Auto Assault NDA lifted

[Stephen Zepp]

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.

Without going into details I can't talk about anyway, I know of 2 auto-racing/combat games in development for PC's, as well as 2 more in early design stages. Yah yah, I agree, "show us the money", but one of them if it makes it out of design is going to be quite interesting!

[Nija]

Is the first word in the title "Interstate" and is it followed by a number? How about the phrase "Mutant League" - is that mentioned anywhere?

I need something to look forward to.

[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.

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

Without going into details I can't talk about anyway, I know of 2 auto-racing/combat games in development for PC's, as well as 2 more in early design stages. Yah yah, I agree, "show us the money", but one of them if it makes it out of design is going to be quite interesting!

The design doc needs to look like this-

Car Wars

[Furiously]

Step 2. Place camera INSIDE car. Make me feel like I am driving.

They should replace the graphic of the car with a Holly Hobbie Oven, and Call it Oven Wars.  At least then if someone caught you playing your could say because you were baked.

[WayAbvPar]

The more I think about it, the more pissed I am. Car Wars is such a natural for computer gaming. The car design is reasonably complex, and could be made far more so by different grades of components unlockable by skill gains (ala Eve). Have an online proggressive MMOG side, and an arena/deathmatch side where folks could design cars and fight them.

[Stephen Zepp]

I'm taking notes!

[Lt.Dan]

Racing Destruction Set

[WayAbvPar]

I'm taking notes!

If you nail Car Wars the way I see it in my mind's eye, you are welcome to my first born, or any extraneous organs you may need down the road.

Racing Destruction Set

Great game. I was a dumb kid when it was out, so I had a pirated version. I wish now that I would have supported it with my wallet, but that wasn't possible at the time. 

[Stephen Zepp]

BTW, I'm not saying I'm "taking notes" for anything myself or GG is working on, but I may pass along some info to those working on various designs.

Or hell, maybe I will throw a prototype together and see if it's workable!

[Llava]

I really want to have something good to say about this game.

But the best thing I can say is, "Well, maybe there's a fun part that I didn't see during the brief period that I tried playing it."

[HaemishM]

It's biggest problem the one time I played it was that it appeared to consist of driving around in circles trying to keep your target on the moving and small pixels that were your enemy. It had nothing to do with the levels, or the character design or anything. The mechanics were refried monkey ass bad.

If that one bit hasn't changed since the revamp, nothing else they changed will mean shit.

[Sunbury]

I played to L7, L5, L5 as the combat character in each faction over the weekend.

The turret will auto-track the currently selected target, or just mostly aim forward if nothing is selected.

The forward gun just shoots in a foward arc.

I found against most non-vehicle mobs, the best tactic is to get the group barely withing in the forward arc, start shooting, then back up, turning to keep the majority in the arc.  Then hit TAB to pick one out to concentrate the turret on.  As long as your in range the turret will hit it. 

But I found the most critical part was not tactics, but finding the right armor and guns.  Then fighting enemies (even +3 levels) that basically could not damage you.   For fun at L3 I found some good armor, parked my car in a spawn point, taped down the fire key, and went to each lunch and watch some footbal.  I came back 2 hrs later, a level up with a ton of cash and equipment spread around the car.

[Mesozoic]

For fun at L3 I found some good armor, parked my car in a spawn point, taped down the fire key, and went to each lunch and watch some footbal.  I came back 2 hrs later, a level up with a ton of cash and equipment spread around the car.

Maybe the game will ship with a roll of Limited Edition Scotch-brand leveling macros.

[sarius]

BTW, I'm not saying I'm "taking notes" for anything myself or GG is working on, but I may pass along some info to those working on various designs.

Or hell, maybe I will throw a prototype together and see if it's workable!

Bless you!  Now if you could just get SJG to sign off on the project.  Ever since Fallout fell through the cracks I've thought that SJ regretted his stances on "violence" and "gore".

[5150]

Well so much for 'Weekend in the wastelands'....

I was 'fortunate' enough to get a Euro invite to this, downloaded the client and installed it Friday night, then found out the patching was going to take 6 hours (60MB download to a 6GB installed game) fine, I left it running and went to bed (I'll accept that I could have installed it earlier but you never know when your going to find a game that wont let you patch unless you have a valid account...)

Saturday morning I get up, click play and immediately get a 'this program has performed and illegal operation and will be shut down'-type message. I do a quick search of the knowledgebase, see its not supported on XP64 and reboot to my XP32 build

and get exactly the same problem (sidenote, they said the same about Guildwars and I have no issues with that under XP64 - interestingly when I went to use its uninstaller under XP32 it told me I had to uninstall it from XP64...... so its not supported under XP64 but knows when its been installed on it....)

So I hit the forums, nice big sticky thread with 'what to do if it crashes' (or similar) as the title, go through the suggestions, delete the odd file here and there, repatch and...... get exactly the same problem.

So I stick a post on there forums with the full crash log XP wants to send to Microsoft (lol!) and even go so far as to install my new graphics card (kept putting that off) because my old one was just outside the min. spec.

48 hours later about 50 people have read my post, not a single reply, the weekend event is over and I uninstall the large waste of 6GB

Beta [stress] test or advertising stunt? Have to say this is my first bad experience with NCSoft stuff

-edits-
Typos and details

[Miasma]

Six Gigs?  What takes up all that space, are the maps that big or do they have a couple dozen hours worth of car revving mp3s?

[Strazos]

This is shipping? lol

[HaemishM]

Six Gigs?  What takes up all that space, are the maps that big or do they have a couple dozen hours worth of car revving mp3s?

I imagine it's all the decals you can stick on top of your car's chassis... eventually.

I'm glad I haven't redownloaded this game.

[Trippy]

I found against most non-vehicle mobs, the best tactic is to get the group barely withing in the forward arc, start shooting, then back up, turning to keep the majority in the arc.  Then hit TAB to pick one out to concentrate the turret on.  As long as your in range the turret will hit it.

Yup given the brain damaged AI on creatures driving around backwards is/was the best tactic for taking those out. They were supposedly going to be adding rear-facing weapons but I stopped playing after I tried the "revamp" and realized it was just a revamp of the world rather than the gameplay so I don't know if they added those in yet.

[Margalis]

I really don't understand.

The game tested, they realized that people were unhappy with the gameplay, they recognized that and delayed to improve the gameplay - then didn't change the gameplay at all?

Huh?

[Trippy]

I really don't understand.

The game tested, they realized that people were unhappy with the gameplay, they recognized that and delayed to improve the gameplay - then didn't change the gameplay at all?

Huh?

My belief is that NetDevil is simply in way over their heads -- they just don't have the talent and experience to pull this off.

When I first joined the closed beta warning bells immediately started going off when I saw the extremely limited testing schedule (two days a week and only a few hours on those days). Matrix Online had the same extremely limited testing schedule when I joined that closed "beta" and we all know how that game turned out. While there's nothing wrong with having server stability issues during development so that they can't run 24/7 don't call it beta then. If you are that far behind in your schedule that you can't keep your servers up for even 8 hours a day just suck it up and delay the product (which NetDevil/NCSoft eventually did but it's not going to help).

The next serious problem I ran into was the incredibly poor graphics engine they were using for all the towns and cities. It was like they hired some kid right out of school to write the engine the performance was so bad. Then of course you had the ridiculous looking animations while running and jumping around in town (when the graphics lag allowed you to).

And then on top of all that you had the uninspired gameplay which other than the destructive elements was just a graft of traditional fantasy RPG gameplay onto a bland post apocalyptic setting, though granted things do feel faster paced since you are "driving" around in a car. At least MxO tried to be somewhat innovative in their mechanics rather than just copying your typical fantasy MMO, but AA doesn't even make an attempt.

So the revamp didn't actually change the gameplay because they simply don't know how to change it to make it better.

Edit: broke things up into multiple paragraphs

[Shockeye]

I was told by Scott Brown that the reason for the limited testing schedule was to maximize the number of concurrent players. Internally they had a world up 24/7 or close to it but for the outside testers they wanted a system where they could have as many people as possible testing at the same time and a limited schedule was the best way to ensure that.

[WayAbvPar]

I wish they would have taken the other approach- make a fun, compelling game and you won't have to worry about concurrent players.

[Trippy]

I was told by Scott Brown that the reason for the limited testing schedule was to maximize the number of concurrent players. Internally they had a world up 24/7 or close to it but for the outside testers they wanted a system where they could have as many people as possible testing at the same time and a limited schedule was the best way to ensure that.

That's all well and good if server stability was the only thing that needed to be tested but that was certainly not the case way back when and is still not the case now where they still have a limited testing schedule (though the playtest sessions have finally as of two weeks ago been expanded to 24 hours there's still only two a week). And there are other ways of increasing the number of concurrent users without having such a restrictive testing schedule including letting in more beta testers and having special stress test events.

[shiznitz]

More beta testers is such the obvious answer to keeping player count high. Any other excuse is an evasion (or denial?) of the fact that if they invited 100,000 people in the beta, 1/10th would be playing after 20 hours /played.

This should be a 32 v 32 team multiplayer game.

[Shockeye]

4/13/2006 is the release date EB and Gamestop is using.

[Strazos]

All I can say is....

[Llava]

1/10th would be playing after 20 hours /played.

My god.

I can't imagine 1/10th of the people making it to 5 hours /played.  I don't think I even made it to 1 full hour.

But youknowearlybetamaybeitsbetternowblahblah.  I'm not a fan of the genre, but I really wanted this game to kick ass.

I'm going to enter into a self-enforced NDA, barring myself from talking about Auto Assault.

Therefore: 

[Signe]

I was hoping this game would be fun, too... but, well... you know... it wasn't.

[Belce]

I guess I am glad this game never interested me at all.

[Hoax]

If anyone wants to get beta access PA had a banner this morning that might get you in for a weekend.

SUFFER FOR YOUR HOBBY!

[Modern Angel]

And a random guy sums it up.

http://boards.autoassault.com/showflat.php?Cat=&Number=86484&page=0&view=collapsed&sb=5&o=&fpart=1#86484

Note the tenor of most of the posts on the board. I think any chance of reasonable change is gone, gone, gone.

[d4rkj3di]

And a random guy sums it up.

http://boards.autoassault.com/showflat.php?Cat=&Number=86484&page=0&view=collapsed&sb=5&o=&fpart=1#86484

Note the tenor of most of the posts on the board. I think any chance of reasonable change is gone, gone, gone.

Cool link!

"Welcome Snipehunter.

We cannot proceed.
Your account has been banned or locked: No longer with NetDevil"

Were you naughty?

[WayAbvPar]

From the thread-

I utterly love this game. I am trying to get the cash together to preorder it and free up some of my cash to pay the monthly

Obviously all the anti-psychotic drugs this guy needs are cutting into his gaming budget.


I seriously do not understand how anyone could love that game. It is just so fucking mindless and boring. It takes all kinds I guess...

[Modern Angel]

I WANT to love it. I want to so desperately. I like the world. Graphics aren't bad. CARS WITH GUNS! I fire it up once in a blue moon (been in beta for a pretty long while) and I can't play more than fifteen minutes because. it's. just. so. boring.

I don't think I've ever had my heart broken quite as much by a game. Meh... that way lies rehashing of this thread.