NetDevil President Scott Brown's E3 Q&A

From E3: Plans to Tune Up Auto Assault

by Jeff Woleslagle

So ever since a certain 12K pound elephant entered our happy little massively multiplayer niche of videogaming (we won't mention names, but said game involves murlocs and now draenei ), accurate sales and subscriber numbers have been hard to come by. But any gamer that loves what NetDevil's done with Auto Assault also hates logging on to see the four North American servers at "low" or "very low" population (my pleas for Scott Brown to substitute "low" and "very low" with fun snippets like "Norris vs. Diesel Nightly" or "Now With XXX Drive-Thru" fell on deaf ears). While there's little worse than a fanboy editor, I don't apologize for liking the game or giving it a positive "First Glimpse" review, and to prevent an epidemic of World of Warcraft-clones (ok, I said it), I wouldn't mind seeing experimental concepts like this do well.

With that in mind, I chatted briefly with Scott "Scorch" Brown, President of NetDevil at NCSoft's E3 developer "speed dating" event (no, really; you sit down for a few minutes with several prominent NCSoft developers as they wend their way from table to table). The good news: a chance to respec your abilities, the auction house, and several nice amenities are coming soon; the bad news... you don't get a second chance to make a first impression, and in-town animations aren't likely to see much improvement (if improvement is even needed, bah).

My first question was for his rundown of Update 1, since I haven't gotten a chance to read the press release between the E3 hall crawl and chasing the booth babes: "It's new missions to fill in a lot of the level gaps that players found. Like, 'oh, this level range doesn't have quite enough missions,' so we've added a lot of missions for that. New tricks and trims, some of the trims are really cool. I really like respec, that's the thing I desperately wanted, so now that's in the game. You just don't know until you play, you play differently so the skill doesn't work for you. I can't believe we launched without that, but it's in there now. That's the beauty of an MMO, right? Your never really done."

I'm not sure the "fix it while people are paying to use it" approach flies nowadays; the patient, ruggedized beta types of yore are no longer a numerically significant part of the total MMO population. The burgeoning console gamer segment want a spit and polish MMO launch that they find in their hermetically sealed console games, and have trouble with the concept of pay to play subscriptions in general. Anyway, moving right along.

The subject of convoys (Auto Assault's take on grouped play) came up. Scott Brown is nothing if not honest: "This could be my biggest mistake in making the game. I mostly like to play alone, but I like to be in a world of other people, which is one thing people don't understand. They ask me, 'Why are you making an MMO?' They don't understand; I want to be in a world with other people. But I like to be able to play alone. So we built the game with that mindset. But the problem is I think that some of the community stuff has suffered. One of the big things we're working on now are ways to help you feel like it's more of a world. Ways to make grouping easier, ways to make grouping more advantageous. So if you want to group, great! Here's your rewards for grouping. Simple stuff, like if you're a mutant, there's this thing called the Trials of Ascension. You go through, and you level up your character and you gain these ranks.

The only discernable complaint among the more knowledgable reviews was the improbable, choppy in-town character animations. Scott said this: "We get beaten to death for that. To be honest, maybe we're too close to the game, but I don't see what's wrong with it. It's never constructive enough, like 'it's because of this and this that I don't like it.'" I noticed it, but to me the core of the game is so far away from those animations that I appreciated it for what it was, the first time a vehicle-based MMO (the other being EVE Online and a few early sci-fi efforts) let you out to stretch your legs.

"What we're going to do now; so if someone achieves warrior status, tell everybody. It gives you a sense that there's other stuff happening in this game; it's not just you, even though it might feel like it is. And other things like, if you do a cool mission, add one more leg to the mission which requires you to come back to town, you speak to the guy, fireworks go off, other cool stuff happens, and people go 'oh, hey, he just did that mission.' It maybe gives everybody a buff for a little while. That's the kind of stuff we're working on; we want reinforce that there's other people in the game and that there's other stuff going on." So worldy is good, I like that.

Everybody loves getting a new car, well, until you have to pay for it. I asked Brown why I never seem to be able to afford a decent upgrade to my chassis. After some initial comments on how the market might need tweaking, he loosed these gems of chassis-collecting information: "One of the things we're doing in the short term is giving you a different car as a reward pretty early along. There's a lot of players that come in and play and never get another car. You need to know that this car isn't you, you're going to own a ton of different cars. Another really cool idea they're talking about right now which I think is going to make it in fairly soon is a test drive track. You can car shop and pick the car and go test drive. It'll pop you off in another map and you can cruise around and see if you like how it handles." They won't even require proof of insurance, I hear.

All this is well and good, but my inventory's bursting with valuable stuff I can't use. If I could sell it... /bites_pinky. Brown reveals that an auction house is definitely in the works. "The big thing that's on the list is the auction house. It kills me that it's not in the game. [Crafting] is built for it, and so is random loot. I just love that kind of loot. So you find all this cool stuff, and if you don't want it, you can always pawn it off to the auction house."

Brown has done dozens of interviews for the player community in the months of delay prior to launch, so there's no doubt he and NetDevil are all about the playerbase. But you don't need to take my word for it: "My opinion on a lot of things is that I think I know what I'm doing, I think I have some pretty good ideas. But in the end, my opinion doesn't matter. Whether I think something is fun or no is irrelevant. It's whether the players think it's fun or not.

"Nobody holds back on the boards, they'll let you know, and not always so constructively, which is hard to work with. Most people at work read the forums. I like to know what people are thinking, I like to know what the main issues are. NCSoft puts together these nice lists for us whenever anyone does /bug or /suggest and what's going through there and prioritizes this for us. This and this, you know, 32 people complained about this bug or whatever. That gets sent to everyone at the office, so we have a pretty good system for that." It's always good to be heard.

Whatever your feelings on Auto Assault, Scott Brown and other folks I've met at NetDevil qualify as some of the nicest, most forthcoming folks you're likely to meet in the industry. They love their game, and it sounds like they have some interesting things planned for Auto Assault.