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[IMG]http://kotaku.com/assets/resources/2007/07/aadoa-thumb.JPG[/IMG] It's with a heavy heart (I'd bet) that Net Devil today confirmed rumors that NCSoft was pulling the plug on their car-themed massively multiplayer online game. The game's servers will be shut down at midnight on Aug. 31. As of today any players with an active account will not be billed again. I can't say I'm surprised, but I am a little sad.
I sort of suspected this was coming. When I was at the NetDevil Anniversary in June several of the developers referred to Auto Assault in the past tense, one even said that they never wanted to spend that much of their life working on something only to see it fail. I was sort of shocked at the time to hear a developer talking about their still running game as a failure, but it makes a lot more sense now.
What I hope happens is that other developers, and certainly NetDevil, do a post-postmortem on the game and try to figure out why it failed. I suspect top on the list will be the overly complex crafting system and the high-end PC requirements.
Important Notice [Auto Assault]
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NOTICE: Today NCsoft is announcing that it will be closing down service for Auto Assault at the end of the summer. The service will close at midnight on August 31, 2007. As of today, any player currently in the service with an active billed account will not be billed again. If players have previously purchased time via multi-month billing or time cards that extends their service past July 31, NCsoft will reconcile these accounts appropriately. There will be more announcements coming soon regarding the shut down of Auto Assault and its impact on current accounts. Please check back at www.autoassault.com for more information.
The thing is while Auto Assault never managed to totally hook me, it did enough things differently that it was worth a gamer's attention. I suspect it was this innovation that probably kept the game from succeeding. Don't get me wrong, it had some significant issues, but the real problem lay, I think, in the fact that it was a bit too different from all of the other mainstream MMOs out there.I sort of suspected this was coming. When I was at the NetDevil Anniversary in June several of the developers referred to Auto Assault in the past tense, one even said that they never wanted to spend that much of their life working on something only to see it fail. I was sort of shocked at the time to hear a developer talking about their still running game as a failure, but it makes a lot more sense now.
What I hope happens is that other developers, and certainly NetDevil, do a post-postmortem on the game and try to figure out why it failed. I suspect top on the list will be the overly complex crafting system and the high-end PC requirements.
Important Notice [Auto Assault]
[IMG]http://feeds.gawker.com/~a/kotaku/full?i=2FDJML[/IMG]
More...