Putting Out An APB On Hard Information About APB

APB has been one of those games that has been kicking around in development for a long time without a ton of hard information to go on. With the game now scheduled to ship early next year under the EA Partners label, it felt like E3 2009 would be the right time to blow the lid off an show the game in motion. Perhaps even let a bunch of people play it. So I have to admit to a bit of disappointment coming out of my appointment to see Realtime Worlds' David Jones talk about the game. Because other than a few more pieces of the gameplay puzzle, all I really know is that it'll have a bunch of customization options.

The demo consisted of a bunch of short video clips, starting with someone using sliders on a character customization screen to make boobs bigger and push them together, and went on to showcase the game's graphic editing tools. You can customize your character with tattoos, slap detail onto your clothing, your car, design large graffiti tags, and so on. Rather than importing graphics directly into the game, APB will use something that more closely resembles Forza Motorsport 2's livery editor, giving you a bunch of primitive shapes and other building blocks that, if you take the time to do it right, can be used to create just about anything in a format that can be scaled up to live on the side of a building or scaled down to fit on the small of your back. The tattoo work looks great, and the designs really seem to mesh well with skin, or on jackets, or really, wherever you place them. But after looking at the tools used to create them, and thinking back to how difficult it was to make great-looking Forza 2 cars, I have to imagine this will develop into a small number of enthusiastic designers auctioning their work off to the rest of the players.

Music will also be handled in an interesting way. The game will let you import your MP3 collection and listen to it in-game. If you are driving around in your car listening to a track, that track info is sent to players you pass by on the streets. If they happen to have the track, they'll hear it playing as you drive by. If they don't have that track, but have something that's stylistically similar, it will play that, instead. The core idea is to ensure that your character's vibe is correctly portrayed. They also quickly showed a music editor that lets you compose your death tune--a quick little piece that plays on the machine of your victims. This could be used to create something sinister-sounding, like the bass line of Another One Bites The Dust. Or, as they displayed during the demo, you could use it to create the 1-1 music from Super Mario Land, which would be a weirdly frustrating thing to hear after getting killed. Also on the audio front, the game will have built-in voice chat support that will position your voice in the world to make it sound like it's coming out of your character's mouth.

So what about the actual game? How does a cops vs. criminals MMO actually work? Rather than showing a great deal of that, only a few quick video bits were shown, usually just to showcase the audio features mentioned above. But they did say that the game will be broken up into chunks of 100 players who freely roam around the city, disengaged from one-another. When a criminal player crosses the line and commits a crime, that sends out a matchmaking request to the enforcer faction. Some cops are selected and the two forces butt heads. How the matchmaking pulls in players depends on the notoriety and skill of the players involved. So a high-ranking criminal may get matches on with one player of a similar skill level, or maybe against a group of lower-ranking players. It sounds like players not engaged in this specific fight will still see it going on in the streets, but won't be able to actually take part in it. The game will have "chaos" servers that let anyone murder anyone at any time, but Jones made this option sound more frustrating than fun.

It sounds like the game is purely focused on player vs. player combat. While there will be named NPCs in the game, these guys are mostly there to give you missions, not to fight you or battle at your side. The rest are civilians, waiting to get jacked. Personally, I was left wondering how it will all actually work and how much it will all cost. While it certainly sounds like a persistent world with a lot of customizable options, the way it matches up players and locks them into one specific battle sounds more like an elaborate server browser than a full-on, traditional MMO. That, in turn, makes me suspect that a traditional subscription model might not be the best way for APB to operate. But that's not something Realtime Worlds is ready to talk about just yet, so we'll have to keep wondering for now. The game is scheduled to ship in the first quarter of next year.