Automatic Explosions

So, true to my lack of financial responsibility, I made off with a copy of Hellgate: London this morning. Previously seen on the demo, short.

I thought there were only three playable classes in the game, but it turns out there are five. Blademaster, hunter, evoker, summoner, and guardian. I think that's all of them anyway. I wanted the DPS feel so I chose hunter.

As a side note, I did play both a blademaster and hunter through the demo. Blademaster is fun, but even when playing games like Oblivion, I tend to go for the typical FPS mode where I can shoot stuff and not take damage. Damage is bad.

Anyway, as is mentioned somewhere, the game was developed, I think, by the guys that did our friends Diablo and Diablo2. So in all fairness, to that immortal Diablo3 thread, I say to you, here it is.

And by that I mean the game might as well be just that. I heard somewhere that areas are auto-generated, but for the single player game, this doesn't seem to be the case. But loots and monsters are pretty much straight out of Diablo. Rare stuff, legendary stuff is available. Mobs are also seen in these nifty varieties, and true to form, drop better loots.

The problem is that it's not an FPS, and it's not as involved or as rich a game world as, say, Oblivion or S.T.A.L.K.E.R. It's stuck somewhere in between, and even though you're doing quests, the game has very little to drive me to play more.

There are some things that I feel lend to the pushed-to-retail-too-early of the game as well. NPCs leaning on nothing, areas you can see through but deflect bullets, mob AI that you can shoot through various things and won't move, etc.

I think I'll try another class or two before I give up on it altogether, or at least try to get further into it to where it might become more interesting, but I'm not expecting much at this point.

Another aside, my computer seems to run the game fairly well at almost all max settings. The exceptions are when there are a lot of "hot air" effects on the screen, like the smoke and air turbulance (overdone) rising off burning barrels, and the shockwave from a grenade going off (also overdone). And by overdone I mean damn cool, just not necessary.

AMD A643000+ (clawhammer I think??)
2GB PC3200 RAM
Radeon X1900XT

I run at 1680x1050.

I do notice some slowdowns on new area chunk loads as well. As I have a fairly quick drive system (10K Raps in R0), I can only imagine this will be worse for older single drive IDE systems. Though I had issues with STALKER actually freezing on me during area loads and it seemed to be my drive configuration causing the problem, so I could be a victim of my own speed fetish here.

Edit: It appears I was wrong about single player random generation. The levels for this evoker I made are completely different from the hunter's. They do persist after creation though, so it's not a random map each time.