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Last night was the end of Auto Assault, the end of a game that hoped to break the mold, push the envelope and bring something truly innovative to the MMO world. Did we succeed? Well, certainly not in making a popular game. I wish we had, but the truth is the game we were making wasn't really a game a lot of people wanted... Still, when one considers "did we bring something new to the table?" the answer, I'm sure you'll agree, is most assuredly, yes.

With an action game's combat pace and a fantasy MMO's leveling and grinding sensibilities, we might not have given people everything they wanted, but we certainly did something that hadn't really been done before. Some of the things we did first, you're starting to see in other MMOs and I'm incredibly proud of that. It means that, despite the game itself being cancelled, its impact will be felt long after it's dead and forgotten. We made a lot of mistakes, sure. We made a lot of downright wrong guesses about what players would want, even, but what you cant' say is that we didn't try to innovate. In truth, we seldom turned down the opportunity to do so, even when it ended up hurting us.

Most of what we did that was new was obvious, but did you know that we originally planned to bring players something new in terms of the mission/leveling/story paradigm, too?

Our plan, at the start, was that each player's travel through the world would offer to them a personalized quest; a single story where they were the hero and the world revolved around them. This is actually why we focused on instances the way we did - we wanted the world to constantly reflect the player's actions. What we really wanted was for players to see this in the wide public world, but we felt like we couldn't realistically make that work along side the physics based, vehicular combat due to hardware demands. So, instead we focused on the instances.

Our plan was basically that we'd use instances to advance the world. As players progressed through their story, they would, from time to time, enter an instance and - in addition to getting a completely scripted, nearly console like, experience (something not really done in an MMO before, though we arguably didn't do it all that well) - the world would change. Our proof of concept example was a warlord's fortress. You'd run in the first time, trash the place and kill the warlord and then leave. Later, you'd come back to that same place and run around in the ruins, seeing evidence that you had been there previously due to the destroyed fortress; even later you'd come back and find a ramshackle scav fortress as the weaker scavs moved in after you had cleared out the warlord. Our favorite example was a dam: In one mission, you'd blow up a dam, and then whenever you came back to it, you see the flooded valley and the destroyed dam - proof that you had changed the world.

It's a little funny, in a sad sort of way, that once we'd developed the technology we changed our paradigm into one that discouraged going back for any reason, making all that work for instances sort of moot. I suppose once you've seen WoW you don't have much a choice, though. I mean, players were clamouring for less and less confusing modes of play (and rightly so), so you streamline and streamline and suddenly, when you're out of stuff to streamline, you begin to simplify - which isn't the same thing, but feels exactly like it is, when you're doing it.

Ah well, don't think I'm complaining - our mistakes were ours to make and even in the making of them, I think the whole industry learned a lot. One, at least to me, outright success in the whole process was the way it made us totally rethink the way you would tell story in an MMO. We didn't implement every conclusion we drew from rethinking the way to tell story in an MMO - we didn't have the capability, but when we did take what we learned and found the clever hacks necessary to implement them, people took notice. It was more than gratifying to see people's reactions to our efforts, especially my personal favorite, the Bloodfarm in the Fetid Bayou.

It's those elements and the story as a whole that we'll be talking about in these weekly features. these features aren't going to be discussions of what we'd planned and didn't get to, in terms of gameplay. I apologize if that's what you're looking for, but it's not fair to anyone on the team to drag all those painful memories back to the surface. Too many things would have had to go right to get everything we'd intended into Auto Assault and most of those things were not under the team's control. Besides, the players of the game have already spoken up about what they really wanted compared to what AA was, a million times already; there's really no point. But, the story? Ah, the story. We had such plans! Plans I tell you!

Well OK, what we had was a series of interwoven and fairly complex plots that together were meant to paint a rich and deep portrait of a world. It was meant to be a study in grays, a study in the apparent role of archetypes versus the realities of the people that fill them. A story about bad guys and good guys and how they're really the same thing, if you think about it...

Yeah, OK, maybe not - maybe that was for my old lit teachers to laugh at. Still, AA was meant to be a story about how a world had gone horribly wrong and how despite massive changes, people really are still just people - warts and all. I think we pulled that off, and I think we made it interesting at the same time... and I think we got the chance - even if only through text, through writing - to show players characters far deeper than they're used to seeing in an MMO. All of this despite the fact that we knew we were underfunded, understaffed and underarmed with the tech we'd need to really do it right. But we did it anyway...

...and, failure to make money or not, I think we were better off for the trying.

So, enjoy the next few weeks as Ombwah and I fill in the missing details of the stories; the bits that were deliberate mysteries and the bits that never made it in will all be discussed. I'll be starting tomorrow with installment number 1 - The story of Tocado and Western Front.

- Snipehunter

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