Slowly but surely, the light at the end of the hellgate is starting to shine ever so brighter, and by Summer 2007, Flaghship's over-hyped project Hellgate: London should be ready to step out of the shadows altogether. That, according to today's joint announcement made by co-publisher Electronic Arts and Namco Bandai Games America, which narrows the game's worldwide launch window down to "summer 2007". Here's what Bill Roper, CEO of Flagship Studios (formerly from Blizzard), had to say about his studio's online action RPG:

"We are all committed to making Hellgate: London absolutely the best game possible," said Bill Roper, CEO of Flagship Studios. "The anticipation surrounding the game is immense and we are looking forward to its launch being a truly worldwide event."

Hellgate: London combines the depth of role-playing games and the action of first-person shooter titles, while offering infinite playability with dynamically generated levels, items, enemies and events. The player creates a heroic character, completes quests, and battles through innumerable hordes of demons to advance through experience levels and branching skill paths. A robust, flexible skill and spell system, highly customizable appearances, and a massive variety of randomly generated equipment allow players to create their own unique hero.

Hellgate: London is currently being featured on the show floor of the 2007 International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas from January 8-11 in Central Hall at the Microsoft booth (#7145) and Intel booth (# 7153) and in South Hall at the Dell booth (Level 3, #30363).

Also, let's not forget that the developer recently established a new Flagship studio in Seattle (headed by Fate lead-designer Travis Baldree) which began work on a casual online RPG called Mythos. This will supposedly be used to test their networking technology - the same one adopted in Hellgate: London. Let's just hope they get that right before Hellgate comes out.

(N.B. Archive text, links removed)