Patch 1.3 Notes
April 24, 2008
Greetings, Hellgaters, and welcome to Hellgate: London Patch 1.3!

Patch 1.3 is a beast of a update, offering no less than eight new features to the game including Shared Stash, a Premium Item Merchant, Donation Collectors and Global Buffs, Ranks and the Expertise system, and lots more. This content update also fixes a number of pesky item, skill, and interface bugs and makes a few tweaks to partying and monster scaling in Stonehenge.

Interacting with your fellow players has been enhanced with the introduction of optional chat bubbles that appear when players talk and performable emotes that your characters now have at their disposal. In Patch 1.3, players can also easily browse lists of chat and emote commands using the two according buttons in the chat pane.

A very sincere thank you to the many players who tested the many builds of Patch 1.3 uploaded to our Test Center server and helped report on the new patch's balance, performance, and stability.

See you online!

The Hellgate: London Team

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Click here to read the full patch notes for Patch 1.3!

Hellgate: London's Patch 1.3 has grown from an intermediary between Patch 1.2 and the Abyss Chronicles to a giant in its own right. With features coming out its ears, this content update is sure to wow and to please. A release candidate of Patch 1.3 is slated for Test Center release later today where it'll receive its final round of testing by QA and Hellgaters. Information on the estimated downtime will be posted before the Test Center server goes down for the update. For those players who sample the release candidate and want to report problems or bugs, please use the Test Center Feedback forum.

After the final Patch 1.3 build spends the night on Test Center, the live servers will be updated around noon tomorrow, barring any unforeseen difficulties. Information on downtimes will be posted to the Server Status page and the forums beforehand. While the final patch notes will be posted tomorrow, ones based off of the Test Center build can be found here.

Patch 1.3 introduces a host of new elements to Hellgate: London, including a Shared Stash system, a Premium Item Merchant, optional chat bubbles, a number of emotes your characters can perform, the abilities to hide your helmet and inspect other characters' equipment, and a Donation Collector NPC who grants global buffs. Additionally, a new set of passive skills called Expertise have been introduced, gained by earning Ranks. For more details, check out the latest patch notes from Test Center.

After about two weeks in public beta testing, the Hellgate: London Single Player Patch 1.2 update is ready to be finally be released. The release candidate published last week has been poked, prodded, and otherwise fully tested and has been retitled sans "beta". Those users who have already applied the release candidate version of this patch need to take no additional action as the update has not changed since.

The reason for the lengthy patch release was due largely in part to an issues players were experiencing where they couldn't make Elite Mode characters. This problem has been fixed and is listed in the compendium that is the Single Player Patch 1.2 notes, available here. The patch can be downloaded from the same link or by loading up Hellgate: London and clicking the Update Available button. Clicking the Details button under Single Player yields the patch notes, clicking Update will apply the patch.


Many thanks to those Hellgaters who helped out by testing preliminary Single Player Patch 1.2 versions!

For two weeks now, Fridays have been "new build" days for Single Player Patch 1.2 Beta and Test Center Patch 1.3. These patches are both early "test" versions of their final iterations and are used to fix issues, bugs, rebalances, and other tweaks with every build. These fixes culminate and become the finished patch notes.

Single Player Patch 1.2 Beta is rapidly closing in on its final build with just a few remaining issues left to fix. The most vital of these is an issue which prevents players from creating new Elite Mode characters. This past Friday's build solved two bugs: one that caused characters not to load properly and another which prevented Skill Retrainers from being given to characters which required them. A new SP 1.2 Beta build is estimated to be out tomorrow which will fix the Elite Mode bug.

Multiplayer Patch 1.3 is having its kinks worked out and quickly on the Test Center server. The patch notes have doubled in length in the ten short days Patch 1.3 has been on Test Center, half of them being new feature and new details on those features. The patch's list of known issues has shrunk from a dozen plus to two, many of them fixed in the build uploaded to Test Center this past Friday and this afternoon. While an estimate for release is still a little ways off, it shouldn't be too long now.

These updates and others like them are first reported on the Hellgate: London forums.

This afternoon at about 3:00 PM PT, the Test Center server was updated with an early build of Hellgate: London Patch 1.3. Patch 1.3 has grown much like Patch 1.2, starting off as an interim patch and developing into a significant content update. The patch offers an impressive selection of new features including Ranks and the Perk Points system, numerous emotes, character inspection, gambling, shared stash, and then some. More details are available in the Test Center Patch 1.3 notes, published on the Hellgate: London forum.

This early version of Patch 1.3 will be updated as new builds become available and ready for Test Center.

Soloist Hellgaters will be excited to learn that a "beta" version of Patch 1.2 for Single Player Mode will be made available for players to try out next week. This is similar to how our Multiplayer patches are "road-tested" on our Test Center server before being released.

This Single Player patch will match the content, balance changes, and bug fixes found in the Multiplayer version of Patch 1.2. Our QA team has reported no show-stoppers in the course of testing it thus far.

A solid ETA for the publishing of this "1.2 Beta" Single Player patch will be made available early next week.