Auto Assault

» see autoassault.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

i was twenty-two in 2006 with ttnet broadband at home and a desktop pc that could run anything ncsoft put out. i knew the name ncsoft mostly from the publishing deals they were signing for the western market that year and from the lineage 2 ads that ran in turkish gaming press. auto assault was on the list of things they were betting on for north america. it never reached anyone i knew.

the game launched on 13 april 2006. netdevil developed it out of colorado. ncsoft published it as part of a push to put four discrete mmos into the western market at the same time. the pitch was a post-apocalyptic vehicular mmo where you drove a car, a motorcycle, or a tank instead of swinging a sword. three factions occupied the surface of a destroyed earth. a third-person shooter combat layer wrapped around the standard mmo subscription model.

reviews were not unkind. metacritic landed at 72. the academy of interactive arts and sciences nominated it for massively multiplayer game of the year in 2007. but reviews did not pull subscribers in the post-wow market. wow had launched in late 2004 and by 2006 it was draining subscribers from every other mmo on the western market. auto assault had neither the budget nor the brand to push back.

~ the case file ~

~ the actual end ~

the announcement came on 2 july 2007. ncsoft said the servers would close on 31 august and refunds would not be issued. netdevil released a statement saying they had tried to buy the ip back from ncsoft so a smaller team could keep the game running on a maintenance budget. no deal was reached. the servers closed on schedule.

netdevil itself collapsed in 2010 after lego universe failed to find an audience. the studio that made the vehicular mmo did not survive long enough to make another bet of its size.

~ what got buried with it ~

the vehicular mmo as a subgenre has not been tried again seriously. earth and beyond covered space. world of warcraft covered fantasy melee. the slot auto assault occupied has stayed empty. nobody else has built a post-apocalyptic vehicular persistent world since 2007, partly because the genre's experiment died unprofitably and partly because the failure was loud enough to be remembered as a warning.

the one mechanical innovation that did age forward was the no-death-penalty design. auto assault let you respawn without consequence at a time when corpse runs and xp loss were still considered standard mmo punishment. the punishing death penalty of the everquest school faded out of the genre by 2010. auto assault was one of the early signals of that drift.

~ the long tail ~

in 2026 there is no private emulator project for auto assault that has reached a playable state. the client and server architecture were tightly coupled to ncsoft's account back-end, which is the kind of dependency that makes private servers harder than they are for early-2000s mmos. the game exists in screenshots and youtube footage. a few of the original netdevil developers still post about it on retrospective threads when the anniversary comes around.

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