All Points Bulletin: Reloaded First Look Preview

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.