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What killed it?
Alamor0
Member UncommonPosts: 182
in Auto Assault
I got the 14-day trial and have been thoroughly enjoying this game.
I think driving AND fighting makes it a blast.
So, my big question is: What is it that killed this game?
Does it get worse later?
Does it become repetitive?
What is missing?
Comments
Mass appeal?
When was the last apocalypse type mad max movie? Not enough kids interested probably...
Kiddie graphics that any 12 year old could play.
The game is a major bitch to run, you need a good system.
ALso there are bugs lingering that have been there since day one.
Not enough workforce to deal with it..why?..see line 1 of my reply.
RIP AA SEPTEMBER 1ST.
WHAT IS AUTO ASSAULT?
AUTO ASSAULT 14 DAY TRIAL
..
"It is the nature of herds that they flock to where there are more of the same not more quality."
I just think it's a poorly executed game and not very fun.
Here, read this:
As MMORPG.com readers may or may not know, NCsoft and NetDevil announced today that they will be closing the doors to Auto Assault on August 31st of this year. This afternoon, I had a brief conversation with David Swofford at NCsoft about the decision and what brought this announcement about.
In the end, and this probably doesn't come as a surprise to anyone, it really all came down to low and ebbing numbers. The number of players on the server was small, and it finally reached a point where it didn't make sense to continue.
I think David summed it up best when he said, "What we were putting in, we weren't getting back".
I tried it and it played just like a cheap console video game, not an MMORPG that is worth a monthly fee.
"Don't corpse-camp that idea. Its never gonna rez"
Bladezz (The Guild)
Its a shame tbh, the game was fun imo, and it had a lot of potential. I wasnt there at day one. I tried the game and took it at face value. I found it to be unique and interesting. RIP AA
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Yeh thats what I said.
Due to lack of KIDDIE GRAPHICS & GAMEPLAY, there was insufficient funding for enough of a DEv team to fix the game let alone advertise it.
Your opinion. Many who were paying a monthly fee will disagree with it.
WHAT IS AUTO ASSAULT?
AUTO ASSAULT 14 DAY TRIAL
..
"It is the nature of herds that they flock to where there are more of the same not more quality."
auto assault suffered from the same thing as swg. incompetent developers who refused to add new content and re-wrote the game every two months and forced their playerbase to re-learn the game. you cannot force
crappy korean grindy content on a western playerbase and that seemed to be
the extent of aa dev knowledge. you know a game is in trouble when the team making it DOESN"T ENJOY PLAYING IT. yes they had to schedule time for the team to play it because nobody wanted to.
this being said i'm glad i played because my clan was born in aa and i couldn't imagine not gaming with the friends i made there.
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Your claim that they refused to add new content is unfounded, though - they showed us plenty of screenshots, made plenty of talk. I don't think they refused to add new content, I think they couldn't afford to. NCSoft was already writing them off and laying off the support staff, how likely is it that NCSoft would have kicked money to the devs for more content, at that point? Not bloody likely, at all. I think it comes down to business - fixes and patches to the game (ongoing support) were probably covered by the original contract between ND and NCSoft while expansion (content additions) was not. At that point ND (the devs) are forced to either do nothing but support (slipping in the occassional content *for free* when they can), or do nothing at all. The sad truth - and a bigger problem industry wide - is that AA is not ND's game, it's NCSoft's and NCSoft *never* had any interesting doing anything with it... at least that's how it appears from the consumer side. Who knows what really happened behind the scenes...
But regardless, ascribing negative qualities to the devs serves no purpose and distracts from the primary discussion (what killed it) - I agree that lack of content and constant balance changes help to kill it, I disagree that anyone "refused" to do anything... other than spend more money than they already had (Which also played a huge part in killing it, but wasn't the *devs* at all).
i though it smelled like an earth and beyond when i played this game. it was a fun casual game. i could not see myself getting to end game content. there was just not enough people after beta. was it me or did it seem like a 50% pop drop after beta? anyway, im sure someone will emulate it like E&B.
What killed it was the repetitive nature of the game and the lack of a single player option. A nice big single player campaign or two would probably have given more people a reason to buy it. As it is every mission seemed to end up with killing a monster or driving around in circles trying to kill another car. So much more could have been done. For example, the only time you're on foot is in the cities. Imagine if you could get out of the vehicle in the wasteland or get out of your burning wreck. You could have weapons and shoot it out FPS style, maybe even let you have traps or weapons that would allow you to capture other cars. But hey maybe if they release a developer kit and/or source code those are mods that could come in the future. I just hope the developers of this game don't let it sit and rot just because they failed at giving enough people and experience worth $14.95 a month.
Shadow-Phax
Or are you saying that this is something we should expect from every MMO, now that Conan is doing it? I hope not. I don't think I'd want to play WoW single player... The game is thin soup as it is, take away the naked dancing gnomes and endless gold-farming spam and I'm not sure there's any game left...
You could not be more of a moron.
What killed this game was Lofty expectations and lousy follow-through.
They expected 40k Peak subscribers(not just subscribers). WTF?
They expected it after roll out. When they flocked up the launch(bugs,bugs,bugs), and those people turned out to be be 5k, well, NC wrote the game off.
There went the marketing for the game. And they could only keep the regularly scheduled updates. EVERY 3 MONTHS. Well, with amount of bugs/skill balance issues. That was not quick enough.
Marketing money came from the current player base, and as that dwindled, less marketing. It was in a death-spiral.
Unfortunately, it was a good game, that had high expectations, and a Big budget to match. Unfortunately, it was "Gigli" movie performance in the box office.
Don't buy the hype. The devs didn't see much of that supposedly large sum that NC claims it spent on the game. It was a tiny team on a shoestring budget working in a state with a very low cost of living that made the game. I'm not saying NC didn't spend the 44 million they claim, simply that whatever they spent that money on, the bulk of it wasn't spent on development. Fire dancers for the E3 booth maybe... That probably came out of the AA budget.
The main problem with AA was that it got old after a while due to the content. It was mostly quest based and the quests were the standard generic quests.
The content did not have much flow. You wound up going to the same places and driving around and kind of doing the same thing. Maybe you clicked on something and killed scavs or just killed scavs until you got drops.
It was well executed, supported well, fun to play for those who liked the playstyle, it had some cool instances with cool bosses. Its only real failing was failing to lead the players into an immersive and flowing game experience. Basicaly you went from zone 1 to zone 2 and drove around did a lot of grinding while having 15 missions in your mission log. It never hung together in a narritive or spice things up somehow.
CoX is kind of like that with its mission system, but you can make up for it by grouping and getting interesting larger spawns.
This is why WoW is successfil and it is why AA failed. Would AA have had millions of subs I dunno, it was a little different. But if you aren't making a sandbox game then you need to make the quests send people on adventures not grinds.
That is what makes or breaks MMOs.
AA had all sorts of innovative features it was a lot of fun, but after a while even the people who liked would say, "You know what I am just kind of tired of doing missions I can't really justify the sub."
You get people complaining about all sorts of silly things, like I want to get out of the car or I can't deal with having a car as an avatar. That is just the typical BS noise from the perpetuial complainers. It was the overall content that was the real problem, I am quite confident AA would have grown if the content had had a better overall direction. Even the missions themselves were good. No individual piece was really lacking, it was the overall direction.
I mean Backfire was great. A fun quest and love how it just killed people without warning, but in the end you usually just kind of wound up going to the east side of the zone for 2 level then the north side for 2 levels and after a while just stopped even reading the mission text.
Content wise it just never quite put the pieces together. It was like a converstaion with uncomfortable pauses or goes on too long about one subject without switching to something else to keep the interest. People get bored and find someone else to talk to.
NCSoft killed it.
If MXO can live under the umbrella of the Sony Station Pass, so can AA live under some similar arrangement through NCSoft. But they adamantly (and in my opinion, stupidly) refuse to allow such a concept to take root.
They'll come to regret that decision, and I also think that AA will live again in some other fashion.
NCSofts games are far superior than SOEs stable (on the whole) thus they don't have the need to create a package pass.
I too think we will see similar games to AA in the future. Most likely on console. Personally, I think AA is a good game, and could have done well, but was simply a victim of bad timing. The market wasn't ready. AA could (and in some form, will) do well on a console. The time will come when NCSoft regrets cutting this game lose. Fortunetly, NetDevil owns the code (not the actual ip as I understand it) so a spiritual successor is likely at the very least.
I really rather enjoyed Auto Assault for the first month or two, but the big two problems I had with it were the same big two problems I have with every MMO: I don't enjoy raiding, and I don't enjoy PvP. As much as my "type" of player is hated on most forums, I'm a soloing PvE player. Berate it, question it, analyze it however you like, that's where I find my fun. As such, I had a lot of fun all the way up to Ground Zero, and then it was over. Unfortunately for Net Devil and NCSoft, it took very, very little time to reach that point. There were certainly other areas that could've been improved, and I think some of them were, but by then it was already too late in my case. Still, it's a shame the game is closing down. It was a good idea with an unconventional theme, and every time someone does something "different" and fails, it pushes designers (or at least investors) more in the direction of being "safe." "Safe," unfortunately, usually means "the same as everything else," which is not what I'm looking for.
I heard this game was super fun if you try to join it now....
What killed it was probably the unfinished game launch. When it first launched the game was horrid - the beta game was aweful - in fact I still have my $5 pre-order copy at the store - never picked it up after playing the beta.
Like I said, sounds like this game is a victom of too little too late syndrome.
I think the reason was much more basic. Movements and control, the most fundamental elements of any game.
Single player console games can get away with sub-par movement mechanics, gamers are more willing to struggle with them. But an online game where you're paying every month, not so much.
I hated AA's movement mechanics, the physics and the feel of the controls. The cars felt like a combination of a balloon half-filled with helium and a shopping cart with a rickety wheel. When it's annoying simply trying to move your character around, all the other features of a game don't really matter.
I beleive if auto assault was like guild wars buy the game and free to paly. it would of done alot better. Thats one of those games that would be nice free to paly but not worth the monthly fee sadly.
Still its sad to see it go.
um.. lets all play upshift strike racer since its free and the closet thing to this game thats free and try to remember your happy auto assualt moments.. it will make some of the pain go away trust me
Not read all replies, so please excuse any repeat.
It is very sad for the fans when any MMO closes and i have experienced it myself with 'Earth & Beyond' a while back.
I tried Auto assault on trial not long after one of it's first updates and to me it was a game that was never going to go to far. Needed major power machine to run at decent speed, the first missions seemed pretty pointless, combat was pot luck at best and there was a major lack of direction. All that being said it has obviously built a small dedicated base of players and my heart goes out to them for losing 'their' game.
It must be Thursday, i never could get the hang of Thursdays.
AA never died, because it never lived in the first place.
?
AA felt more like an arcade game to me. I totally agree with the previous poster and the controls and feel of movement.
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