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Auto Assault Dev Journals: Update 3 and Skill Sysytem Changes
NetDevil Co-Project Lead Matt Shaffer writes about Update 3 and the Skill System Changes
By Guest Writer on December 04, 2006
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Developer Journal: Update 3 and the Skill System Changes
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One of the most difficult aspects of creating an MMO is keeping the vision in line with the reality. As developers, we spend countless hours talking about and documenting what we intend to put into a game and how those features will be used by the playerbase; the reality is people will always come up with ways to play the game that you never thought of. This means that we have to be able to adapt quickly and be continually evaluating what is in the game, what needs to be in the game, and what needs to be adjusted or changed. Update 3 is a large part of this process. In Auto Assault, skills play a major factor in PVE and in PVP combat; a single skill cast might change a battle in your favor. The system itself is very large and complex, involving over 500 total skills that are available to the players. Balancing a system this large for playability and fun provides a unique challenge. In Update 3 we have started revisiting this aspect of the game and tweaking it for more playability and fun. We have been systematically going through and changing how certain skills work, the amount of damage they do, re-fire rates, and point costs to acquire and balance between the different races and classes. The end result of this effort is to make a system geared more towards player skill as opposed to mashing the same buttons over and over or in a specific sequence. We don't want every encounter to be the same, or every map to be a rehash of the previous with just higher level creatures. We want the players to be able to adjust their characters' build depending on their goals, what they hope to accomplish and what aspect of the game they enjoy the most. One of the larger obstacles when revisiting a skill system is attempting to identify all the areas that will be affected by a single change. Even something as simple as adding 100 points to a health stat buff can have a large impact on both PVP and PVE. Recognizing the areas where problems may occur and avoiding them while balancing the skills is extremely important...and extremely difficult, considering the complex systems involved in an MMO. If an error makes it live then there is no telling how quickly it can be fixed. Also, when changing a skill in a positive way for one class it has be recognized that the skill will be used against another player. So a buff of one skill is in a way a nerf to the people that fight against that skill. The changes generally need to be done in a small, incremental fashion, and in a way that allows others that come against the skill to be able to counter it or master an alternative way to deal with it. ;)
Another one of the overall goals with the skill pass was to maintain the ability of a solo player to do well in the game and have fun, but also have skills that complement a group. We have added a lot of new content geared toward both high and low level players in this update. We have also added solo and group encounters that, along with the changes to skills, will help the players experience the game in a new way. The shift towards adding group content is an ongoing evaluation that will take us past Update 3 and into future updates as well. If determining how a single skill change will affect a single player in PVE and PVP is difficult, determining all of the effects that a skill change will have on a convoy of players can seem insurmountable. Skills that complement each other have to conform to certain boundaries and "norms" that are defined by the designers. Anytime a skill or a group of skills together goes outside of that set boundary, then players will experience the game's content in a way that conflicts with the design intention. The main risk of this is that characters aren't truly developed according to the player's goals and the game is no longer fun. Overall, Update 3 is taking Auto Assault down a new road - a road where player skill is more important than player luck, where players can fine tune their character to fit their play style, and where different tactics are needed to approach different obstacles. Human, mutant, and biomek, are only the first of your choices. Through game play, quests, encounters, interactions with other players, and skill choices your character will become unique. The final result is a post-apocalyptic world of challenges and opportunities to prove yourself against all foes. -Matt Shaffer, Co-Project Lead NetDevil |
You have to hand it to the guys at Net Devil for not throwing in the towel and truly improving upon their game. AA can be a lot of fun....it's just not 15 dollars a month fun. If any game could benefit from a Free to play micro payment philosophy like Guild Wars and the upcoming Xsteel it would be AA. Doing this would double the number of players overnight. I hope the eventually see the wisdom of this but so far Netdevil is still trying to hang with giants and AA isn't that type of game.
I just wasted my time reading a dev qq about how hard it is to balance the system and tell me pretty much nothing at all in an entire press release besides qq qq it is hard to balance.
And yeah, of course when they mess up there is no telling when they can fix it. They update the game once every 3-6 months so when they mess up it is huge. I played that game on day 1 and it was fun and interesting but after running into so many bugs, lame duck pvp, no end game (lame duck pvp is not an end game, daoc pvp is an end game).. Then it took them 5-6 months before they even patched.. Players were leaving left and right and they couldn´t do small incremental patches to fix the game... It is funny when he talks about small incremental patches because that is something they don´t do...
On top of that the worse zone in the game was Ground Zero because it was lacking in content and fullll of bugs. Sync issues when you pvp so bascially one guy would kill you while you could not do anything about it because he was out of sync. Or you would see someone shoot you once and you would insta die because he had been shooting you for 10 minutes and you just didn´t notice because of sync. There was no content in that area, it was the least developed area of the game..
Guess who they put in charge of the game??? Yeah really, they did.. they guy who was in charge of ground zero.
I hope eventually that game gets fun but to me it is dead, 2007 is a big mmo year and you will have to be good to survive it and AA simply isn´t up to par and the dev team is way under par.
When I listening about auto assault, I think it is a game with cars, pistols, ... A present game. But, it's differet, it's special. Until today I don't know why, but it's a great game.
Come Play Auto Assault! -.-
It's a special MMORPG!
I stand corrected, let me rephraste that part. When the game launched with a low population and players were leaving because of the amazingly large amount of game play problems, quest gaps, and syncying which made pvp in GZ unplayable. The development company took 3 months to release the first patch. Most of the community had then already gotten to level 80, saw all the problems, got tired of waiting and left. This game is old news and this game is going to either become free or go under. The development team killed it, good idea in the hands of people who could not deliver.
Kinda of like shadowbane, awsome concept but it had a team of dev´s that just could not do it.
I really wish this game would have taken off. With all the fantasy games out there this was a shining star during its development stage. It's to bad it launched with so many issues that it sank before it even had a chance to float.
I really hope a company can really put forth a GREAT MMO that does not center around tradition Tolkien like fantasy. I guess I am holding out hope for Star Trek or Stargate to break the tradition fantasy role. I was hoping AA would be that game. It still might with a little more work but right now it's not.
this game was fun but the only thing the updates do is make you relearn all the skills and redo your build every 2 months. most players have quit playing human and i won't be returning.
seems there was another game that went under cause the devs changed stuff too many times.....
I played AA from early in the beta and watched it grow and evolve for a long time. I only recently stopped playing because of the lack of any decent solo play at higher levels. My Human BH is lvl 62 and hit a point where there realy wasn't anything for him to do solo. They added some new quests that I could do but those realy didn't hep. I may give it a try again and see if update 3 fixed the issues I had with the game.
I do admire someone that doesn't quite and NetDevil is one of those people however, they should either quit or remove the monthly fee. This game is fun for an hour or so then it quickly gets boring and VERY repetitive. It won’t matter how many times they provide updates as their efforts are wasted as they are building upon a baseline that has numerous problems. I was in the beta and through the months that I reported issues, they rarely addressed them. This includes everything from graphics and physics to the storyline. If you want to waste your money then this is a good game to do that.