Hellgate: London Community Day Report

The folks at IncGamers have written up a preview of Hellgate: London, after spending some firsthand time with the action RPG during Flagship Studios’ recent press event.

There are a lot of major changes in how skills work in HGL compared to how they did in Diablo II. One big change is that most skills in HGL max out at around 6 points. Some only allow 3 or 4 points, but 6 is usually the max, and the skills have an absolute hard cap of about two levels higher than the soft cap (to allow you to boost your skills a bit further with equipment). It’s nothing like D2, where every skill went to 20 points, and could often be boosted another 10 or more with equipment. The point of this is to make every skill point you add valuable, since you can’t just keep adding points to make skills super powerful, and you don’t have skills where 1 point is all you ever want or need. The fact that the initial game’s max level will be 50, compared to 99 in D2, obviously factors in as well, since we’ll have far fewer skill points to play with.

Interestingly, lots of skills, especially higher level ones, only let you put in another point every other, or every third level. So you might get a skill at 30, and not be able to put in your second point until lvl 33, then your 3rd at 36, and so forth. With a maximum level of 50, and very slow advance expected past 30, this means you’ll go a long time between significant skill increases at higher levels, and you will not be using one mega skill, since you can’t put more than about 8 points into any skill in the game, no matter your level or equipment.

They’ve also uploaded fifteen new screenshots to go along with the article.