Hellgate: London Community Day Report
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The demons you battle in Hellgate: London are varied and pernicious. Thanks to the art hanging on the walls of Flagship Studios we've recently seen a ton of new monsters, but I can't comment on any of those since I didn't see them in the game at the early levels I played. I did see a lot of the monsters we've already seen in screenshots and gameplay movies, but even if they weren't new, their behaviors were interesting to observe. The AI has continued to improve, and monsters move in a lot of interesting ways.
Overall, I was pretty happy with the monsters. They moved realistically, they had good animations, their AI was varied and they made great noises and had enjoyable death animations. The physics worked pretty well too; monsters I hit would fall down in believable fashion, sometimes tumbling head over tail, or sliding across the ground if I nailed them hard enough. They've got a wide variety of death and movement animations too, and when combined with the projectile physics this keeps the action looking fresh. In other words, every zombie doesn't keel over and die in the same way.
As for bosses, they were quite scarce in the early going. Other than quest bosses, such as the Taint and the Shulgoth, I didn't see a single boss monster, or pack of champion-type semi-bosses. There were random bosses in the earlier builds of Hellgate: London I played in 2006, but I got to a higher level those other times, so maybe they start appearing by clvl 8 or 10, or maybe I just got unlucky with the spawning this time. Also, I didn't explore that much this time, and I never fully cleared out any of the levels. I just did enough for the quest or to find the portal to the next area, and it's quite possible there were random bosses around, but I just didn't bump into any of them.
