All Points Bulletin Preview

APB has potentially the best customisation ever seen in a video game

Layered on top of all this is a customisation tool that may well be the most in-depth ever created. Realtime’s goal is to enable players to pick out their friends in an instant from a line-up of 1000 players without the need for their names to be displayed above their heads. From what we’ve seen, it may well be possible. It’s not the number of options with which you’re able to customise your character and vehicles that impresses, but the tool itself. We see a video of someone messing about with it. Fat is applied where it actually generates on a human body. Fat is taken away, revealing ribs, veins and body hair. Eyes and noses to name but a few are available from a wide selection, but you’re able to alter them once applied, pulling them out of the skull for example. Hair manipulation looks great – it’s not just about mixing and matching static hair styles, but shaping them to your heart’s content. We see the points of a Mohawk curved backwards and forwards, protruded and contracted. Pupils can be replaced with contacts – we see lucky 7s and cat eyes. Scars can be fleshy and bloody or age-related. Characters can be of different ethnicity, young or old.

Supporting this is a symbol designer that lets players create their own tattoos and prints that can be applied to the various surfaces in the game. It looks as complicated as Photoshop, but as a result should allow for some stunning creations. The game will ship with base symbols, characters, letters and shapes, and allow players to skew, taint, colour and fade them. Tattoos can be slid around the body at ease, the game taking care of the specifics behind the scenes. Tattoos will pick up skin pigmentation. Indeed, whenever a decal is applied to any material, whether it’s player skin, car metal, fabric on a piece of clothing or bricks on a building, it conforms to that material. Body paint, make-up and even bruising and sweat stains can be applied. Clothing can be layered – t-shirts worn outside trousers or tucked in, jackets are separate from corsets. The same principles apply to vehicles. Body parts, wheels, interiors, stereos, paint, they can all be manipulated on the 30 different vehicles the game will ship with. In this way, players in clans can feel part of an individual group, with decals on jackets, for example, and their cars.

It gets better. APB’s music editor will allow players to create their own music tracks for use in-game. We hear an electronic version of Queen’s Another One Bites the Dust, the theme tune to Beverly Hills Cop and the Mario theme. This five or six second ditty can be applied to Enforcement sirens, for example, and even used as a “Death Theme” – heard by players you kill. Annoying, but potentially very funny.

While APB will ship with 100 licensed tracks, like what you’d expect from a GTA game, Jones says you’ll be able to listen to your own MP3s through car radios. Realtime has done a deal with Last.fm to license their music-matching tech, which enables players to hear the same tracks played by nearby car radios in real time. If you don’t have the same track on your MP3 list, the game will play a track by the same artist. Failing that, the same genre. We see a car busting out some heavy rock as it approaches a player walking on the street. The music switches from left speaker to right speaker as it drives by. Player chat, via VOIP, is also 3D positional. If you’re walking by a shootout you’ll hear the players barking orders at each other.

Narrative isn't the point. It's up to players to create their own stories with their actions.

What’s interesting is that everything created by players, from tattoos to decals to music tracks, can be put up for sale on APB’s auction house, or simply shared with friends. Jones, describing this as the “first step in APB’s crafting system,” reckons APB will create fashion designers who become famous in-game not for their kill to death ratios, but for their creative and artistic expression with the game’s tools. This is why players will feel like celebrities, the last of Jones’ three Cs. If you’re not known for being a skilled player or your “Threat Rating”, you’ll be known for looking so unique it’s painful.

And that’s it. The presentation ends and Jones has to catch a flight back to the UK. Important questions remain unanswered. The absence of live gameplay footage during the presentation means talk of anything other than potential is impossible at this stage. Jones confirms Realtime isn’t a monthly subscription MMO business, but we don’t know how much, exactly, APB will cost to play (could micro-transactions be involved?). We’d like to know more about the missions, too, and just how big they can get. But every doubt is answered by a feature that enthuses. There is no experience-based levelling. Player progression is instead limited to weapon upgrades, abilities and unlocks, which should ensure success is determined by player skill and not the amount of time you put in. Cities will be differentiated by rule sets, too. Matchmaking locks involved players' weapons into a fight, and uninvolved players' weapons out (interestingly cars aren’t), so griefing should be kept to a minimum. But certain cities will facilitate free-for-alls. Jones says chaos usually ensues after about 15 minutes. Sounds great.

Surely all that remains is for Realtime to announce an Xbox 360 and PS3 version of the game. Really there’s no reason why it can’t work on console. The third-person driving and shooting is GTA-like, and the UI is sans tooltips and other buttons that would demand a keyboard and mouse interface. Make it happen Dave.

Despite the fact that APB’s E3 debut amounted to little more than a whisper, it lays serious claim to being the game of the show. Only Splash Damage’s Brink is as interesting and refreshing. Our sneaky source was right. Wicked.

All Points Bulletin (APB) is due out on PC in early 2010.