This past Friday, I spent my evening saying a final farewell to Auto Assault. I mentioned the game's impending demise in a previous
entry, and of course the date of the server shutdown (August 31st) arrived much much sooner than I could have expected.
Amazingly, the cats down at NC Soft found it in their hearts to allow the players some extra fun on their last night. Every character on the server was leveled to max, given uber armor and weapons, and then gigantic creatures were spawned in all over the place, even in town (normally a safe, enemy-free area). The GMs were especially accomodating, trying to grant numerous amounts of silly requests. It reminded me of the last night of beta in 2006, when I was on the other side, spawning in huge mutated creatures and talking to excited players. On this last night, there was much PvPing, group picture-taking, and even a fair share of lamenting by players and GMs alike. It was a fascinating thing to experience.
About two minutes to midnight, I drove away from a cluster of PvPing players, onto a long stretch of open highway. I looked across at the horizon and paused for a moment. It was quiet, and I found a strange serenity in the empty landscape. But then the screen flickered, and I found myself face to face with a message notifying me I had been disconnected from the server. It was over. To see a game from birth to death... surreal.
Auto Assault is now only a memory, but I'd invite you to take a look at the
gallery of screenshots I took that evening.
