Auto Assault: Shacknews - Preview — 03/08/06

Auto Assault Preview
-- March 6, 2006 by: Chris Remo

My first look at Auto Assault, a vehicular combat MMO, was during E3 2005. At the time, I reflected on the explosive growth of the massively multiplayer genre and wondered how much longer it could continue. World of Warcraft had recently surpassed one million subscribers, a noteworthy sum for the genre to be sure. Ten months later, that growth certainly hasn't slowed. World of Warcraft has just reached six million subscribers, there are current and upcoming film tie-in MMOs, and worldwide publishers such as NCsoft survive entirely on the business of MMOs. Of course, any company putting all of its game eggs into one genre basket has to at least make sure the eggs are of varying shape and color to--okay, well, they need a diverse portfolio, let's just say that. Cryptic Studios' City of Heroes/City of Villains has been the company's biggest success in straying away from the hallowed wizards and warriors fantasy setting that is traditional to the massively multiplayer genre, but developer NetDevil is straying a lot further with Auto Assault. The game has many of the trappings of most MMOs--character progression through levels, crafting, skill trees, quests, instances--but all combat and exploration is done in Mad Maxian armed and armored vehicles.
NetDevil was formed as an MMO-exclusive company in 1997, in the early days of graphical MMO pioneers Meridian 59 and Ultima Online, with the explicit goal of making online RPGs in which the player fights as something other than a standard humanoid avatar. The company's first product was JumpGate, a space sim take on the genre released in 2001. Not long after, work on Auto Assault commenced, and now, a few years later, the game is about to be released. I recently had the opportunity to check out a preview of the game given by NetDevil president Scott Brown, as well as spend some time creating a character and questing in the beta.

One lesson the developers learned from JumpGate is that even if the game is centered around vehicles, many players do want to be able to control something that looks at least vaguely like they do. "Players don't identify with vehicles," Brown explained, "they identify with avatars." Massively multiplayer games are by their nature social; one of the biggest draws of the genre is that all the people running around are, in fact, people. This time around, NetDevil puts the player in the form of a traditional RPG avatar when inside large fortified cities, which are essentially the only places in which no combat could conceivably take place. Everywhere else, it's car-only. The character creation screen offers a pretty good amount of variety: it's more open-ended than World of Warcraft's, but nowhere near the madness of City of Heroes' creation utility. One can modify height, skin/hair/eye color, hair and facial hair style, clothing type and colors, and various accessories. You're also able to choose the initial paint job and name of your vehicle. Of course, that starting car is just one of many you will acquire over the course of the game.

Auto Assault is set on a future post-apocalyptic Earth. Years ago, an alien force sent down contaminants and mindless drones to begin terraforming the planet for their own ends. Like a plague, the contaminant destroyed most that it touched, but some humans managed to survive its contact, developing various physical mutations. Seeing themselves as having been chosen to evolve to the next stage of humanity, the mutants went to war with the humans. Unable to hold their own, humanity outfitted volunteers from their number with cyborg technology, creating the half-human, half-machine Biomeks. However, the Biomeks proved incapable of dealing with the mutant army, and the humans abandoned them. They went deep underground and unleashed the world's stockpile of weapons of mass destruction in an attempt to rid the surface of mutants and Biomeks alike. Decades later, upon emergence, it turned out that both factions were able to survive that apocalypse, and unsurprisingly none were too fond of the others. Humanity sees the Biomeks and mutants as abberations, the Biomeks continues their longstanding war agains the mutants and sees humanity as betrayers, and the mutants believe that only they have the right to survive as the next step in human evolution.

Okay, so what do you actually do?

In many ways, Auto Assault plays like a typical MMO. In order to level up your character, you've got various kinds of quests, such as kill quests, collecting quests, escort quests, delivery quests, and so on. There is one important kind of quest not idiomatic to the genre: blowing stuff up quests. NetDevil wants your immediate surroundings in Auto Assault to be more tactile and responsive than in most other MMOs. In a video game, particularly a post-apocalyptic one, that means destroying things either with various ordnance or simply by crashing through them. You might get a mission that only requires you to wipe out the enemy inhabitants of a particular settlement, but to destroy the actual buildings themselves as well. Almost all foliage, buildings, signs, and other structures found outside of cities can be destroyed in realtime. To that end, Havok physics are also fully integrated into the game. You're not "stuck to the ground" by any means. "We want to be the leader in physics among online games," stressed Brown. It doesn't seem as though there's all that much competition in that arena just yet. You'll launch off jumps, crash through fences, barriers, and buildings, and take collision damage from running into other players. Fortunately, there is no environmental impact damage, so there's really no reason not to be busting through stuff left and right. The game has an Xbox Live-esque set of achievements to earn separate from your actual quests, and to give you an idea of the kind of behavior encouraged here, the first achievement I obtained was to catch five full seconds of air in my car.

Combat in Auto Assault, like many of its other aspects, has fundamental MMO principles at its core but with an action slant. The mouse controls a radial targeting arc extending from your vehicle's turret-mounted weapon, and in order to hit an enemy, they must be either under that arc or within the line of fire of your front- or rear-mounted stationary guns. If this is in fact the case, then the game will do all of its MMO combat business, factoring in stats and determining whether the shots hit and how much damage they do. It is also possible to lock onto a single target and have the turret auto-aim on it while you drive around. The nice thing about this is that you can be a lot crazier than you can in most MMOs. Rather than carefully pulling my target while trying to manage aggro, I just sort of barreled into my targets, locking onto one of them at a time and crashing into the rest while spraying my stationary guns around. The funny thing is, and I didn't really consider this until just now, that was simply what seemed like the obvious thing to do. Even with over a year of World of Warcraft training me to be careful around large groups of enemies in MMOs, in Auto Assault I had no qualms about throwing caution to the wind and going in guns blazing. In a nice touch (and apparently a recent change), player vs. player combat is treated rather different than player vs. enemy combat. In PvP, the action elements--aiming and skillful driving--are greatly played up, while the RPG elements--the dice rolling to hit and damage--are minimized. Rather than having separate PvP and PvE servers, each zone actually has two "layers," a PvP layer and a PvE layer. When on the PvP layer, you'll see everyone else on the PvP layer and it's every man for himself; you might later choose to switch over to the PvE layer if you simply want to finish your quest in peace. In addition to standard faction vs. faction world PvP, players can enter arenas, which pair them up against other players of equal ability. Currently, arena fights are deathmatches, but NetDevil is currently working on adding other gametypes such as capture & hold matches and races. Arena PvP uses a chess-like worldwide ranking system which will be tracked on the Auto Assault website. To make this feasible, arena PvP is not separated by server; when you enter the arena, you can be matched up with any Auto Assault players, regardless of their server. There will also be special scheduled tournaments, possibly on a weekly basis, listed on the site.

There is a full skill system as well, with some skills being specific to your class, and some specific to your race. Each level, you gain one point to allocate to a skill, either learning a new skill or improving an existing one. Some are passive skills that improve statistics, some add new types of attacks and abilities. You know the drill.

It is also possible to divert power to different parts of your vehicle. So if you're traveling, you may decide to cut your offensive power to give more juice to your engine, or if you're entering an area where you're heavily outnumbered you may boost your defense at the expense of your speed. Speaking of traveling, the game has repair pads located in settlements around the world that will recharge your hit points by parking on top of them. Once you've discovered these areas, you can be transported to any of them at any time by calling up an airborne repair ship. This same ship will also automatically take you back to your last visited repair pad if you lose all of your HP, which makes the pads essentially checkpoints.

This Game is Not Full Auto

And, for that matter, Full Auto--a recently released Xbox 360 combat racing title from Pseudo Interactive--is not this game. They are different games. I am including this paragraph merely as a public service announcement which I have deemed necessary based on obliviously confused behavior observed around the internet.

Back to the Preview

Despite being essentially a different skin over the age-old online RPG formula that's been in use since the days of MUDs, Auto Assault does actually succeed in feeling quite different. It is a very active game, in that even typically mundane tasks such as driving from place to place take on more of a playable quality, as you'll be trying to catch air and blow stuff up on your way. In fact, you sort of get to the point where you take blowing stuff up for granted. Contrasting Auto Assault with its fantasy MMO cousins, Brown wondered aloud, "When you shoot a fireball in a forest, does it make a sound?" I'm sorry, he didn't actually say that. What he said was, "When you shoot a fireball in a forest, why doesn't the forest catch fire?" A worthwhile question, to be sure. I am by absolutely no means any kind of MMO connoisseur, but I can say with certainty that at least within my experiences of the genre, I have never seen so many explosions as one might see in a typical commute in Auto Assault. Besides settlements and towns, the highways connecting important locations have an essentially limitless supply of destructible objects, be they crumbling ruins, pieces of scrap metal, trees, barricades, or, yes, good old crates. In case for some bizarre reason you do not feel compelled to blow all that crap up as you speed by it, know that it sometimes contains loot.

The loot system in Auto Assault is somewhat similar to Diablo's. You'll find tons and tons of loot, and items all have randomly generated stats within a certain set range. Actually, that was probably the most overwhelming part of the game when I noticed it. As I said earlier, I wasn't really in hardcore MMO mode since so much of the game, at least in its early stages, has to do with driving around like a crazy person and blowing stuff up. It was a bit of a genre shock when I opened up my inventory to sell my excess junk to a merchant and realized I had accumulated far more engines, weapons, accessories, and crafting materials than I had realized. Furthermore, I had no idea how to even begin using or comparing them. At a loss, I decided to blow up all of the merchant's crates, gather the resulting loot, then sell that stuff to her. Fortunately, she seemed to fall for it.

Still, that was one of the snags I hit in my enjoyment of Auto Assault. It was exacerbated when it led to my discovery of the crafting system, which seems to be quite comprehensive but which is also somewhat incomprehensible to somebody who encounters it without any explanation. I've only logged a few hours in the beta at this point, but I did eventually go out of my way to find out how all that stuff worked. Essentially, you can be trained in various types of crafting/repair: weapons, armor, and engines. The materials you find throughout the world (and you find a lot of them) can be refined into other materials and used to craft practical items. It all makes sense when you go and seek out the trainers who will explain it to you (or if you've played other MMOs with similar systems), but by having all of those systems available right from the beginning, it can be a bit of a shock. It would be nice to see safeguards such as in games like World of Warcraft, which keep those abilities off limits for the first several levels until the player is likely to have learned all of the basic mechanics of the game.

My other concern with Auto Assault is whether the PvE combat system is subtle enough to stand up to hundreds of hours of playtime, which is of course necessary in an MMO. I'm a bit more confident in this than I was at E3 2005, now having been shown some of the highest level content in the game, intended for groups of players in the 60-80 level range. Brown showed off locations such as Ground Zero, which is the epicenter of the alien race's spreading contamination. There's quite a bit going on, with huge insectoid enemies, what appeared to be a huge crashed spacecraft, and tons of extremely difficult enemies. To be honest, it was difficult for me to frame the whole thing in terms of what I'm used to seeing out of high-level MMO content; group members still have to work together and be aware of their own roles in the party, but they still appear to be driving around like banshees and blowing stuff up. I tried my hand at Ground Zero for a few minutes, but it was utterly baffling to me. It must be noted though that, to be fair, I know I would be equally useless given a high level player in a high level encounter in any other MMO, so I'm giving Auto Assault the benefit of the doubt here and assuming it scales up like it should.

Much to my relief, there is in fact a jump button in this game. The designers included it mainly as a way to get unstuck from tight situations; any time a game has a full physics engine, some method of dislodging your character from potentially immobilizing circumstances becomes necessary. By default, it is mapped to the somewhat out of the way "B" key, presumably to imply, "This is not actually a jump button, it is an unstick button, we don't really want you jumping all over the place in your car," and supporting that presumed implication is the fact that there also seems to be some kind of short cooldown after jumping. Regardless, I rebound it to spacebar immediately and have been jumping all over the place in my car unrepentantly. I consider the ability to jump an essentially inalienable right in video games, and no half-hearted attempts at verisimilitude are going to convince me otherwise, especially if it's a game full of heavily armed cars flying through the air.

How it Looks

Auto Assault is not going to be the game that justifies your brand new $500 video card. Like most other MMOs, extra RAM will go a lot further than a higher clock speed on your GPU. I must admit, the starting Biomek city, where my character was created, did not exactly blow my mind. However, as soon as I ventured out onto the game's highways, things improved greatly. The team has added weather effects, and the duststorm I saw was handled very well. On the whole, the environments were very evocative of the post-apocalyptic settings one recalls from Mad Max or (dare I say it) Full Throttle. The game takes the route of attempting confident and cohesive art direction rather than ratcheting up the polygon counts, which at least for me is definitely the right way to go in an MMO. If you're going to be spending days and days of cumulative time in a virtual world, you are guaranteed to become accustomed to whatever the polygon counts are, assuming they are vaguely competent. However, in my experience, elements such as poorly conceived color design or overriding tone are a lot more difficult to ignore.

Brown explained that over the last couple months, NetDevil split up every square inch of the game into small zones, and assigned small "strike teams" to each one. The teams consisted of of a writer, and artist, a programmer, and a designer, who scrutinized their areas to brainstorm for how to make each one more exciting both from a visual perspective and a gameplay perspective. The idea is that since each team was working independently, different areas would end up with different additions, but since they were all working with existing material in some way, the areas would not become too divergent and dissimilar.

Our House, in the Middle of Our Post-Apocalyptic Fortified Shelter

By completing a low-level quest early in the game, every player is given an instanced house within his or her race's city. The interior can be decorated in a variety of ways, and it can serve as an isolated meeting place for party members or friends. It's not a major gameplay feature, it's just a place for players to hand out and customize. As Brown admits, "Some players absolutely love it, some don't care at all." Auto Assault has clan support as well; simply speak with a particular NPC in town, pay a small clan creation fee, and supply a name. I didn't get a chance to toy around with the system that much, but it seems par for the course.

OMG Nerf Preorders

As an incentive to preorder Auto Assault, NCsoft and NetDevil are offering a small loot bonus. Anyone who preorders the game will have a higher chance to get additional stats or attributes on randomly generate loot. It's not a balance-upsetting bonus; it will likely only increase chances by one or two out of a hundred, but as Brown noted, there's a huge amount of loot in this game, so that's enough to make a difference.

Conclusion Assault

It is rather difficult to accurately preview an MMO, especially one with which I have had no actual hands on experience prior to this. Apparently, the game has undergone radical changes over the past two months or so based on beta player feedback, and at this point NetDevil is largely focusing on tweaking and improving what's in the game rather than actually add new content. The content has been set for a while now, so it's just a matter of making sure everything is as refined as possible by launch. However, since I have no personal familiarity with the Auto Assault of several months ago, I am ill-equipped to provide former beta players with specifics on what has been improved. I can say that my personal expectations were actually exceeded by what I've seen and played of Auto Assault. I still hold some concerns over the long term robustness of the combat mechanics, but that is something that, really, is a concern with all MMOs, and at least less worried about it in Auto Assault now than I was previously. In general, my experience with the current version of the game has been very positive. In terms of future additional content, NetDevil plans to develop plenty of additional material for free download in patches, as well as eventual paid expansions, the two-tier content approach taken by most MMOs. "NetDevil only makes MMOs, and NCsoft only publishes MMOs," explained Brown. "We understand that finishing a game and shipping it is hardly finishing. It's just starting."

Auto Assault is currently scheduled to ship this spring for PC.