While NCsoft has gotten a lot of attention for City of Heroes and Lineage II, and deservedly so from what I’ve seen, there are some other titles that it has in development that are also deserving of attention.

Auto Assault (PC Online)

Auto Assault is probably the most straight up entertaining MMO that I’ve seen to date. Think Mad Max with some Independence Day thrown in. You can build your car and take it out on the road to stomp scavengers, defend your turf, or steal alien technology.

The demo I saw was just driving around, on road and off, getting into a few skirmishes, and blowing up various trees, buildings, etc. With tons of chassis options, PvP capabilities, missions, and four different species to choose from this game looks to be a high octane slug throwing good time.

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Guild Wars (PC Online)
Guild Wars is a little something different. Here we have what at first glance seems to be your typical fantasy MMORPG, but a few things make it stand out. You have an elegant and stunning set of character avatars, with lots of options. Not only that, but leveling is not all it’s cracked up to be, or so the developers would have us believe. Supposedly it is much more strategy and less time spent playing. About that time thing, yeah all those MMO’s you’ve been paying $15 a month for, well Guild Wars is looking to change all that by not charging a monthly fee. That’s right you pay game price up front and then nothing else, unless of course you want the expansions that they plan on releasing every six months or so.

The good news on that is that even if you don’t buy the expansions you can still interact with those who have, you just can’t get the stuff from it or go to those places. So overall this game looks absolutely gorgeous, and is gearing up to be a ground breaking step in MMO gaming.

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Tabula Rasa (PC Online)
Tabula Rasa, a game being developed by some of the team that brought us Ultima Online. This game has a heavy Asian influence in character design and combat animations which are both outstanding. The interface looks a little intimidating at first, but is pretty easy to pick up on and flows very well. If you like the development team, and don’t mind a little more in depth gaming then this will be a definite crowd pleaser.

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