Isn't this the company that brought us AutoAssault?

Yes. Yes it is. They are also bringing us the upcoming Lego MMO.

Legos MMO?

This folks better remember me when they do close beta invites.  I was a paying customer of theirs until they shut out the lights of that project.  Never played it beyound beta LOL, but I support Indie companies when it they take active rolls in listening to their community. 

Actually, this is the company that DEVELOPED AutoAssault, but NCSoft was the publisher/investor and therefore had alot of control over release dates.  Its generally accepted that NCSoft drove AutoAssault into the ground for releasing before it was really ready.

NetDevil developed Jumpgate and now JGE without outside influences.

Generally accepted by who?

It's generally accepted that it was a functional game, but no one wanted to RP being a car.

I played Auto Assault in the beta.

It was promising, but not quite ready at release - still too many bugs and the content was a bit thin in the higher levels. My impressions of the gameplay were rather mixed:

Pro:

-nice, fast action

-innovative, and I didn't mind the "roleplay a car" bit

-interesting crafting system

Contra:

-a bit too limited by level: only fighting mobs near your own level made sense, with absurd scenes near the limits: I remember taking down a watchtower 4 levels higher where I was standing before the tower and missed 4 out of 5 times against a non-moving target

-absolutely no penalty for dying, no logistics to handle. A little bit more hardcore would have been nice (I'm playing EVE atm, which is mostly at the other extreme of the scale)

-too little room for player skill: The driving physics were half-decent (a bit cartoony but OK) but the crude joystick interface seemed to know only two degrees of turning the steering wheel. Keyboard was worse. For me that really damaged the driving aspect, which could have made a nice in-game pastime of its own.

 In the end, I didn't buy Auto Assault but I still think Net Devil have the skills to make a good game. They just need to drop the idea that their games have to be completely skill-free 

Originally posted by baff

Generally accepted by who?

 

It's generally accepted that it was a functional game, but no one wanted to RP being a car.

I'm not sure what game you played at launch.  I'm assuming that you either didn't play it early on or didn't make it far enough to actually walk around in one of the cities.  Yeah, there were bugs.  Some pretty horrible ones.  The entire on-foot experience in the cities was the kind of thing I might expect from an early in-house build.  I couldn't even believe it was the same game.

The last time I played AA was maybe six months before it shut down.  I got bored and decided to climb the rocks at the town I was in.  By that, I meant I glitched up a 90-foot verticle rock spire and then stood atop it and surveyed my domain, including the black space which wasn't meant to be viewable by people in the city.  Then I jumped off it and ran around outside the city walls for a while, which isn't even supposed to be possible.  I never did figure out how to escape into that black part.  That was my biggest goal in AA.

I think it was honestly both problems.  AA, if done perfectly well, probably would have been a niche game.  Having a game which only attracts a niche audience, then making it super buggy on top of that, is a sure recipe for disaster.

Originally posted by baff

Generally accepted by who?

 

It's generally accepted that it was a functional game, but no one wanted to RP being a car.

Well, since the lead developer gave an interview where he clearly pointed to the fact they were driven by meeting  NCSofts hard milestone deliverables throughout the development of the project and swore he'd never make another game with those restrictions again, its a safe bet that NCSoft had a lot to do with the number of bugs at release.

To be sure, people are reluctant to roleplay non-human characters, heck, they prefer to roleplay mostly fantasy charcters, all other game types end up catering to niches.