City of Villains and Auto Assault top NCsoft's E3 lineup

Joining the growing chorus of pre-E3 announcements, NCsoft unveiled its lineup for the looming game expo. Along with several previously announced titles--including Lineage II: The Chaotic Chronicle, Guild Wars, and Tabula Rasa (which was announced way back in 2001)--the Korean publisher will be showing off two all-new PC titles.

The first new game is Auto Assault, a postapocalyptic massively multiplayer online role-playing game developed by NetDevil. Set in a world that's half Road Warrior and half Fallout, the game will let players customize their own cars, trucks, and motorcycles with a variety of engines, armor, and weapons. Gameplay will consist of missions and wandering through a wasteland full of mutants and bandits. Environments in the Havok engine-powered game will be completely destructible, and crashed cars will suffer realistic damage.

NCsoft's other new title is City of Villains, an expansion pack to its superhero MMORPG City of Heroes. As the title suggests, the Cryptic Studios-developed expansion will let gamers join the dark side of Paragon City. As supervillains, players will battle those infernal tights-bedecked do-gooders while building their own criminal empires. (Insert diabolical laugh here.)

NCsoft did not announce a release date for either City of Villains or Auto Assault.