Auto Assault: Auto Assault preview at 1up.com

Auto Assault is featured on the front page of 1UP.com today, comparing and contrasting a lot of early impressions with some detailed analysis about how the game played in beta form recently. You can read all about it here.

Here's an excerpt from the article:

Why we were wrong: That's a much more glass-half-empty approach than that of the NetDevil team, which fully reconfigured in order to rejigger the game. Says Brown: "We had the extended beta functioning the way we wanted it to, but we decided it just wasn't good enough yet. We saw two main problems. One, it was too hard to get into the game -- moving and shooting simultaneously is new to a lot of MMO players, and some people were spending hours in the tutorials. Now, tutorials are just five to 10 minutes long -- we give you your own place to get used to the game quickly, and then you go to minihighways populated by other noobs."

The other problem? "It was too repetitive. Once you were past the learning part, you found a bunch of different levels, but they were too similar to one another." To tackle this, the dev team reconfigured into three "strike teams" operating under three lead designers. They broke the game into pieces, and each team was tasked with making its section look "really cool and unique," Brown says. "Each team lead explained, 'Here is what the player is supposed to "get" from this area -- what goal, what story elements, etc. Now make it happen.'" The result? Much more diversity from area to area, right down to the way weather affects the game's fully destructible environment, which could take a beating from, say, constant lightning and rain in some areas. "How [the weather] acts in each section was up to that section's team -- there's no universal rule about how it works," Brown says.