Why Flagship Failed (and made their users very angry)

Recently (the end of July) a somewhat small game company closed its doors and remains a barely operative shell of 5 or so founding leaders. Flagship Studios, creators of Hellgate London, finally had to call it quits. I read a lot of articles on the topic, and played the game myself for several months. It had an engaging storyline with a lot of true "lol" humor, as well as horrifying moments that almost sent me flying out of my chair. The artwork's style, especially of items, was extremely impressive. The levels did get a little boring in contrast, but I'll explain that part later. I also really enjoyed the skills system, which allowed you to make some extreme choices and variations to your character, and the item customization system.

My main concerns with the game are as follows. They chose to do something completely original, but they couldn't deliver. They decided that doing dungeon crawls of the same maps again and again, and camping enemies waiting for a rare one to spawn was unnecessary. I agree with this, but they fell short with their new strategy. The new strategy was to make every level randomly generated for your character (or party, if you are grouped). No one else can enter your instance unless you're grouped together. They used templates of rooms and structures to randomly generate each map and the chance for hidden treasure caches and named bosses. Unfortunately there are only so many drastically different looking areas you can make when you randomly generate from templates. After a while the areas started to feel washed out and used up. "Hell" itself was just some sort of red abyss or a dark cathedral. This also led to a stagnation of the community since you can only really interact with people in the "safe zone" main terminal stations. Also, the skill system which could allow you to choose great combinations, could also allow you to make a completely unplayable character with just a few clicks. And with no "respec" option, a new player could find themself making many many new characters.

Hellgate came out of the gate barely breathing. They so wanted to release on Halloween, but the game just WASN'T ready. Instead of listening to reason they pushed it out anyway and had to deal with serious bugs and an unhappy community. They also promised a new package of content each quarter, but only delivered one package during the game's lifetime (since 10/31/07). Their subscription structure for online play was annoying to subscribers and non-subscribers alike. You could choose to subscribe in order to get more storage space, subscriber only items, and the ability to wear prettier armor; or not subscribe and receive almost the entire game. They either had to differentiate between the two better, or get rid of the subscription fee/enforce it for everyone. Giving people a choice was probably a poor decision financially as well as from a design perspective.

I could have dealt with all of their issues, if it wasn't for the fact of broken promises. When Sony Online Entertainment says that there is going to be a game patch released, or a new expansion, they give a date and stick to it. If they feel that their content won't be clean enough by then, they push it off and give us the reason. Flagship continually promised the world but delivered nothing. It go to the point where I would read about a new patch on the forums, and immediately believe I would never see it (which happened with Patch 2.0 - it is currently scrapped indefinitely due to the stability of the company). There are only so many times you can promise something to your gaming community and not deliver it, before they lose faith in you and your game. For the time being, Hellgate is still operational and I still retain all subscriber benefits without being billed. Hopefully a large gaming company will purchase it and make it into the game it was meant to be.