The game presents three archetypes to choose from, each divided into two sub-classes. Blademasters and Guardians are melee warriors; Summoners and Evokers are spellcasters; Marksmen and Engineers are ranged attackers. Depending on your weapons, you can switch between a first- or third-person camera.

With these features, former Blizzard developers at the helm and a fine marketing campaign, Hellgate was highly hyped and sold nearly one million copies.

Then came the fall. It quickly became evident to players that content was lacking – they were just walking in the same corridors and fighting the same monsters. The only thing that changed was their HP and damage, plus a few poorly balanced skills.

Valuing quantity over quality, designers over-relied on MMO-type fetch quests – everything was based on “collect this artefact”, “kill this monster”, “collect X body parts from X type of monster”.

Like Diablo II, the game could be played either online or offline, but only those paying a monthly “Elite” subscription of $10 (or a lifetime fee of $149) would get content updates, such as new dungeons and items. Regardless, all players had to deal with server issues, character resets, crashes and bugs.

And so, a year after Hellgate's release, Flagship went bankrupt, closing the game servers soon after. A Korean company then bought the game and re-launched it in 2011 as Hellgate Global – this time free-to-play and with new Tokyo areas. Criticised for its “pay-to-win” progression, it lasted until January 2016. It then changed hands once again, being re-released on Steam in 2018 as cut-down single-player only game.

Few games get this amount of hype and chances, but, while Hellgate: London had a brilliant concept, it failed to deliver. Borderlands (2009) would soon prove just how well “Diablo with guns” could work.