GamingNexus: What’s your favorite race to play with and why?
Ryan Seabury: Ah, the most dangerous question to ask a dev. ;)
all of the races are my favorite, they are all equally fun..
Right now I’m digging on the Biomeks, but mostly because that race has more content at the moment. And because their vehicles can transform into Giant Robots of Destruction! This is also known as “Hazard Mode.” So we’re actually working on some cool hazard modes for the other two races right now, because the Biomeks showed us how fun it can be.
GamingNexus: Do you think this game will satisfy those craving an Auto Duel adaptation?
Ryan Seabury: I don’t want to make any bold claims; I think it’s up to the gaming public to decide that, but I hope so! All I can say is that we have a lot of fun playing it so far, and we’re just getting started with the content population!
GamingNexus: One of the great things about City of Heroes was how easy it was to get into; do you think Auto Assault will carry on this trend?
Ryan Seabury: We sure hope so! That’s another great lesson we learned from Jumpgate, actually. There is an unbelievable amount of depth and features in our first title, which probably 80% of people who tried it never got to experience because it was too inaccessible. This time around, we’re taking great pains to make sure the interface is intuitive and offers redundant controls. We’re making a non-obtrusive but informative tutorial system, and generally focusing the initial gameplay to make the new player comfortable with the basics before throwing all the game’s features at them.
Maybe the best way I can indicate our accessibility efforts is that at E3, we had many marketing and PR people from lots of publishers, retailers, and other developers check out our game. If you know anything about marketing and PR folks, many tend to be casual gamers at best (no offense to marketing/PR people reading this!). We got a lot of comments from this demographic, saying that they never play games, but that they actually enjoyed playing our game and might even subscribe some day! So that was very exciting for us, because no one found the controls frustrating or hard to understand and everyone had a blast just driving around and shooting right from the get-go.
And then we had a few hardcore MMO vets sitting there analyzing every stat on every weapon they picked up right away, playing literally for hours at E3. But pretty much everyone who played had a smile on their face while playing, and that’s what games are supposed to do, right?
I think we’re on target for a really fun game with lots of broad appeal… of course everyone says that, so we’ll see if I can predict the future or not. ;^)
I'd like to thank Ryan Seabury and the folks at NCSoft for helping us out with the interview. Ryan's a really great guy to talk to, even taking time out of his busy schedule just to talk about some of the processes on how NetDevil develops. Auto Assault sounds like it's going to be a blast to play and we at GamingNexus wish them luck.
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