Auto Assault Preview

The guys at Gamerati are offering up a five-page preview of Auto Assault, after playing NCsoft and NetDevil's MMORPG firsthand during this year's QuakeCon event. An excerpt to follow:
One other area in which NCSoft excels is innovation. While they have several games under thier belt, they aren't carbon-copies of each other, with a skinned interface to enhance the theme. They do, however, use a few common MMORPG conventions: hotkeys for skill and ability usage, inventory, and character sheets. Auto Assault is no different - it's very appealling to the MadMax crowd and the post-apocalyptic genre junkies, and the game very strongly reflects that. Like any RPG, it has the defining elements of most Role-Playing Games: a set of attributes that defines a character's strengths and weaknesses, various skills that enhance the damage or damage-reducing abilities of a character, different races and classes that have certain focal skills. It also has several common elements of MMORPGs: it uses the common F1-F10 hotkeys for skills, a hit point and energy/mana meter, a target indicator and a waypoint system to direct the character on where to go, a chat interface to converse with other players in your area, the ability to craft items and weapons.