My first look at Auto Assault, a vehicular combat MMO, was during E3 2005. At the time, I reflected on the explosive growth of the massively multiplayer genre and wondered how much longer it could continue. World of Warcraft had recently surpassed one million subscribers, a noteworthy sum for the genre to be sure. Ten months later, that growth certainly hasn't slowed. World of Warcraft has just reached six million subscribers, there are current and upcoming film tie-in MMOs, and worldwide publishers such as NCsoft survive entirely on the business of MMOs. Of course, any company putting all of its game eggs into one genre basket has to at least make sure the eggs are of varying shape and color to--okay, well, they need a diverse portfolio, let's just say that. Cryptic Studios' City of Heroes/City of Villains has been the company's biggest success in straying away from the hallowed wizards and warriors fantasy setting that is traditional to the massively multiplayer genre, but developer NetDevil is straying a lot further with Auto Assault. The game has many of the trappings of most MMOs--character progression through levels, crafting, skill trees, quests, instances--but all combat and exploration is done in Mad Maxian armed and armored vehicles.

NetDevil was formed as an MMO-exclusive company in 1997, in the early days of graphical MMO pioneers Meridian 59 and Ultima Online, with the explicit goal of making online RPGs in which the player fights as something other than a standard humanoid avatar. The company's first product was JumpGate, a space sim take on the genre released in 2001. Not long after, work on Auto Assault commenced, and now, a few years later, the game is about to be released. I recently had the opportunity to check out a preview of the game given by NetDevil president Scott Brown, as well as spend some time creating a character and questing in the beta.

One lesson the developers learned from JumpGate is that even if the game is centered around vehicles, many players do want to be able to control something that looks at least vaguely like they do. "Players don't identify with vehicles," Brown explained, "they identify with avatars." Massively multiplayer games are by their nature social; one of the biggest draws of the genre is that all the people running around are, in fact, people. This time around, NetDevil puts the player in the form of a traditional RPG avatar when inside large fortified cities, which are essentially the only places in which no combat could conceivably take place. Everywhere else, it's car-only. The character creation screen offers a pretty good amount of variety: it's more open-ended than World of Warcraft's, but nowhere near the madness of City of Heroes' creation utility. One can modify height, skin/hair/eye color, hair and facial hair style, clothing type and colors, and various accessories. You're also able to choose the initial paint job and name of your vehicle. Of course, that starting car is just one of many you will acquire over the course of the game.

Auto Assault is set on a future post-apocalyptic Earth. Years ago, an alien force sent down contaminants and mindless drones to begin terraforming the planet for their own ends. Like a plague, the contaminant destroyed most that it touched, but some humans managed to survive its contact, developing various physical mutations. Seeing themselves as having been chosen to evolve to the next stage of humanity, the mutants went to war with the humans. Unable to hold their own, humanity outfitted volunteers from their number with cyborg technology, creating the half-human, half-machine Biomeks. However, the Biomeks proved incapable of dealing with the mutant army, and the humans abandoned them. They went deep underground and unleashed the world's stockpile of weapons of mass destruction in an attempt to rid the surface of mutants and Biomeks alike. Decades later, upon emergence, it turned out that both factions were able to survive that apocalypse, and unsurprisingly none were too fond of the others. Humanity sees the Biomeks and mutants as abberations, the Biomeks continues their longstanding war agains the mutants and sees humanity as betrayers, and the mutants believe that only they have the right to survive as the next step in human evolution.

Okay, so what do you actually do?

In many ways, Auto Assault plays like a typical MMO. In order to level up your character, you've got various kinds of quests, such as kill quests, collecting quests, escort quests, delivery quests, and so on. There is one important kind of quest not idiomatic to the genre: blowing stuff up quests. NetDevil wants your immediate surroundings in Auto Assault to be more tactile and responsive than in most other MMOs. In a video game, particularly a post-apocalyptic one, that means destroying things either with various ordnance or simply by crashing through them. You might get a mission that only requires you to wipe out the enemy inhabitants of a particular settlement, but to destroy the actual buildings themselves as well. Almost all foliage, buildings, signs, and other structures found outside of cities can be destroyed in realtime. To that end, Havok physics are also fully integrated into the game. You're not "stuck to the ground" by any means. "We want to be the leader in physics among online games," stressed Brown. It doesn't seem as though there's all that much competition in that arena just yet. You'll launch off jumps, crash through fences, barriers, and buildings, and take collision damage from running into other players. Fortunately, there is no environmental impact damage, so there's really no reason not to be busting through stuff left and right. The game has an Xbox Live-esque set of achievements to earn separate from your actual quests, and to give you an idea of the kind of behavior encouraged here, the first achievement I obtained was to catch five full seconds of air in my car.

Combat in Auto Assault, like many of its other aspects, has fundamental MMO principles at its core but with an action slant. The mouse controls a radial targeting arc extending from your vehicle's turret-mounted weapon, and in order to hit an enemy, they must be either under that arc or within the line of fire of your front- or rear-mounted stationary guns. If this is in fact the case, then the game will do all of its MMO combat business, factoring in stats and determining whether the shots hit and how much damage they do. It is also possible to lock onto a single target and have the turret auto-aim on it while you drive around. The nice thing about this is that you can be a lot crazier than you can in most MMOs. Rather than carefully pulling my target while trying to manage aggro, I just sort of barreled into my targets, locking onto one of them at a time and crashing into the rest while spraying my stationary guns around. The funny thing is, and I didn't really consider this until just now, that was simply what seemed like the obvious thing to do. Even with over a year of World of Warcraft training me to be careful around large groups of enemies in MMOs, in Auto Assault I had no qualms about throwing caution to the wind and going in guns blazing. In a nice touch (and apparently a recent change), player vs. player combat is treated rather different than player vs. enemy combat. In PvP, the action elements--aiming and skillful driving--are greatly played up, while the RPG elements--the dice rolling to hit and damage--are minimized. Rather than having separate PvP and PvE servers, each zone actually has two "layers," a PvP layer and a PvE layer. When on the PvP layer, you'll see everyone else on the PvP layer and it's every man for himself; you might later choose to switch over to the PvE layer if you simply want to finish your quest in peace. In addition to standard faction vs. faction world PvP, players can enter arenas, which pair them up against other players of equal ability. Currently, arena fights are deathmatches, but NetDevil is currently working on adding other gametypes such as capture & hold matches and races. Arena PvP uses a chess-like worldwide ranking system which will be tracked on the Auto Assault website. To make this feasible, arena PvP is not separated by server; when you enter the arena, you can be matched up with any Auto Assault players, regardless of their server. There will also be special scheduled tournaments, possibly on a weekly basis, listed on the site.

Turn to the next page to find out about classes, and about what Auto Assault is not.