In an effort to make the vehicle combat MMO Auto Assault a top-notch product, NetDevil have decided to extend the beta test period into next year which of course means the final release has been delayed. The good news is the game is likely to be a lot less buggy come release and there will be more features based on tester's feedback. The post from Producer Steven Snow goes as follows:

We started beta testing earlier this year and here is an update on our progress.

The beta testing period has spawned some great ideas that we want to include before launch. NetDevil and NCsoft are both companies with a strong commitment to releasing “only when it’s ready,” so we want to extend the beta into the spring of 2006. Over this time, we are going to continue tuning, tweaking, and adding to Auto Assault.

There is a lot that we will be changing over the next few months; here is a quick look at some of the items that we will be addressing.

Content for all the races: The core goal is to work on giving things a more diverse feel. The vision we are shooting for is that particular locations will have a specific feel and that the enemies located there have abilities that change up the standard gameplay.

Client performance: More optimizations to increase performance.

Level progression: Level progression will be faster paced and have more levels overall.

Character creation: There will be more details for making a character look unique, as well as customizing your first car.

New Items: More than a thousand new items are going into the game to help balance out the loot system.

Chassis: There are quite a few chassis in the game that people haven’t seen yet, but we are going to add even more.

The list that we have is literally full of hundreds of other things. Keep an eye out – the scope of changes you’ve inspired us to make over the next few months is amazing!

We will not be adding any more testers for North America a little while, but more invites will go out once the next round of content revisions is published later this fall. European beta invites will continue to be sent, but the majority will be issued to coincide with the roll-out of the new content.

We were all excited about a 2005 release, but these changes – and ones to come in the future – will make Auto Assault the best it can be.

Steven Snow
Producer – Auto Assault
NCsoft

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