So, the PA Beta Weekend for Auto Assault has come and gone, and truth be told, it’s left a little bit of a bitter taste in my mouth. Now, I understand that this is a beta, and there’s still a lot that needs to be worked out. It’s not just the bugs, which there were plenty, or the rollbacks, which we plenty, or even the graphics issues, which were plenty.
There’s some very basic gameplay issues that need to be addressed. The quest management sucks. Certain quests have to be active to get the confirmation for completing it, which means that if you happen to be on your way to a quest point, and you pass by the spawn of a certain named mob you’re supposed to kill, then you have to open up your quest log, activate that quest (and hope it stays active) to get the kill recorded as being part of your quest.
The physics of driving the vehicles also seems off, there are moments where your vehicles gains kinetic energy bouncing you off in some random direction out of nowhere, that doesn’t really seem to correspond to what you were doing.
There’s also the issue of it being a multiplayer game, it didn’t really seem like it was designed to be an MMO. There wasn’t really any content that seemed like it could be cooperative. Granted we didn’t have the ability to explore some of the high-end content of the game, but there wasn’t any interation between the factions, nor was there any motivation to do anything besides just kill stuff.
Their crafting system is also incredibly complex, and from what I’ve seen, pointless. You don’t really gain much from crafting, and it takes a lot of farming for materials to start making the materials you might use for crafting, depending on what dicipline you chose.
It also needs some sort of auction hall or trade market, as you end up getting a lot of stuff that you can’t use, and someone else would probably be willing to pay for. Most MMOs support this type of system now, as it employs real world economics.
Overall, the game needs a lot of work, but hey, it’s still in beta, so there may be some hope for it yet. I’ll look forward to seeing what becomes of this, but it probably won’t hold my attention as much as WoW has. It just doesn’t have the playability factor that keeps you in the game.