All in all in then the breadth and freedom of the game's worlds is staggering, and the movement and combat can at times be a joy. That said, our inability to sample missions, or spend longer with the game leaves us unsure whether Ubisoft Montreal's 'organic design' mantra has really hit the nail on the head from a control perspective (do players have the patience to embrace this new scheme?). That said, Assassin's Creed is truly 'next-generation' from an artistic and design standpoint, and it looks like we could be rewarded with a truly inventive title, even if it isn't utterly flawless when it reaches the Xbox 360 and PS3 in a few weeks time.

It’s been less than a week since we’ve opened the Hellgate, and we’re ecstatic at how many people have already joined us online. Overall, the game is running really well. Our game servers are incredibly stable and the community has been great about working with us to identify and resolve issue through the forums. We’ve been working through some issues as every new online game does, and as is befitting the season, we’ve our share of both tricks and treats.

Hellgate: London was scheduled to ship to stores by October 30th so it could be available for sale on the 31st. The excitement of retailers having the game on hand won out over our carefully crafted plans and we started seeing anxious gamers wanting to get online a day earlier than expected. Although we had to scramble, we also didn’t want to disappoint our first players, so we opened the servers early.

After the game had been running for a while, we found that we were having issues with out subscription transactions not being correctly processed. While this wasn’t an issue of incorrect charges being applied or insecure data issues, we needed to suspend subscriptions while we worked with our payment processing partners to address the problems. We’re working on this through the weekend and will take as long as required to iron out the last issues. We will update everyone as soon as we have more concrete information.

Turning of the ability to subscribe meant that we had some cool All Hallows’ Eve content that a lot of people weren’t going to be able to see. So, we decided to “turn on” the goodies for everyone who was playing. Unfortunately, this meant we would need to shut down the game servers in order to issue a new patch. Although we announced the down-time on our forums and within the game, not everyone got the message, so some people were surprised when they couldn’t get online for a few hours.

This, in turn, led everyone that was playing to rush to the Hellgate: London forums, which promptly overloaded both our forum and website servers. The treat was that we really saw that there are a LOT of passionate people playing the game. The trick was that the rush to our sites caused our little corner of the Internet to shut down.

It’s not that we don’t already have a good amount, but we immediately put out the order for more web servers. We’ve also implemented a website overflow plan in case we get that many people flooding onto the boards in such a short amount of time again. Live and learn!

We brought the servers and our sites back online a few hours later, patched everyone with all of the special themed content, and we’ve been up and running ever since. Some of our Beta testers have progressed through the end of the storyline and are continuing on in Nightmare difficulty. We can’t wait to see them tackle Elite Mode.

All in all, we’re pleased that the game itself is running so well. We’re also as frustrated as you are about these initial bumps in the road. Trust us – we’re here working on them all day, every day.

Single Player Patch

We’ve made the general fixes, improvements and changes found in Patch 0 available to our stand alone players. The option to patch your single player version of Hellgate: London is available from the launcher when you first start up the game.

Founder’s Offer Extended

We’ve received a flood of messages from people that have pre-ordered asking that we extend the time for our Founder’s offer. We understand your concern, and want to assure you that our delay in accepting subscriptions will not adversely affect your chance to take advantage of this offer. We’ll release specific details in the next few days, but we’ll extend the timeline of the offer and make sure that we take care of everyone that wants to be a Founder.

New Special Event

We’re putting the final touches on what is making it into our next patch, and details will be coming VERY soon. One hint – there’s going to be fire. LOTS of fire…

See you online!

--Bill Roper

Another observation is that either the single player uses random dungeon generation or they nerfed them on purpose so subscribers can only play in the bigger outdoor areas. Whatever the case may be, I'm not liking it very much. I'm sick of the generic underground steam maintenance tunnel levels.