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Why Robin Makes Batman Better So Flagship (and Hellgate) are sunk, and Mythos has been canned along with them, right? Not necessarily! According to some job postings over on Gamasutra and DICE.com, Korean publisher T3 is opening a development studio in San Francisco, and will continue work on both titles. Seems random, but T3 own a controlling stake in HanbitSoft, Hellgate’s Korean publisher, and the company at the centre of a tussle over ownership of the game as Flagship was going down. A tussle they seem to be well on the way to winning. The news probably won’t matter to Hellgate players since, outside of Korea, there really aren’t any left, but it’s good news for Mythos fans.
Report: T3 To Continue Hellgate, Mythos Development In SF Office [Gamasutra]
Namco-Bandai may be stepping in to rescue Hellgate: London from embattled Flagship Studios, who recently suspended private testing for Mythos in the wake of widespread reports that the studio was shutting down.
We’ve approached Flagship for comment and they’ve yet to explain their status to us. Then, a posting appeared on Hellgate‘s official forums from Namco-Bandai’s senior director of business development, Zack Karlsson, stating:
Hello Hellgaters,
I know everyone is looking for an announcement, and we’d love to make one — but right now, many things are in flux and we don’t have all the information yet. As soon as we do, we’ll post here on the forums, on the website, and anywhere else we can find you.
The posting continued:
Word started passing yesterday that Flagship Studios went caput, and now multiple sites are reporting word that the Hellgate developer is indeed no more.
We got an anonymous tipster who said Flagship shut down abruptly yesterday, and that developers for both Hellgate (San Francisco) and Mythos (Seattle) have all been pink-slipped. “But there’s also hope that they will all have their jobs back at the end of next week at a brand new company”, our tipster says.
But wait, there’s more. Flagship’s Korean partners/owners, Hanbitsoft, were said to be taking over. That sparked a foofaraw regarding who owns the Hellgate intellectual property.
What happens at the studio when a game doesn’t sell as well as was hoped? Imagine being at Flagship Studios after Hellgate: London‘s launch stumbles, which 1UP identified as “one of the top 5 worst PC game launches of all time”. Angry PC gamers even invented a special term, “Flagshipped”, to refer to when a company overpromises and doesn’t deliver.
If you think morale might suffer on the team, a blog entry from Flagship Studios audio and gameplay manager Guy Somberg suggests you might be right. Somberg said on his blog that work had become “depressing” because of fan response to Hellgate‘s issues. (The original post has since been pulled, but MMO fansite IncGamers retrieved it.)
Although Somberg wrote that he loved being part of Flagship, he also expressed a fair bit of worry about many of his colleagues moving on from their jobs:
A PC game having a bad launch isn’t as rare an occurrence as it should be, especially in these days of readily available internet patches, so it takes something special to be called a truly botched PC game launch. 1UP takes a look at five of the worst first days ever in their feature, “Top 5 Botched PC Game Launches”. For the most part they’ve chosen the ones you’d expect. Hellgate: London, with its greedy payment system and near character wipe in Asia; Vanguard, which just plain wasn’t finished when they launched it, and of course Half-Life 2, which completely ate the newly launched Steam service’s servers. I can think of a few they missed – Anarchy Online, which lost most of its subscriber base thanks to a buggy launch, only to evolve into a damn fine game once half their audience had stopped caring, or Dungeon Lords, which was the only PC game I have EVER returned. Hit the link to see their full list, and be sure to add your own in the handy dandy comment section.
For centuries humanity had struggled to keep the demons from entering our dimension, until the year 2020 when we faltered, unleashing a horde from the dark pit upon an unsuspecting populace. Hellgate: London picks up the story 18 years later, and what better time to usher in a game about all hell breaking loose than Halloween, when the veil between worlds is said to be at its thinnest? What I’m hoping to be one of the best PC RPGs since Oblivion is hitting retail stores across North America on October 31st, with the Europeans playing catch-up two days later on November 2nd. I’m not one to get excited about a PC that isn’t an MMO, but after catching the trailer and seeing the game in action on several occasions, I’ll be staying in this Halloween to the relief of multitudinal Atlanta area kids who would otherwise be clutching their candy white-knuckled against their chests, terrified of my legendary hunger for chocolate bars in pillowcases and the tears of small children.
