Auto Assault Beta Preview
Once upon a weekend dreary, I chanced upon an MMO weak and weary... err me, not the MMO. How can that be so much clearer in Poe's original...
Auto Assault, "The Fastest, Most Destructive MMO Ever!" as the tagline goes, opened it's doors to all (as long as you read Penny-Arcade) for a long weekend Beta at the end of January. Given my fascination with all things vehicular and the art of blowing shit up, I took this as a good opportunity to combine both in one heady cocktail.
Casual v's Hardcore
Other than a few maternal basement dwellers who smell strongly of sweat, pizza and caffinated beverages, everyone seems to agree that the real audience for gaming is in the casual players that want to pickup a game for a couple hours here and there and have some fun, and this seems to be AA's target audience. Everything, barring crafting which I find irritating enough that it's best not talked about, is extremely straight-forward, and it's not the kind of game you're going to forget how to play if you leave it for a couple of weeks.
Unfortunately, one weekend doesn't give you much opportunity to determine if there's anything like a progression towards an "end game". Certainly while I did manage to level my Mutant Champion to 19 there wasn't much I couldn't do solo.
Loot, Loot and More Loot
Just about everything in the environment is destructible and drops loot; inanimate objects like fences, buildings, and roadside signs and lightpoles drop crafting items and NPCs drop everything from replacement engines for your vehicle to harder to find crafting items. The variety of things that drop can be quite bewildering, though at least the inventory system has options to sort by size or type so you have some opportunity to see at a glance what general class of items you have on hand.
Loot is important, as replacing your engine and weapons goes a long way to increasing your destructive capacity. With your newbie engine and pop-gun, you can lay on the autofire button for quite a long time before your weapons overheat, but once you're out in the wider world, the stock weapon has more of an annoyance effect than causing real problems to your enemies. Better engines mean your weapons take longer to overheat (and stop for 10-15 seconds), and better weapons not only mean your target dies faster, but often his whole convoy and anything within range dies as well! In fact, I never found a single target weapon that was close to being worth using versus the 2-3 target spray weapons, and collateral damage in AA is a good thing.
Also, while quest rewards will often be armor and weapons, they usually have a level requirement above your own and there always seems to be better that you can get freely from enemy vehicles out in the wastelands. So though they've avoided the often disappointing problem of getting a quest reward that's several levels below your own, they seemed to have missed by a wide margin in making a level 15 quest weapon better than a level 12 random drop. Armor seems to fair little better here, and I didn't notice any quest rewarded power plants. But, as I'll say later, questing is about leveling and NPC farming is about getting better gear, in quite a reversal of what I'm used to.
There's also quite a lot of cash to be picked up from random enemies around maps. Your first 1000 Clink seems to take a long time to amass, and in fact there's a Medal awarded for collecting that much wealth (Medals are just one of the many similarities between AA and other NCSoft titles like City of Heroes), and blissfully it immediately transforms itself into 1 of the next higher monetary value; scrip if I recall correctly. Cash being a handy intermediary if you want to do some bartering with other players, and lets you buy the necessities of life in the wastelands like new vehicles, crafting services and skills, and junk from vendors, thankfully there doesn't appear to be any food. There's something disturbing about people that think it's fun to make bodily functions a feature in a video game.
Quest and Get Stronger
A common driver in MMOs and RPGs has usually been what I've oft heard described as "kill and get stronger", this is still true in AA, but the real gains are to be made from questing. Sure, you can repeat kill enemies all day if that's what gets your motor running (never fear, a beating will be forthcoming for that dreadful pun), but the guy next to you completing every quest they can find will leave you in the dust level wise, and besides, he'll have access to new areas when you run out of greenies to kill and are forced to do at least a few quests to open the next zone. For example, I recall one quest that required me to talk to 3 or 4 different people in the one town and rewarded experience points at every step, granting me enough exp to complete level 9 in about 5 minutes, which would been a couple hours of killing stuff. An abberation to be sure, but the average quest return for time means that I was catching Hastur's character, which was focusing on NPC killing and loot farming, quite quickly.
The quest system looks squarely aimed at the casuals too; for example there's little chance of not noticing someone who has a quest for you given there's a bright beam of light stretching from a ring at their feet into the heavens that can be seen long before they can. Once you have a quest, the journal tool at the top of the screen makes it pretty clear where you have to go, and if you're within a mile of your target a large arrow points to the nearest enemy needed for your active quest. All this means that the (quite decent) dialogue written for the quest givers is glossed over or ignored, as you'll be led by the nose to complete the quest and get the phat reward, regardless of any ignorance you might try to display. It's great that you don't have to resort to a spoiler web site to complete simple quests or take endless notes and create meticulous maps so you can find NPCs related to your quests, but it does tend to disappoint the more fanatical gamer.
Death, Convoys and BMX Bandits.
One of the first questions a lot of people seem to ask about any new MMO is "what's the death penalty like?". We all know it's inevitable, and everyone seems to have a different idea of how it should work; from the dim dark days of MUDs that gleefully killed you in trap rooms so that your corpse (and hence your equipment) was completely unrecoverable, to WoW's "slap on the wrist and along you go sonny", it does seem to have been a steady reduction of penalty for death. AA isn't about to buck this trend; death means an airlift to the nearest repair station and loss of any current spell buffs. That's it. It's so trivial that unless I was in some remote far-flung corner of the world, I rarely even looked at my health bar, and probably would have just let myself die so I could sell some trash loot at the repair station rather than use up any of the healing potions I'd found as loot.
Another point for the casual gamer there.
There is grouping availble, in the form of Convoys, but at least up to the high newbie levels there wasn't much point in it. Hastur and I tried it once, but we couldn't even seem to work out if the experience was really being shared, and it even seemed like the loot sharing was off or non-existant. Certainly they've been doing some tweaking with this as they progress in development; the official site still says you can have 8 members of a convoy when in fact it's limited to 4 now. The one time I might have appreciated a group was late in the weekend when I had a boss mob that I could damage fairly easily, didn't really do damage to my vehicle very fast, but regenerated damage faster than I could do it.. ugh!
Perhaps if I'd had a convoy someone might have at least been able to pick up the masses of loot that dropped from one of the boss mobs earlier before I'd upgraded my vehicle and loot whoring ability, and I probably wouldn't have had to worry the thing to death by taking 15-20% of it's hitpoints, dying, healing up and snapping at it's heels once more. The image to the right here gives you some idea of the amount of damage I could do to Granby between deaths. I also snapped a pic of the giant loot dump from this fellow, but because it all just drops on the ground and disappears after a couple of minutes, I couldn't tell you if any of it was as disappointing to miss out on.
The physics engine takes some rather amusing liberties with the problem of avatars that should have more in common with turtles than your normal humanoid character; for instance, it's quite difficult to get a vehicle to roll over, and if you do manage it, the thing will magically flip onto it's wheels like a mechano-feline hybrid. But, my rather obscure Nicole Kidman reference comes from the many places on the maps that they've set up jumps, for ummm some reason. Hastur probably spent as much time driving as fast as possible into hills, to see how amusingly he could crash, as actually playing the game. I imagine it would probably afford some quite considerable benefit if there's PvP to come in knowing that your vehicle was capable of some crazy spiderman wall-crawling and air shennanigans to get out of range of your enemy, but at the moment it just seems to be a fun diversion from peon slaughter.
The Washout
Auto Assault is entertaining enough, and different enough, that I'll probably buy the game but only time will tell if I would play it often enough to fork out a monthly fee.