Hellgate London - CES 07 Updated Impressions @ GameSpot, IGN

A very short Hellgate: London impressions article from CES 07 can be found at GameSpot. The big news in the article is the freshly revealed Summer release window, although the revelation of "subscription-based multiplayer" was news to me:

Hellgate: London will let you battle an army of demonic monsters in the gutted ruins of London. Set sometime in the future, you'll be able to play as a templer, which is basically a high-tech knight; a cabalist; a spellcaster; or a gun-wielding hunter. Roper explained that the cool thing about Hellgate: London is that you can play it as a single-player game, but there will also be an option to turn it into a subscription-based multiplayer game if you want to play with others and enjoy lots of new content.

Meanwhile, IGN has a very similar short article describing the same gameplay demo:

Classes still have not been added to the game, but there were a bunch of new enemies and skills. The mission we were dropped into required us to find some poor kid's missing leg (don't worry, he has a prosthetic peg to tide him over). Finding the limb was merely a matter of blasting every moving thing in the streets to bits. Eventually we came upon an enormous, bulbous, globular beast, and once we put it to rest we found the leg in the remains.

More information.

Subscription based?

I find it hard to believe the men who brought us the pioneering landmark of free multiplayer gaming (Battle.net) are going to start charging money.

Gamespot must be misinformed.

Say it ain't so Joe…

As far as I know, Battle.net is Blizzards online gaming solution. Hellgate: London is not being developed, or published, by Blizzard.

"The mission we were dropped into required us to find some poor kid's missing leg (don't worry, he has a prosthetic peg to tide him over..)"

Do you think the missing leg is a little reference back to Diablo2??(—I recall a pegleg that opened the door to a certain secret level…..)

I think Reyla thought (as did I) they would have a similar philosophy to when they were at Blizzard.

I don't know how accurate this is. Interesting.

Most likely Magerette. Wirts leg has become famous over the years.

Whether they follow the same way of thinking or not remains to be seen - keep in mind that they don't have the financial backing that Blizzard does. Also, after Oblivions successful sales of various small mods, developers trying to make money on online services is bound to boom.

Not much a news to me. There is rumor that 9C(one of the largest publisher in China) had paid 63M RMB(~7.5M USD) for publishing Hellgate: London in China. If Hellgate: London isn't subscription-based, 9C can't earn back that much. Still, it's a confirmation for that.

I was hoping to play this one in co-op with hubbie, since the game looks rather scary and i'm a big chicken
But this quote here:

Roper explained that the cool thing about Hellgate: London is that you can play it as a single-player game, but there will also be an option to turn it into a subscription-based multiplayer game if you want to play with others and enjoy lots of new content.

Leads me to believe that will only be possible of we pay an added subscription fee. That is too bad, because after trying Guild Wars and WoW I just don't have a lot of interest in MMORPGs anymore, I just wanted to play together over the network

Maybe I'll just sit next to hubbie and watch him while he plays and hide behind his back at the scary parts

I don't think we're talking MMORPG style here, but a coop mode is most likely ruled out as well.

Well, pay-to-play MP is confirmed on the front page now …

I wonder if that means no co-op or local multi modes?