Hellgate tries its luck with Steam Greenlight

Remember Hellgate: London ?

? It was a near-future action-RPG set in a post-apocalyptic world shattered by an invasion of demons. The focus was on single-player gameplay but there was a strong multiplayer element to it as well, with PvP action and instanced, team-based quests. It was a cool idea (I thought so, anyway) but the execution faltered, and the servers were taken offline in early 2009. It was resurrectedas a free-to-play online game a few years ago, but that didn't gain any traction with North American audiences either. Now it's taking a run at Steam.

I'm really not sure what to make of this. The cinematic on the Steam Greenlight pageis a re-post of a trailer that's at least three years old, and the most recent "news" on T3Fun's official Hellgate siteis from 2011. There are more recent "announcements," but they appear to be nothing but notifications of server maintenance. The Hellgate Facebook page, meanwhile, has a few post from this month leading up to the Greenlight announcement, but prior to that there's one from July, four from June (which are related to Football Club Manager rather than Hellgate), and then nothing until January—of 2013 .

Furthermore, while the Greenlight page is for "Hellgate," it's also described in one instance as Hellgate Global, which includes "most of the previous version features together with the following updates brought by the Tokyo Patch," those being a new storyline and three new gameplay modes. But the Tokyo patch was actually announced in 2009, and was part of the Hellgate: Resurrection project that, according to Wikipedia, underwent a very brief closed beta test in North America back in 2011.

There is, understandably, a good bit of confusion surrounding Hellgate's appearance on Greenlight. Some fans are defending the original release while others decry it as a cash-grab on the back of a game that's been utterly ignored for three years, but the one question that everyone seems to be asking is, "Why now?" A "yes" vote is harmless enough—it isn't a commitment to buy—but given that the three-year-old Tokyo update is the latest-and-greatest thing that the Greenlight campaign has to offer, it's hard to imagine that Hellgate will see any significant updates if and when it makes it to Steam. And that makes it hard to imagine that anyone is going to care.