Interview with Scott Brown of NetDevil - Part 2

Editor's note: This is the second of a two-part series exploring NCsoft's recent release, Auto Assault, with NetDevil president Scott "Scorch" Brown. Part 1 may be found here.

Different doesn't always mean better. In the case of Auto Assault, the newest release from NCsoft and NetDevil, different means explosive. Inventive. Fast. Destructive. Just plain fun.

Set in a post-apocalyptic future where humanity has fractured into three distinct factions, struggling for life, liberty and limited resources amid the ruins of a nuclear holocaust resulting from pandemic mutation, a touch of alien invasion and a resulting civil war, Auto Assault puts players in the driver's seat of various combat-ready vehicles, from cars to motorcycles, pickups to semis and even tanks, and throws them straight into the front lines.

Suddenly, "morning commute" takes on a whole new meaning.

"I think this is the next evolution in gaming," said NetDevil president Scott Brown. "We're bringing action to the [massively multiplayer online roleplaying game]."

And bringing it at a speed unheard of in more traditional MMORPGs. Everything in Auto Assault is geared toward speed, keeping players in the action rather than in the garage. Downtime is almost unheard of and there's always something that needs blowing up.

While that's exactly what Brown and his pit crew were after, it can sometimes overshadow other just as important elements.

"I think one of the things that people don't tend to realize about Auto Assault is that it's a full-featured MMORPG," Brown said. "There's character advancement, there's leveling, there's quests, there's crafting, there's housing, there's clans.

"All of the things you find in other MMORPGs are a part of Auto Assault as well. Just because it's action, I think people kind of assume there's a lack of depth or long-term gameplay, but that's not the case. There are thousands of hand-crafted missions in the game as well that all tell a pretty cool story."

At the heart of that story is the splintering of the human race following a chain of events including contaminated meteors, an alien scout ship and a civil war that resulted in a nuclear holocaust. The end result? Three distinct races known as Humans, Mutants and Bio-Meks, each with their own strongholds, technology, culture and reasons to hate, using tricked-out vehicles as weapons. (One can only assume the rest of the aliens took a good look and went elsewhere.)

"One of the things we've done is, we have different design teams for each of the races and they all bring their own kind of unique style to the game," Brown said. "There's a lot of replayability in trying one race as opposed to another."

Humans, the pure bloods, are the descendants of those who went underground to avoid the contamination on the surface. Mutants are the descendants of those infected by the contamination and the Bio-Meks are evolved cybernetic soldiers, originally developed to defend Humans against the Mutants and left behind when the Humans retreated to their underground Arks.

With all these factions, a fight is almost a sure thing.

"We've got two really different kinds of [player vs. player combat] in the game," Brown said. "One is a kind of free-for-all PvP that takes place on some of our higher-level highway maps where you have things like obelisks and outposts you can try to capture and earn rewards you can only get through PvP.

"The other is our PvP arena system. Like a lot of first-person shooters, we have online rankings where you can see how you rank versus all the other players. It's more for setting up even matches and then playing for rank against all the other players. The other thing about our RP system is that it's serverless, so no matter what server you're playing on, you're playing against all the other players on all the other servers."

And outside of the arena, off the beaten path - or sometimes in the middle of the road - players can find plenty of player-vs.-environment action - with one big difference. In other MMORPGs, PvE just means fighting NPCs, animals and the like. In Auto Assault, PvE is just that, featuring a fully destructible environment - trees, buildings and old highway signs are all fair game (but watch out for propane tanks).

"It's not just for fun," Brown said. "A lot of the time, what you need for crafting can only be found in the wreckage of the environment."

Like the loot system, the crafting system also uses a dynamic generator, which allows players to create unique items.

"We really had two different goals for the crafting system," Brown said. "One was, we didn't want crafting to feel like your progression as a crafter is the same as everyone else. We wanted everyone's progression to be sort of unique and in the end, with the dynamic generator, you could craft items that are really unique.

"The other thing that we tried to do was to sort of protect the new crafter. Often, in a lot of MMOs right after launch, you get your first wave of crafters and they can sort of build everything. It becomes sort of difficult for someone to come into the game later as a new crafter and be competitive with the other people that are already out there. So, while you can memorize items, there's a limit to how many you can memorize. The goal is that, as you level up your character, you're going to want to memorize better and better objects."

Better weapons, armor and other items useful in a three-way war.