What can PoE learn from Hellgate:London?

Pretty fun game for a bit. Summoner was good times. Had some of the worst boss battles though.

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ShaUrley a écrit :

Now, just to be clear, Hellgate:London was utterly doomed from the start because

(a) It had a subscription model for any additional content.
(b) It was released in a totally unfinished, bugged state.

Correction: Hellgate: London was doomed from the start because they had people that were going to make terrible decisions. They continued to make terrible decisions. They made a few good ones, however.

The subscription for additional content was a good move. It provided steady income from players while offering them something. The bad part was that, as I recall, I didn't get anything for my subscription. No XP bonus, no additional storage space, nothing. I got access to more areas to grind. My having no memory of what I enjoyed from the subscription meant the subscription was not worth it to me. I did it only to support them to help keep them alive.

Now if they had done a subscription that gave passive benefits, like increased XP gain, more storage space, a bonus to loot rolls, and other things that help the overall experience, it would have gone well if they had also done microtransactions that offer other things. For instance, if they had offered cosmetic sales like GGG, I'm absolutely certain this one thing alone would have bought them at least a few more years. It takes much less to come up with different skins than it would to come up with totally new stuff.

This is the exact reason alone that GGG is still alive. They're bringing in $3 for a single stash tab, up to $20 for a premium stash tab bundle ($3.33 per tab, individual premium tabs cost $4). That's a single purchase.

Most "good" games cost $60. That's one third of a WHOLE GAME.

I have 132 stash tabs. 2 currency tabs ($7.5 and $6, I just purchased another today with the discount) and 4 regular stash tabs, which means I have bought 21 orders of the premium stash tab bundles. That's a whopping $420 dollars. This is not counting any microtransactions like pets and skin changes. Most of my purchases were in the form of supporter packs, so I got more bang-per-buck, but still. That's a LOT.

Yet I've gotten less of a game in PoE than I ever did in HG:L. Yet GGG is alive and the other company is dead.

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ShaUrley a écrit :

But HG:L, at its core, was one of the best ARPGs I've played. It was the first one I encountered where status effects (freeze, ignite, shock,..) played a crucial role; though no doubt there were plenty of others that preceded it and others, like PoE, that succeeded it. More importantly, HG:L had great combat and mostly balanced itemization -- you could easily go from feeling invincibly powerful to dead in a few seconds, while still feeling that it was your mistake when something went wrong (excluding the many times that the game froze or otherwise bugged out).

I had the opposite experience. If I had good gear I never went to dead in just one second. But then again, I played as the super tanky Engineer or Summoner. I never played squishies like the Marksman or Evoker. Dunno how the Guardian and Blademaster fared, I never touched em.

My Engineer was also brokenly OP in PvP. Once you kamakazied one slow bot on an enemy, they were fucked.

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ShaUrley a écrit :

GGG wisely went with a non-play-to-win micro-transaction model, and PoE has never been the memory-leak-bug-infested mess that was HG:L. But what did Flagship Studios do to try and rectify the horrible launch of HG:L?

You mean pay-to-win, right?

Again, opposite experience. I played only a few months after HG:L's release, if I recall correctly, and didn't encounter many bugs.

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ShaUrley a écrit :

Second, Flagship continued to add new content (for subscribers, at least) as fast as their limited resources allowed. But what kind of content? The original game story went through some pretty drap environments -- a lot of tube tunnels, with no water or doors for some reason. But they added Stonehenge with several areas to collect boss heads and work towards a final boss (plus an area and boss that required a party). These were all fun and different areas to play through (Hell's Heart was HG:L's Dried Lake) and they weren't just accessible to the 1%. A little like PoE's maps but with more consistency and purpose to them, and IIRC reached more easily with new characters if you'd gone through the game once.

Another good move for HG:L. I never had an issue finding a group willing to do that stuff with me, at least once I got to that level. Other games, like WoW, Guild Wars, Warhammer: Online, nobody wanted to go with you if you weren't already capable, or if themselves were in your own shoes and were willing to do it with you.

Games like PoE don't encourage any sort of party play, and that alone discourages someone from bringing someone into new, higher content.

What GGG needs to do is make two major changes. First, make players want to party. Make them want to party so bad that soloing is a non-option. Second, offer rewards for bringing players into higher content. Additional players increases experience earned from monsters, and if you do most of the killing you get most of the experience. They get some, but it's better than them attempting it and dying.