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Realtime Worlds’ failed MMO All Points Bulletin may have only lasted a handful of weeks before closing, but the studio had ambitious plans for an entire series of related games.
Darek Connole, public relations manager for Gamersfirst, the company that took control of APB after its fall and packaged it as a free-to-play title explained to VideoGamer.com that the original developer had coded in plans for future content and future games.
“When we first heard about [All Points Bulletin] we were like, wow, we’ve heard of this game and everybody’s bashed it. But it had 70 million in development,” Connole explained.
“So we flew out to look at the code and we realised what was there, and we thought oh my god, this is an amazing game. It just needs to be finished. The game part needs to be finished. It has all this great stuff but it doesn’t have a game around it. So we got really excited and snapped it up as quick as we could.
“When Realtime Worlds had the game, they had really large, over large ideas of what they wanted to cover in the games. So they coded in a lot of cool stuff that would have related to future content and future games that now we’re not going to be doing.”
However, this caused issues within the game, particularly when it came to response time.
“So we were able to go in and pull a lot of that code out, and a lot of that code was causing the cars to be so slow. So what it ended up with was a better response time between the key stroke and the actual movement.”
In terms of what Realtime Worlds had been planning for their MMO, Connole went on to say: “I can’t give you too much detail because I’m not a coder. But as I understand it they were looking to make APB the entry level to this whole series of games. So like you’d go into the APB district, and the social district would take you to other games and from my world you could take your APB car and drive it into my world and shoot things. They had all these crazy cool ideas that was just very ambitious.”
All Points Bulletin closed on September 16, 2010 after roughly two months. Its free-to-play sibling APB: Reloaded has recently signed a deal for retail distribution.
