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Flagship Studios shuts down

Published on 14th July 2008 by Joe Martin

Flagship Studios, developer of Hellgate: London, has shut up shop it seems and made all staff redundant.

Flagship Studios, the developer behind EA's Hellgate: London has closed and made all staff redundant, it emerged on Saturday according to Voodoo Extreme.

The news, which wasn't entirely unexpected, comes shortly after news that morale was low at the company and that many developers were already leaving. The closure is thought to be linked to the poor performance and reaction to the company's main title, Hellgate: London.

"Flagship bit off way more than they could chew and made a lot of development and structural mistakes in how they went about things. They had a lot of big dreamers on staff, but not enough nitty-gritty people who knew how to get poo poo done. It sucks, but that's life I guess," "GLC", wrote a former employee of Ping0, the digital publisher of Hellgate: London on the SA forums.

"I think it's less that they aimed too high than that they tried to aim that high and do it quickly, and they didn't do anything the easy way. It was like picking everything that's hard to do in a game, and then putting it on a brand-new company (two of them, really) with people who hadn't worked together before."

There's currently no news on how this will affect subscribers of Hellgate: London. Nobody has formally taken responsibility of the game and the rights have fallen to US money firm Comerica, according to Eurogamer. There is currently no option to unsubscribe from the game either.

Flagship's other game, Mythos, is to be handled by Korean company HanbitSoft, which reportedly aims to handle the MMO internally.

Are you a fan of either game? Let us know what you think of the closure in the forums.

15 Comments

Discuss in the forums Reply

DarkLord7854 14th July 2008, 15:55

Hah, I'm so glad I unsubscribed last weekend XD

Shame though, HGL did have potential, and patch 2.0 was going to make the game worthwhile :(

johnnyboy700 14th July 2008, 15:57

Shame about the Hellgate reviews, the game looked promising but ended up more or less with a B+ for effort.

Might still pick up a copy, just out of curiosity.

chrisb2e9 14th July 2008, 16:51

I had really high hopes for hellgate. but then the reviews started coming out and my hopes started fading away. sucks for the people working there. hope they find jobs after the dust settles.

Solidus 14th July 2008, 17:38

sad to hear this. I never bought the game but it was getting allot of hype before its release while in production - its a shame they couldnt deliver but I think ambition is a good thing but you have to perhaps find a balance between that and being realistic when making a game.

But i know nothing of game developing anyways !

Werent the Hellgate team former Blizzard staff or something?

deltaworld 14th July 2008, 18:13

Haha.. i bet the staff that left Blizzard wish they never left. Now that Diablo III is out. Do you reckon after Diablo III is out they will secretly start working on "World of Diablo"?

Jordan Wise 14th July 2008, 18:17

isn't it world of starcraft next?

Apoca1yps0 14th July 2008, 20:24

I wonder how Mythos will fare under a new dev team.

Ninja_182 14th July 2008, 22:21

The staff should go back to blizzard and sort out the graphical mess thats being made of diablo 3

LordPyrinc 14th July 2008, 22:31

I too was initially interested in the game until the reviews came out. I almost picked up a copy the other day, but it was still priced too close to that of a new game. I'm not going to pay premium for a game that might suck. If it was between $20 and $25 then I would've picked it up.

rollo 15th July 2008, 00:39

blizzard games are never graphically brilliant. Diablo 3 looks fine for what its going to be. Id hazzard a guess it will run on anything built in last 3 years which is the whole point.

Not everyone owns the crysis pc

Mentai 15th July 2008, 04:45

I think he's reffering to the art style rather than graphics. Notice that in the dungeon you can actual SEE everything instead of having a little light radius around you. I'm in two minds about it personally. I don't think it looks bad, but I think I would have preferred the game to be darker and more gritty.
Regardless, the gameplay looks as mint as it should be, so whatever. Art style doesn't give a huge impact on my enjoyment of games.

Fozzy 15th July 2008, 06:30

meh I was on beta and at release they messed EVERYTHING up

Sparrowhawk 15th July 2008, 07:34

Looked good before release, but they rushed it and shot themselves in the foot. Shame, too.

Mister_X 15th July 2008, 13:43

I loved the idea of hellgate, even bought one of the statues ( female knight templar) And have both the books that were released.
The game though flawed was a great idea. It just didn't have that "something" to make me go back again and again. It was however getting better and better with every patch.

Its a shame, I applaud them for having a go.

deltaworld 16th July 2008, 13:00

The had a brilliant FMV trailer that they released in one of the E3 shows. It got me really excited about the game. Up until I saw a gameplay trailer, I was dissapointed.

We need another good MMORPG. The gaming industry needs a WOW killer or competer at the very least. Don't get me wrong I love WoW I have it, I play it. But I would like to see some decent competition for the sake of choice.