Auto Assault NDA lifted

[Yoru]

I want to cruise the wasteland, fighting and scrabbling for my own survival while trying to take over Bartertown.

I don't want to play WoW in cars.

Until they fix the latter part, I ain't reinstalling.

[HaemishM]

If it was WoW in cars, it'd at least be mildly fun.

No, it's EQ in cars, in that it's not even fun.

[Strazos]

I say you share your DDO account with certain people so that we may compare. 

[HaemishM]

No.

[Llava]

I think it's time to make this forum go POOF.

BUT LOOK AT ALL THE ACTIVITY!

[Sky]

I think it's time to make this game go POOF.

[ClydeJr]

http://boards.autoassault.com/showflat.php?Cat=&Number=50519&page=0&view=collapsed&sb=5&o=&fpart=1#50519

The Auto Assault team is pleased to announce that our Non-Disclosure Agreement has now been lifted, giving beta community members an opportunity to publicly share their opinions about the game, not only through posts on our public message board and your favorite forums across the internet, but also with screenshots and player-made videos. Watch for their comments and see what all the excitement is about, then head over to MMORPG.com to see how you can participate in our big beta weekend event starting Friday, January 13.

I've gotten back into playing Auto Assault for the past few weeks. Here are my thoughts:

The Good:

• If you like blowing stuff up, this is your game. Almost everything in the game can be destroyed if you apply enough force. Trees, telephone poles, guardrails, buildings, and creepy mutant creatures can all be poked, prodded, shot, fried, zapped, and ran over. Nothing is more fun than just plowing through a huge settlement and running everything over in your path. If you hit a person at high enough speeds, they'll explode in a big bloody mess.
• Anything you destroy has the chance to drop some sort of item. You can get items that buff or heal, paintcans to color your car, weapons/armor/powerplants/etc to add to your car, and broker weapons/armor/powerplants/etc and components for crafters. Your vehicle can be outfitted with a front weapon, a turret weapon, a melee ramming weapon, and a rear weapon. They've got rifles, machine guns, flamethrowers, flechettes, missile launchers, and mine layers. Each weapon builds up heat in your car so you can't just run around the whole time firing. You'll overheat and become a sitting duck.

The Bad:

• If you like to do other things besides blowing stuff up, there's not much to do. Besides arr-peeing, the only other thing to do is to be a crafter.
• Some people are tired of class based level systems. Each race has a Warrior Class, a Healer/Buffer Class, a Pet Class, and a Rogue Class.
• Combat can get pretty monotonous at times. You end up doing a lot of driving in circles or backing up while shooting.
• The inventory manangement system is a pain. You've got ton of little items in your inventory and you have to figure out what the hell to do with them all. Since almost everything drops some sort of item, you end up picking up craploads of stuff. If you're a crafter, great. If not, you have to get rid of it somehow or else it will fill up your inventory and you won't be able to pick up the Laser of Whoop Ass. While there are plans in the future for some sort of auction house, nothing exists right now.
• The game is rough on lower end systems. If you plow through a whole bunch of stuff, you'll have items flying through the air everywhere. My nvidia Ti4600 would often slow to a snail's pace and then crawl into a corner to cry.

The Ugly:

• While the BioMek race's mission are pretty well balanced, the Human and Mutant missions are all over the place. I was getting missions that were sending me to kill things 4+ levels higher than me. There are gaps between certain level where you don't get any missions of those levels. You either have to try a mission that pretty much suicide or else you have to go grind somewhere. There are also quite a few bugged missions that just don't work.
• Crafting is pretty screwed up at the moment. The crafting tree is incredibly steep. In order to move to the next tier of crafting, you have to be able to craft lvl 50 items in the first tier. Then you go back to crafting lvl 1 items again.

[schild]

Touche.

[Wolf]

While I'll admit most of the hate I got for AA can be traced back to the limited beta test. I'm from Eastern Europe, my timezone is GMT+2. In the US beta I had to stay up to 2AM in the morning to play around for 15 minutes and hurry to bed so I can go to work the next day, the EU beta was a bit better, but getting more than 2 hours at a time, once a week (if that) was a pain. And as Clyde said the game is a bit heavy so I got pretty low frame rates.  My biggest character was level 7 or something. I find it hard to put my finger on stuff I didn't like, but I'll defiantly not be picking this up when it releases. And this is coming from a serious Fallout junkie. Can't someone just make Fallout: Online and be done with it? That game was a serious disappointment for me. I'll probably give it another shot about a month before release, but as it stands now I don't like it.

edit: In "but I'll defiantly not be picking this up when it releases" i wanted to say definatly, but the spell checker changed it to that and I'm leaving it :P

[WayAbvPar]

Note- I haven't played since the very early beta, so take my comments with a grain of salt.

I played AA for about 15 minutes total. I fucking hated it. They had an opportunity to do something really different and fun, and instead made EQ/WoW in cars. Fuck that. If they would have made Car Wars Online, I would be happily playing it for months, and probably have multiple accounts.

I was SO excited to be among the first in the beta, and SO disappointed when I saw what direction things were going. Very similar to my SWG beta experience in that respect.

[Hoax]

Fun has not been patched in eh?  What a surprise...

 

My sig may indeed be bad luck...

[schild]

So help me god if Supreme Commander and Hellgate: London are bad I'll be turned off PC Games forever.

And I will lodge sharp things in your throat.

[Sky]

Heh. Unlock that beta forum :P

[Furiously]

I'm surprised they lifted the NDA. I would have kept it in place past release. I can't see much good word of mouth coming from beta testers.

[Nija]

This game was incredibly bad. I've not played in a few months, which is a saying that you should get used to hearing, but here's what it was then.

You'd be in town as your dude. I don't remember how much you could customize him or whatever, but you were 3rd person in this awkwardly animated junkyard type town. You wandered around and got quests from people, which were 'kill 20 of these' or 'go here and talk to this dude'. Then you'd leave town and you'd be in your CAR/TANK thing.

Combat in the game involved using the mouse to spin your turret around and the keyboard to move the car. Now, this sounds kind of cool in practice, but it definately was not.

You'd start with a gun that had about a 30 meter range and the "spread" was about 40 degrees or so, forward. So you'd spin the mouse around and get some bad dudes within that 40 degrees and click the left mouse and hold it. Then you'd autoattack in that direction, machinegun fire going all over, and you'd drive around trying to keep this 40 degree BLANKET OF FIRE on the bad guy.

Then you had guns that you could mount on the front and on the rear of your car that fired only in those directions. Apparently later they added ramming devices, but I never saw it.

I GUESS there were 'special attacks' which were hit 1-0 to select one, then right click to use. You'd be chaingunning shit then you'd hit 1 and right click and you'd fire glowing blue rounds for a few seconds. ZAP POW THIS IS GREAT!

Being able to destroy shit wasn't even that grand. You'd run into a little cardboard building (nothing in this game looks solid, or even remotely real.) and it would fold in on itself. Then you could back up about 50 yards, spin your turret around a few times, then drive forward and it would be reconstructed.

The AI, haha, there were some gems. There were these mushroom things that hung out by TOXIC PONDS or some retarded shit, and they had SUPER SHORT RANGE and blew up and injured stuff near them. Thing is, their range is like 20m, and THE SECOND YOU SPAWN INTO THE GAME you have a range of 30m. So if you knew this, for awhile at least, (I hope they fixed it) you'd just have to roll out into the wilderness, avoiding the gang dudes, and find some high level mushrooms. Cause you could hit them, and they wouldn't touch you.

Then you had the gang dudes who had speederbike type things and often travelled in convoys. You'd see them bumping into each other and running into obstacles. One guy at full throttle going right into a rock, but he's at a 5 degree angle so he's slowly moving to the left. Another guy going full throttle right into his fucking kickstand. Physics? Did the guy move him sideways? Hell no, this is a mass multiplayer game we can't concentrate on stuff like that!

Last I played it was when they took the game down for that "break" while they tried to figure out how to make it fun. From what I hear (friend gave me an account, and I think he signed back in to see the painful changes) they totally changed the combat system so you don't even get to spin your turret now. You hit tab to lock some target then either press a key to fire, or hold it down to fire.

Anyways, I can't even remember who worked on this game but I look forward to their future failures. This is going to be an AO-quality launch disaster, with even less content and a world that's not even a tenth as interesting as AO.

[Krakrok]

This makes me sad. The post "add fun" preview I read said they ramped up the graphics but the gameplay is the same as ever.

[shiznitz]

I tried to play this twice, before and after the beta "revamp". Why did they put levels in this game? Why is this an MMOG? I can imagine AA as a really fun 32 versus 32 multiplayer team game. There is no way to coordinate with others during combat other than Teamspeak since typing anything meant your vehicle was standing still or autodriving in a single direction.

I made it to level 3 once. Killing things just involved holding down the trigger and driving in circles until your gun overheated.

The destructible terrain was fun. I didn't get tired of it during the combined 3 hours I /played.

[Furiously]

It just amazed me that the only people to survive the nukes were nascar fans.

[Venkman]

It's not a bad game, but lacks in almost any area that would drive longevity in my opinion. It's a fun activity set in a niche environment with niche motivations, at odds with what's driving the success of the genre. I hope the AA has scaled their business plan for 150k or so subscribers, because I doubt they'll plateau much above that.

Their use of Havok physics makes for all sorts of fun, but it's fun in a CoH sort of way for most: get in, have a great time blowing stuff up, get out and go play something with depth. AA will have its adherants just as all games do though, so I'm sure if I ever say that again, someone will flame me.

Finally, their theme is what I also think will keep them nichey. Not that all games need to be Tolkien ripoffs, but cyberpunk has similarly been way overdone, and it's nowhere near popular enough in MMOGs to build a whole new game around. I long for some serious sci-fi to replace this "let's use sci-fi for BFGs!1!!1"

[Mesozoic]

Is there any compelling reason to pay a monthly fee?  Are the persistent aspects of the game meaningful and integral to the gameplay? 

[Flood]

Well this thread bums me out.   :-(

I admit that I am part of the niche "sci-fi" fanbase.  I love cyberpunk, steampunk, shadowrun, mechwarrior type schtuff.  I actually just like any "fantastical" type genre. 

That being said I was really excited about AA.  I played AO for a good bit, from launch until something pulled me away from it.  (Probably AC1 again).  Aside from the steeeeep learning curve and nuketacular launch I can say I really liked AO and thought it was the one of the better MMO's out at the time. 

I was hoping against hope that AA might be similar enough to AO that I would enjoy it.  And the old "Car Wars" theme makes me nostalgic for my younger days playing with my friends.  I like reading everyone's opinions here but man the anticipation/disappointment rollercoaster for the MMORPG scene is burning me out.  I have even had a couple PM's from folks that were in the Beta telling me to not get too excited.



I will hold out hope that AA will be interesting to me but so far this thread makes me /sadf about AA's actual play.

 

[Venkman]

I like reading everyone's opinions here but man the anticipation/disappointment rollercoaster for the MMORPG scene is burning me out.

That's definitely an issue. But sometimes a game just isn't fun for a certain group of people. I wouldn't write off AA for yourself anymore than I'd write off SWG or CoV for others. I also would push people to try and wait for a free trial period though, with a free download :)

Betas are already allowing people to do that, but they're cagey about who they allow in.

[Lt.Dan]

Betas are already allowing people to do that, but they're cagey about who they allow in.

Like open invitation to Fileplanet or IGN members?   

[Sky]

Seriously, open the beta forum and let people see how much we've been buzzing over this gem.

[schild]

Seriously, open the beta forum and let people see how much we've been buzzing over this gem.

WHAT FORUM?

[Shockeye]

I merged the two threads from the beta board together and merged that new thread with this NDA lifted one.

[schild]

This thread is super funny now.

[WayAbvPar]

This thread is super funny now.

It should be titled "AA- A Timeline of Suck".

[schild]

You know, it's a shame. They went back and redid so much and it still turned out to be....meh. It just wasn't meant to be I suppose.

[WayAbvPar]

The real tragedy is that no publisher in their right mind will fund a car combat game now, so even a single player Car Wars/Autoduel game is probably a pipe dream. That fucking sucks.

[schild]

The real tragedy is that no publisher in their right mind will fund a car combat game now, so even a single player Car Wars/Autoduel game is probably a pipe dream. That fucking sucks.

Full Auto for the 360. Car combat just won't appear on PCs now. It's till alive and well on consoles.

[WayAbvPar]

Consoles aren't real games.

[Sky]

I merged the two threads from the beta board together and merged that new thread with this NDA lifted one.

What were we to do on your feet again?

[Shockeye]

I merged the two threads from the beta board together and merged that new thread with this NDA lifted one.

What were we to do on your feet again?

Place comfortable shoes on them?

[Sky]

Is that what the kids are calling it these days?