Well, that’s new:
Auto Assault: Veteran’s Awards (Found via OGRank)
Bonus loot drops for block bookings, it seems. Another day, another experimental Additional Revenue Stream, I guess. Auto Assault is only a few days old and already it has Veterans, which seems rather odd. Still, I it was only a matter of time, and it’s already the commonly done thing to give away special shineys for pre-orders, and indeed, an Auto Assaultist who preordered and then stumps up for six months worth of motorised mayhem now gets +2% cash drops, +2% loot drops and +7% chance of the loot being magical…er…’enhanced’. They also get a big flashey ‘I paid too much for this game!’ light they can put on their car. And a flaming exhaust, which in the post-apocalyptic wastelands of the future is probably the equivalent of the ever popular Firey Sword.
It’s probably quite annoying for the hoi-polloi, but I do find it increasingly difficult to get irritated about this kind of thing anymore. I’ve never gone for more than one-month’s subscription, because as regular readers will know, I’m quite mercurial in my gaming, and tend to be obsessed with the genre, rather than individual games. I always like to have the prerogative of just walking away from a game that fails to amuse me. But many other gamers are more dedicated, and loyal, than me, so why shouldn’t people who pay more get more for that money?
I do wonder if the idea of a six-month subscription is a worthwhile thing in this particular case though. I managed to miss the surprisingly frequent and accessible ‘beta events’ (free trial marketing exercise) they did for this one, so haven’t actually played it myself, but seem to have an impression of Auto Assault being very far up the Casual end of the MMO spectrum, in the Planetside, City of Heroes, Guild Wars region. I’ve no doubt that driving around shattered wastelands in a missile-launching muscle car just blowing stuff up is tremendous fun, but probably not something one could play night after night, for months at a time. It’s worth noting that pretty much all NCSoft’s games seem to follow this design ethos – quick casual fun, but not the stuff of obsession.
I’ve never been a fan of driving games anyway, so will probably give this one a miss for now, but Prognositcator has some first impressions at Virgin Worlds, and most likely some follow-up to come too. Unfortunately, his first impressions seem to consist mostly of a fatal windows memory allocation error, and massive character rollback, but one shouldn’t judge the thing too harshly on the first day or two alone. Alas, for better or worse, MMOs being mostly broken on launch day is something else we’ve become all too accustomed to as well…