All Points Bulletin (PC)

[  1 | 2 | Next Page »  ]

Realtime Worlds finally takes the lid off APB, with EA on publishing duty.

It feels as if All Points Bulletin (APB) shouldn’t be at E3 at all. Perhaps Realtime Worlds’ ambitious GTA-style MMO, surprisingly announced during EA’s press conference, wasn’t supposed to be. It’s tucked away at the corner of the LA Convention Centre, upstairs in meeting room 301. We don't have an appointment scheduled to see it, but we're notified to its presence by some sneaky sources. “There are presentations on the hour every hour”, we're told. “Check it out, it looks wicked.”

So we do, and indeed it does look wicked. While its urban city-based third-person shooting and driving will be familiar to anyone who’s played GTA3 and upwards (Dundee-based Realtime Worlds was founded by creative director Dave Jones, formerly of DMA Design and architect of Grand Theft Auto and Crackdown), it’s how online player versus player combat has been integrated into the action that’s most exciting.

 Advertisement

In fact, it may even be revolutionary enough not to be considered an MMO at all. Jones himself doesn’t think it is. “We don’t call it an MMO,” he says as the presentation begins. “We say keep your minds open because there’s been nothing like this before.”

So, if there’s been nothing like APB before, then what is it? Jones prefers the term “online persistent game”. He talks about it being “highly dynamic”, about putting players in a “living city” and about bringing “100 players together for the first time and seeing how this works”. He goes through the three Cs: creativity, conflict and celebrity, one by one. Buzz words for sure, but over the next half hour he convinces us that he just might have something special on his hands.

Players begin by creating a character (more on that later), then choosing one of two factions: Enforcers and Criminals. At its most basic, Enforcers are the hunters and Criminals are the hunted. Players then pick what city they want to play in – like servers in traditional MMOs but without the restriction - that support 10,000 concurrent players each. Cities are divided into districts, and APB will launch with three different kinds: two action and one non-combat social. Financial is a harder downtown style area and Waterfront is a resort coastline. Each district supports up to 100 real world players. Got that?

Criminals and Enforcers are equally customisable, but Enforcers all wear badges.

Conflict usually occurs when a Criminal, or a group of Criminals, commit a crime. Imagine if you will, two Criminal players driving a van. They spot a nice-looking car. There doesn’t seem to be many people about. They stop, get out and knick it, with a view to selling it to one of the game’s NPC crime lords for hard cash. It’s at this point that APB gets really clever. As soon as they steal the car the game will do a matchmake in real time to pitch Enforcers against them – effectively sending out an APB. There is no lobby, you don’t have to wait for other players to set their status to ready and you don’t need a certain number of players to make the chase fair. APB tracks every player’s stats so it knows how good they are. If the two Criminals are good players, APB might set four Enforcers against them. Or, if they’re really good, two groups of Enforcers, of whatever the game thinks is appropriate. The Enforcers chosen by the game set off in hot pursuit, driving and shooting and shooting and driving. This, in a paragraph, is the essence of APB.

It obviously gets more complicated than that. Mission types vary depending on who gives them, Criminals can get into a scrap with other Criminals (Enforcers can’t fight each other, but Realtime is looking at this – corrupt cops?) and Enforcers can trigger matchmaking by embarking on escort and protection missions (NPCs are nothing more than fodder for criminals to prey on and enforcers to protect, and don’t fight back). What’s also interesting is that the timing of the APB is unknown to the Criminals. An NPC might witness the crime and call it in, or a silent alarm triggered while hotwiring a car might trigger it. Enforcers might be 300 yards or half a mile away when they get the call. All Criminals know is that if they step on the wrong side of the law, an APB won’t be far away.

The possibilities, as you might already be imagining, are exciting to say the least. Jones didn’t offer any specifics, but called the mission type that’s just been described “the simplest building block”. “We expand upon that with much larger missions.” While we know that clans won’t be supported, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to realise that districts packed with large groups of friends will end up forming rivalries and killing each other because of the relatively low district player cap. You will see familiar faces, develop relationships, love or hate, with players, and, hopefully, have a blast doing so.

[  1 | 2 | Next Page »  ]