Player skills are also being revamped; both external and internal feedback felt that skills were basically useless. It was usually more effective to just hold down the standard fire key! The c. 600 skills are all being revisited, going from the bottom up. One example of a change is the skill Sonic Boom, which originally did 5 to 8 points of damage, only a little more than the standard gun attack. Now it does nearly 60 points of damage, but has a longer cool down and takes more power. Hazard modes are currently under review.

There are a ton of new items being added to the game, especially weapons. There are over 1,000 weapon types alone (shotguns, lasers, x-rays, grenade launchers, missile launchers, cannons, rifles, anti-aircraft weaponry, etc), and every one of them is merely a base for the randomly generated statistics of AutoAssault. Rear weapons are also in the game now, and players can drop goodies such as oil slicks, caltrops, mines, and seekers for their enemies to deal with.

Very close to going in the game are a ton of new chasses. Because of the in-game physics engine, the weight of vehicles and placement of wheels etc. really matter when building new car types. “Sometimes vehicles just don’t work.”

There have been some changes to inventory and stores, too; players can now sort their inventories or vendor inventories by size or type, and at vehicle stores you look at the cars now instead of the keys.

Lastly on the item front is a change to suspension. People just didn’t like the “feel” of the cars. NetDevil didn’t make any drastic changes, but it really feels like you are driving a car now, and different vehicles feel different to drive.

Of course, one of the most important things for NetDevil is to make sure their game lives up to their credo of “Level while playing, don’t play to level.” While they certainly think the game is fun enough and rich enough in storyline to achieve this, they were a little worried about slower level progression, and thus have made the levels go a bit faster. This means that there are more opportunities for skills and attribute points, and fewer opportunities to grind.

One of the major philosophies of the game is that it’s a mission game, not a grinding game. The content designers have a cool story to tell, and NetDevil wants people more interested in the story than in blasting monsters away for 8 hours on end. As for players who like to grind, they will have to make do with the high level cap of 80.

NetDevil has made some concessions to the adrenaline gamer; for example, mission descriptions use different text colors (more important information in red, storyline stuff in green, etc) so that players do not have to read the whole story text. Players should be able to know what’s going on just by doing the mission itself.

Least exciting but perhaps most important, NetDevil is working on game performance, too. Frame rates are going up and RAM usage is going down, and they plan to keep working on it. They do not, however, plan to lower the minimum system requirements. Having a destroyable world and tons of different cars in a large area at once requires a lot of RAM. The typical highway map has a 30,000 object count — way more than most other games.

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Thank you to NetDevil and Laura for this.

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