The game that was Borderlands before Borderlands was Borderlands, Hellgate: London is finally returning to America. If you don’t know the story by now, it goes something like this. Flagship Studios made up of people who had created Diablo came up with a FPS Diablo clone. EA bought the rights to publish it and people got excited.
Flagship then decided to announce that you can play it single player, you can play it online for free, or you can pay $14.99 a month to get all sorts of premiums, including World of Warcraft like expansions through patches. People get confused and wary, and hardly anyone pays the fee. The games opening weeks are plagued with billing problems, and people not getting the premiums they are paying for. Not to mention the server crashes. Meanwhile, the free players are content just playing with what’s on the disc.
Within a year the game folds and is sold to HanbitSoft a video game publisher in Korea, because quite frankly the Koreans loved Hellgate: London. It continues to grow and prosper in that country. Here in America Namco Bandai now holds the publishing rights and has no plans to do anything with them.
Today it has been announced that HanbitSoft and Namco Bandai have reached an agreement to allow HanbitSoft to publish the game in North America and Europe. So rejoice! Hellgate: London(a game I personally loved)will be available hopefully by the end of this year.