Enough of the RP nonsense, and back to the rumination! Spent most of this weekend getting the most out of my 14 day free trial of
Auto Assault, which is turning out to be a lot of fun. I'm about level 30 now, which is a bit alarming in itself, and I'm now zooming about Cinderfall, which is a large crater filled with crumbling shanty towns, rotting tower blocks, rivers of green goo, and to the north, a fantastically imagined and designed region dominated by a mad AI, all in right angles, red lights and black robots, with some excellent terrain for stunts.
I even managed to get a medal for one embarrassingly accidental pile-up, during some of the more hectic high-octane melee, where a combination of high-speed collision, nearby ramp and a speed-boost consumable launched my car upward with enough force to keep me airborne for over five seconds. I love medals anyway, but this has to be one of the more fun ones I've gained over the years. I'm not sure I could do that again on purpose, mind.
Auto Assault is fascinating to me on two levels. The first is the obvious gleeful carnage of the basic game, which is a thing of personal novelty, yes, but also, I think, a genuinely and objectively fresh, light and fun gaming experience, and the sort of thing everyone ought to have a go at, at some point, just to see how else one's online time
could be spent. But the other, more academic and esoteric fascination I have with the thing, is that in many ways, it's the MMO equivalent of the
Marie Celeste.
The infamous 19th century brigantine, was found intact, with meals still at the table, but with no sign of the crew, presenting a mystery to those who found her, and a useful simile for the rest of us, and it's what I think of when I think about Auto Assault. Over the last few days I've been regularly pinging their /who lists, a sense of morbid curiosity driving me on. "/who * * *" will list everyone in your faction - in my case Biomek, and far from the usual truncated 'too many entries' I was expecting, it came up with about 27.
Somewhat disbelievingly, I did it again, and again over the next few sessions, at times ranging from 11pm UK time, through to 2am UK time, (which is about 6pm to 10pm, if you are in New York), and the Biomek Order typically consists of between 20 and 30 players at prime time. In the interests of accuracy, I rolled up a Mutant and Human newbie, partly to have a look around their starter areas and see their types of vehicle, which were both very interesting too, and partly to run the same census exercise. Mutants seem about as popular as a Biomeks; 20-30 players online. Humans seemed much more popular, (as they always are where the choice is available at all), and seemed to number 50 or so online at once. Auto Assault has only one server.
So in general, there are as few as 110 people playing Auto Assault at any one time, in the entire world, making casual freeloading daytripper Van Hemlock, a little under one percent of the entire playerbase, which is a tad worrying. Applying the Van Hemlock 'Rule of Five', which is where you multiply concurrency by five (a number which I've pulled out of my bum, but which seems to work a lot of the time) to get subscriptions, and you can see that the average Auto Assault Subscriber is a member of a very exclusive club. How many other people in there are also just trying it out, is hard to say, and I'm not quite sure if the PlayNC account is capable of working like the Station Access Pass, which may further confuse things. Still, something does seem to have gone terribly wrong somewhere...
I know, I know, shame on me for beating on the dead game, but I'm not rattling off these figures as an exercise in gloating. Far from it. I really quite like the game, and am genuinely quite puzzled as to why the thing isn't doing much better than it is.
Like the Marie Celeste, there doesn't appear to be anything actually broken, malfunctioning or wrong with it - certainly from the newbie perspective. It's well polished, a lot less bug-riddled than a few more popular MMOs I could list, interestingly fresh while retaining many widely accepted MMO conventions, and the basic business of killing monsters, an often dreary timesink in many games, is a gleeful exercise in reckless (and wreck-filled) abandon, while still held together by the overall structure and purpose of the commonly employed and accepted Quest Journal gameplay style.
And yet, at any given moment, around twelve times more people are playing the notoriously harsh and unpopular MMOFPS shooter,
Planetside, (based on the half-arsed census I did at the end of the Reserves thing) and I really can't work out why.
It could be "The Sci-Fi Cooties" perhaps. Sci-Fi MMOs are notoriously unpopular in this regard, and if you're not swinging an Enchanted +5 Short Sword of Righteousness at goblins, or firing magic missiles at the darkness, a lot of folks just aren't interested, which seems a strange reason not to like an MMO to me. If this is the case, things don't bode well for
Tabula Rasa. Which is odd really, because if you take away the actual car and setting for a moment, Auto Assault so far seems a lot to me like the first 60 levels of
World of Warcraft (i.e. The Bit Everyone Liked) - fast progression solo and small group questing, equipment and power upgrades, crafting and advancing world travel. It even has 'dungeons' with 'boss' vehicles, which I think are instanced...I'll have to check.
Maybe it's the car itself - no 'auto-attack' here, and the actual business of destroying 'monsters' does require a bit more of a hands-on approach than in most games. Saying that, the driving controls aren't especially difficult, and driving a car in Auto Assault is a damn sight easier than driving a Lightning in Planetside. Having a target-locking auto-tracking main gun makes life even easier in that regard, and means in general, to kill something, you just need to drive about in small loops near the enemy to bring it down. Being constantly on the move during combat helps a lot, but you'd get pretty far just parking in front of the enemy and duking it out too.
It could be a marketing thing. You just don't hear much about Auto Assault these days, apart from hacks like me going on about what a failure it was - past tense - and maybe it's simply that the majority of MMO gamers don't know it exists at all. Things are still happening with the game though - the latest update news, from about the beginning of June, is talking about a set of
new racetrack areas being added, indicating that far from being 'on maintenance only', new development is still ongoing. Given the numbers above, this makes me think that the cost of actually
running an MMO must be
much lower than I thought. NetDevil, the folks behind Auto Assault are mostly in the news nowadays for the upcoming Lego MMO, so I expect Auto Assault will get less resources in the months and years to come, but it looks far from the derelict abandoned project one would expect.
Maybe it's the people, or lack thereof. When your entire faction wouldn't be able to fill a Molten Core raid group, and is smaller than most MMO
guilds, life can get a bit lonely out there. This is clearly a self-reinforcing spiral - less players means less groups, means less M in your MMO, means leaving to find a more people in another game, means less players, etc. It's possible that an MMO simply decays below a certain threshold beyond which recovery becomes impossible. There's a lot of talk on the 'O'Sphere lately about Numbers, which I'm finding generally interesting, and the wiser sages seem to be coming up with the conclusion that Numbers are Irrelevant, and only personal fun is important. Well, Auto Assault is certainly the sharp end Acid Test of this theorising - it's numbers are awful, but I'm having a lot of fun. Personally, I mostly soloed from 1 to 60 in WoW and enjoyed every minute of it, and could see myself doing the same again in Auto Assault, but even I'd miss the hubbub and feeling of vitality that just having other people around lends to a game.
Those people who
do play are not to blame mind you, and Faction Chat seems friendly and helpful enough. With a bit of social effort on my part, it wouldn't take much to find a clan (their Guilds) and become part of what seems to be a very close-knit community indeed. In some ways, this makes for an opportunity that it would be hard to find in another, more populous MMO. You get to be a Somebody right from the word go, rather than just another name on the big city OOC chat spam. Taking a regular gaming group in there with you will make the lot of you a significant and known force, and god forbid, taking your entire guild in there on a kind of 'holiday'...well, with these numbers you'd probably end up
being most of a given faction, with an entire game at your fingertips. Big fish in a small pond, certainly, but in many ways this can have rewards over being a big fish in an ocean. Auto Assault is not a place for Pick Up Groups however, but then again, I've not come across much in there that can't be tackled alone. Your guess is as good as mine on The End Game though.
Maybe it's just that Auto Assault isn't sticky enough. I'm 30 already, and unless it becomes significantly harder in the coming levels, I can see me at 80, the top, in a month or two, and I'm not much of a powergamer really. Perhaps everyone who was ever interested in the thing has already been there, done that, and got the T-Shirt. Maybe these games aren't
supposed to keep us banging on the pellet feed bar over and over, ad infinitum, and it's WoW that's the abberration? Anyway, I'm not sure what endgame is like in Auto Assault, but presumably there are Level 80 'dungeon' instance areas with big loot. Looking at the world map shows three areas of zones - one for each faction, and a large area in the middle with dotted border lines, which implies overland territorial Faction vs Faction PvP. I hear high-level people talking about 'GZ', ('Ground Zero', apparently), but don't quite know what that is - probably some kind of end-game thing. Perhaps everyone has already played the thing, liked it, had enough and moved on? It does happen! But it certainly wouldn't be the first time I've 'discovered' some cool MMO thing eight months after everyone else got bored of it.
Also, it's been about for a while now, and while I'm seeing it for the first time, I have no idea what it was like at launch, and how much stuff has been added, removed, changed, fixed or otherwise altered. Maybe it launched as a real broken stinker - I can't remember what people were saying about it at that time - but if that was the case, and everyone went in eager, at a broken and unready launch, I can understand why most would just leave and never come back. From there, it's a hard uphill battle to change peoples opinions of it all, to convince them to give it a another go and see the hard work that may have gone into fixing it up and getting it working properly. Lucky old me, I don't have any of that baggage, and the game I'm seeing today seems pretty solid.
All in all, it's a perplexing puzzle, and one I'm determined to figure out, but anyway, look for my proper Operation Cheapseats roundup review soon, as the two weeks draw to a close...