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Why Auto Assault will fail

Submitted by Abalieno on April 20, 2006 - 05:26.

Auto Assault should have launched recently and noone cares.

At least I don't. I played Jumpgate for six months after launch. There was ZERO support. Nothing if not superficial massive "events" that were all about massive grinds (think to Ahn Quiraj). It was pretty obvious that NetDevil shipped the game and then forget about it.

When you do this, you deserve to go back into irrelevancy and stay there.

But of course people are stupid and the worst companies always get more founding. So now we have "Auto Assault". It seems they worked on this for more than four years. With a team of 50. While Jumpgate was going on with a team of one.

Here's the reason why this game and this company will never go anywhere:

NetDevil’s only other game was another massively multiplayer game called Jumpgate. NetDevil still maintains the game, which was launched in 2001, even though only about 1,000 people still play it.

And Brown said he plans to expand the company beyond its two current games.

“NetDevil is going to start another team and multiple games,” he said, adding that the company might also look at creating more traditional, non-MMO titles.

You cannot support ONE game and you already plan for multiple projects. What a fucking CLUELESS management.

For now, Brown and his crew will watch the gamers roll into Auto Assault and hope they stick around long enough to see what else they’ve been working on.

I hope they don't.

This whole industry needs surgery to remove inflated egos.

P.S.
There's a thread on Q23 if you want to read more specifically about EverQuest on wheels.

In Interstate 76, you had to deal with the physics of your car, and what armor was on what quadrant. You had to use your front rear and side weapons very intelligently. If your left armor was gone, you had to constantly manuever to keep that side out of the line of fire.

In Autoduel, it was even more strategic. You had to do many of the things mentioned above, as well as deal with subsystems of the car going out. Like tires, engines, weapons getting destroyed after the armor was gone (Granted, Auto Assault has this as well, but with one health bar car placement strategy means nothing. Once your health bar is gone you have no control over protecting your precious interior).

In Auto Assault, you have one health bar. Your main weapon is on a turret, so it doesn't matter where the enemy is. You can always shoot it. Also, how you manuever your car and it's position relative to the enemy means very little. There are front and rear mounted weapons, so you have to keep the enemy in this front arc that is drawn in front of your car to use the front mounted weapons.

The problem lies in the fact that skill plays almost no role. For the turret, if an enemy is in range, every shot may or may not hit them dependent on a die roll. Same with the front weapons. You basically just drive around in circles keeping the enemy in the front arc and hope that the die roll rolls a hit. It's a piss poor merging of standard MMO combat mixed in with a pseudo-skill based system.

The reason this exists is to give you weapons firings stats that slowly increase over time, to keep you playing. Unfortunately, it makes the combat so ridiculously dull because it doesn't reward skill. The only reward is eventually getting your weapons skills high enough to auto-hit enemies.

If it was for me I'd have put all the weapons on fixed positions so that you have to steer the car. More like an x-wing simulator done with cars, which should be easily doable even in a mmorpg since the car movement is easily predictable for the netcode.

Then it would be all about ramming other cars with blades or tailchasing them with a machine gun. It seems Auto Assault fails already on these extremely basic expectations.

Oh, and if I would make a game about "cars" it is quite obvious that it would all pivot on "modding" them. That's what the car geeks expect. No "ding, level up" shit.

Filed in: The Cesspit | Tinfoil hats

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Re: Why Auto Assault will fail

Falconeer on April 20, 2006 - 15:09.

You know it's not NetDevil fault's if Auto Assault gets released but NCsoft's, right? :)
And wanna know (if you don't know it already) why it is getting released at all, even if the concept and the general system is so unappealing to 21st century gamers?

Guess who is the nostalgic in charge at NC that "loved" the game at first sight:

http://www.gamerevolution.com/oldsite/games/pc/rpg/restricted_area_autoduel.gif

(Let me know if you can't see the image).

Basically, given that AA *WILL* fail (no doubt on that), you could say that this is a work of love, not money :)
For once.

Oh and one last comment, from another nostalgic who is enjoying the dumbest game of 2006: I stated this multiple times on f13, but Auto Assault has nothing to do with EverQuest.
AA is, in fact, Diablo on wheels, as clearly admitted by Devs on various interviews.

--
the Falconeer

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Re: Why Auto Assault will fail

Brent Michael Krupp (not verified) on April 20, 2006 - 21:00.

Yeah, I agree with you the game is lame. I played it for a couple hours in the open beta. Kinda cute and zooming around blowing stuff up was kinda fun -- but it was pretty clear that nothing was ever gonna change, I'd just get bigger numbers but still be zooming around blowing stuff up with zero strategy or skill. Total yawn of a game.

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Re: Why Auto Assault will fail

Mangoacid (not verified) on April 26, 2006 - 15:28.

I disagree fully. While this game isn't for your everyday MMO addict - it fills a certain void. The casual gamer loves this and there is a strong community in love with this game. It is a well layed out game with the right audience in mind.

The game is not for everyone, but it is still fun. A few of you admit to it being fun, but you gave up after a few hours. Try playing into the 40's and 50's and then you can reliably reply with your dislike.

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Re: Why Auto Assault will fail

Xeter (not verified) on April 26, 2006 - 18:21.

Well Brent, that is certainly a good description of the first few levels of auto assault...and pretty much every other MMORPG. But as you get out of the newb levels where everything goes down easy and your character moves away from the starting stats you do have to start developing some strategy (at least for the class I play). As a constructor, my cars are heavy and slow so chasing down fast stuff is a pain. My highest damage is melee damage (becuase my car is heavy) and stationary mines so when fighting single unsuspecting or slow targets, my best strategy is to come barreling straight at them and not open fire (which makes them tend to move out of the way) untill right before I ram them. And I like to try to drop a mine on them if I manage to hit them hard enough to ramp over them. My front gun has the highest single target DPS, and i keep a lower damage AoE turret equipped. This mean i get maximum damage from the one shot I fire right before I ram since I have to have them in my front weapons tac arc to ram them. And it also means when I find myself fighting a bunch of small fast targets like infantry or bikes where my front weapon has a hard time connecting, I can score at least some hits from the 10 meter AoE of my turret cannon. When neither of these strategies work, because the critter is fast, never stationary, and can heal (pelmels last night argh!) it's time to break out all my tricks. I figure out where their patrol path is, I set up all my mines in a tight little cluster dead center, and then I place my 2 stun turrets to each side of the mines. then I park behind them, and lob bullets at them as they come racing by which attracts them right over my mine field if I'm lucky :D

Anyway, for the record I did try your "strategy" of "zooming around blowing stuff up with zero strategy or skill." on them and sadly all I did was get myself blown up as they healed themselves and each other :( But your strategy does work quite well for me on stationary objects like buildings and very slow moving vehicles provided they are the only thing in the area.

I'm guessing you never made it to a boss fight, or if you did you didn't try it without help :D You are definately going to need some time and strategy to solo a boss at even level and the bosses are fairly frequent.

I find there is far more strategy to AA than any other mmo type game I have played so far. Part of the strategy is up front and consists of picking your class, and then picking your chassis for that class and then picking the type of weapon you will use...single target high dps, multi target mid dps, aoe low dps, fast or slow fire rate? a mixture of guns? Also damage type can be important since they complement differnt skills and are more or less effective against differnt units (fire, corrosive, etc) Picking skills is also fairly important because there are FAR more skills than you can max. Each level you put in a skill cost more of your available points, so taking one skill to 8 would cost far more points than taking 8 skills to 1. Personally I'm trying to get 1 point in every passive, and any other skills that sound usefull first so I can attempt to raise them by +skills items. (Which brings up another strategic bit...did you know in AA you cant double up any stat improvements? +1 fire damage can not stack with +1 fire damage but it can stack with +2 fire damage...all the stats are this way so you have to choose..do I want +1 +2 +3 all of one stat....or +3 +3 +3 of 3 different stats that maybe arent the one you really want? Hmm) And that's all just stuff you can tweak before you ever leave town...actual combat strategies based on your class / skills / equipement / opponents and terrain are vast, and get more and more important the farther along I get.

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Re: Why Auto Assault will fail

Stranger1111 (not verified) on April 26, 2006 - 22:51.

thx for sharing your "knowledge" after playing the game for a few hours. crappy review waste of time. its actually a good game when u beat noob zone.

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Re: Why Auto Assault will fail

Stranger (not verified) on August 4, 2006 - 16:37.

I have to side with the "high level" players here. I didnt quit AA because of anything mentioned. Things do get better out of Newbie Zone. ( I can say that for a fact, as I was a Lvl 70 Agent when I quit.) AS the game goes on it DOES get harder. The reason I quit was due to lack of people playing. I love the game, and I might try to comeback to it at a later time.

BUT

Having said that, AA needs to work on the grouping system baddly. At least when I was playing (And I sincerly hope this has been changed) Groups couldnt share missions, groups had a hard time keeping track of group members in a fight, and it was generally speaking easier to solo than group. For a MMO thats a bad thing.

I mean the reason I quit was #1) Noone was remotly my level, nearest one my level on Wasteland was like 55, and there was no way to advance in quests because I had to have help. and #2) Low population do to BAD advertising. This game was misrepresented so baddly by the producers, that noone will touch it with a 10 foot pole, they think its a bad remake of Motorcity Online FFS!

I had high hopes for this game, and I am afraid it will fail, it had/has great potential, and Netdevil Blew it.. big time.

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Re: Why Auto Assault will fail

WTF? (not verified) on December 31, 2006 - 12:21.

Itll fail yes unless it grows a community i mean cmon its a desert town in there they NEED to advertise properly and cmon if they dont then people will stop playing and itll just be a waste of money for the players and netdevil i play it on a hope that more and more ppl will come but... dusnt sound like theres gonna be more ppl soon.

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