Auto Assault Interview, Part One
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Q: Were you worried someone else would have the same idea and beat you to release?
A: Well yeah! We're shocked still that there's no real competing product, not anything really close to what we're doing to this point. We've had this announced for two years probably, so somebody could have picked it up and done something similar. But I think until there's a proven game that actually does it, you know, publisher risk and aversion and all that kind of stuff.
If you look at mass market entertainment, like TV shows, how many of those are fantasy based? Fantasy is actually a pretty niche market, but it has quite a few users in the MMO space. But look at games in general even. How many now are fantasy hack 'n' slash? There's your Need for Speeds or Burnouts coming out. There's a lot of interesting car games with destruction and action. Those are things that people want to play; those have the highest sales and those are the games that people talk about. We were always big action gamers. The videogaming roots of NetDevil were with Quake and Tribes. Games like that where it was high action, but team based gameplay still. So taking that into a massively multiplayer space with that kind of mechanic and pacing seems like a natural progression.
I honestly think that a big reason why MMOs took so long to open the door for so many people is just because the accessibility wasn't there - the learning curve was so steep and the core game mechanic is very, very turn-based. The latest incarnations of MMOs are faster, but they're still turn-based at their core. So we're trying to say no, real-time, jump to real-time, like action with stats behind that. Car combat is the perfect vehicle, so to speak, to achieve that sort of gaming.
