Greetings, human! Yes, we have successfully verified that you are indeed not a zombie. However, as part of preparing you for the hard life that awaits you in these trying times, you are mandated to attend further survivor training and orientation through the help of the SAFE video series. SAFE stands for Survivor Acclimation for Everyone and is your best chance of staying...safe!

Unfortunately, our hard copy of the first lesson of the series was lost during a recent raid by some particularly nasty firesnap monsters. While we're not sure why they would want to take it, our top experts speculate it to be a tactic to sabotage our survivor training attempts. As a result, you will be starting the SAFE video series with the second lesson: "Humans and Zombies". This educational program will teach you three key methods of differentiating humans from zombies when venturing topside.


Good hunting, last vestige of humanity! Be SAFE! A higher quality version of this video will be posted on the HellgateLondon.com front page today and a number of major game media sites have it available for download.

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.

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.

Hot on the heels of Patch 1.2 comes Patch 1.3 which offers a host of new features and improvements to your Hellgate: London experience. This update is just as beefy as its predecessor and then some. Taken from the searing forge of development, it has been hammered and honed on the fiery anvil of in-house testing and will soon be fortified upon being thrust into the cold water that is Test Center.

Metaphors aside, Patch 1.3 has been crafted with an abundance of hotly desired features, the patch notes for which are presently being compiled. The latest addition to Patch 1.3 is Shared Stash, originally slated for the Abyss Chronicles (Patch 2). This feature will allow all of an account's characters to have a space to keep weapons, equipment, and other items in a location where any other characters on the account can access them. Two other new additions to the patch include gambling vendors and an increase to the current Palladium cap per character. Gambling vendors will offer unidentified items for sale which appear as "Normal" rarity and may or may not be worth far more than their purchase price. For more information on the estimated "content schedule" for Patch 1.3, be sure to check the "Lowdown On Upcoming Updates" news post made shortly before Patch 1.2 launched.

Patch 1.3 is estimated to be ready for Test Center next week. A more absolute date will be announced in the coming days along with the update's patch notes.