1UP has written up a short preview of Hellgate: London. The preview is 4 paragraphs short and doesn't contain any useful information, but it does contain a little complaint about the game's first person viewpoint. Here's a couple of interesting paragraphs from the preview centered on the complaint: <blockquote>We're looking forward to that, because while Flagship's design pedigree and the near-future, demon-plagued London setting give us tremendous hope, we have some serious questions about this game: If it's not an action-oriented RPG (e.g., the weird modifiable guns in the game are generally "sticky," homing in on a target), then why mandate a locked-in FPS-style viewpoint? If you're aiming to re-create the phat lewt carrot-on-a-stick gameplay that propelled the Diablo games to success, then why won't you allow players to see their increasingly cool characters in anything other than a menu screen? OK, so we're a little fixated on the near-total lack of a third-person view (it does switch up during melee combat), but it implies a somewhat deficient generosity of spirit. Gamers enjoy seeing their developing characters kick ass--or at least they like the choice of whether they get to see that--and if success in the game is going to boil down to dice rolling instead of twitch skills, why not let gamers see something more than their guns' brilliantly colored light beams smack a demon down during that dice roll? Vampire: The Masquerade—Bloodlines made it work (more or less), and that game did depend on twitch skills for success.</blockquote> What do you think? Read the rest here. Oh yeah, the preview appears to be <B>OLD</b>. <Blockquote>Flagship's first release can make a first-person RPG fun to play--and that's what we're hoping to discover at E3, where Hellgate: London will be available for hands-on play.</blockquote>
