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Thank goodness I didn’t opt for the lifetime membership!

Hellgate: London was yet another one of those games — awesome in beta, terrible at release. Terrible is a bad way to put it — more like, release didn’t have anything else, and was therefore a total disappointment. Beta was so goood too! Sigh, such is the current game industry.

Anyhoo, the point of this post and that terrible pun for a title: I received my official email from Bandai games today. For those of you who don’t know, hellgate has had a huge amount of legal trouble - Flagship fired everyone, Bandai was suing to get the license (and won, it appears), etc. I’m surprised it has lasted this long, honestly, but hellgate is finally coming to a close. As of Jan. 1, 2009, the hellgate london servers will go offline and no more multiplayer will be available. Hellgate has a shitty single player, but it doesn’t hold a candle to the multiplayer experience. You can’t even play locally. If they are awesome, Bandai will release either a server exe or a patch to run local games, Diablo 2 style, but that is a long long shot, so don’t count on it.

RIP Hellgate.