sol’s Invictus–it refers to me.

It is a reminder of better times. The game went quickly downhill, and our expectations petered out by release.

I remember one day, months later, my superior asked me to gather 10,000 complaints about Hellgate: London. Later that week, I turned in 10,000 complaints to him printed on hundreds of pages of paper.

Such a prolific game gone down such a bad path. Hellgate: London is both a game that, for me, gave some of the best experiences of my life as well as some of the biggest let downs.