Much like this eight year old header image of All Points Bulletin, APB: Reloaded is working toward a better future.
The APB: Reloaded team put out its 2020 roadmap this week detailing the kind of updates players can expect in the coming eleven months. Chief among the updates is the upgrade to Unreal Engine 3.5 which has been in the works for quite some time. CEO Matt Scott has been maintaining a thread on the official forums logging where the team currently is at with the update, as well as what still needs to be fixed before the upgrade can go live.
Further updates include quality of life improvements and balancing the shotgun. For more details, check out the official website below.
GamersFirst announced this week that it has been acquired by developer Little Orbit, with new CEO Matt Scott addressing the communities of APB and Fallen Earth to detail their plans for the future.
“There’s been a lot of speculation over the last couple months about who would be crazy enough to take on this game. And I’m not going to try and sugarcoat it, we know that the confidence in this game is at an all time low, and odds are you haven’t heard of us at Little Orbit. But that’s OK. There’s a lot of work to do, and I’m not writing this letter to make unrealistic promises or layout a grand roadmap. Instead, I’m going to ask for your patience as we get organized and that you give us a chance to show you that we are sincere in our efforts to make APB Reloaded the game we all know it can be.”
Scott lays out a roadmap for All Points Bulletin for the months ahead, including a new mode, maps, challenges, clothes, vehicles, and the much awaited move to the Unreal 4 Engine. The Fallen Earth post doesn’t go into detail on any planned updates, but Scott does wax nostalgia of his days playing the title.
“Nothing is going to happen overnight with Fallen Earth. But it’s clear to me that there is something special here worth rebuilding. We need to spend more time mapping out exactly what that looks like.”
If you hadn’t noticed, DDOS attacks have become common enough that nowadays they’re just a regular thing that happens every so often. Pick any major game service, be it Xbox Live, PSN, RuneScape, World of Warcraft, etc, and odds are it has experienced service disruption in recent months due to these attacks.
In the case of APB Reloaded, Reloaded Productions has thanked its community for bearing with them over the course of recent attacks. As compensation, any player who has logged in between June 26th and today (September 10th) will receive two free inventory expansion selectors.
Over the last couple of months, we’ve seen DDOS attacks on the rise again for APB as well as other games. While we’re working with our Mitigation provider to combat these new types of attacks, we know that it’s an unpleasant experience for our players. As a small token of appreciation, we’ve delivered 2 codes for Inventory Expansion Selectors, this is for all players that have logged into a district from June 26th to today, and is good until September 22, 2015.
Today’s MMOrning Shot comes to us from All Points Bulletin, a piece of artwork sent out to the press way back in 2005. Fun fact: Realtime Worlds imposed an embargo on reviews that lasted one week after the launch of the game. They told us that the reasoning was so we could experience the full effect of player customized vehicles and mayhem. As it turned out, all of the customization in the world couldn’t make All Points Bulletin an enjoyable game, or a profitable one because Realtime Worlds went bankrupt and shut the game down just a few months later.
Review embargoes leading up to launch day are suspect enough, an embargo lasting past launch day should be a red light to stay very far away.
BRAWNDO’S GOT WHAT PLAYERS CRAVE! Brawndo’s got electrolytes. And that’s what players crave. They crave electrolytes. Which players crave. they crave electrolytes. Which is what Brawndo has. And that’s why players crave Brawndo. Not water, like from the toilet.
Good news, All Points Bulletin fans. In the latest APB dev blog, Gamersfirst is proud to announce that serverside lag has been almost completely eliminated. The issues stemmed from the manner in which the server would attempt to invoke various external libraries, causing congestion in the server. After some work under the hood, and the help of some new hardware, the team believes that this is the end of APB’s lag problems.
In fact, the system works so well that Gamersfirst touts players connecting from Australia to Frankfurt, and achieving a reduction from 1500ms to 500ms, the remaining 500 due to distance rather than congestion. They do want you to know that you may still experience lag, but that it will be mostly your fault.
Will you or some of your friends still see game lag? Sure – under three conditions; (1) your home network runs in to congestion, (2) your ISP has a freak-out and messes up its routes to its peers or (3) your home computer is not up to spec and you end up lagging all the time (but that’s of course client side lag which is a whole different beast).
Reading K2 Networks (GamersFirst) talk about cheaters reminds me of the black knight scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Even though King Arthur continues to hack the black knight apart, limb from limb, he continues his volley of verbal assaults at Arthur’s ability with a sword, to the point where, in defeat, the knight offers a draw.
In an alternate reality, I might be complacent with Gamersfirst’s handling of cheaters, but given their work in titles like Knight Online (which is full to the brim with cheaters, bots, and gold farmers), my hope for APB’s future is on uneven grounds. Of course, if you go by Gamersfirst’s words, back when Realtime Worlds was still running All Points Bulletin, the company had the information to ban the high number of cheaters, but simply chose not to enforce the rules. The implication being that the new host will be enforcing the rules.
With the latest K2 Networks blog, the APB team has offered a thank you to the cheaters for providing them with useful information.
For the past 3 weeks we have been watching and observing user behavior in Closed Beta. We’d like to extend a “thanks” to the 60 odd players that have been toying around with various hack tools (about 0.4% of the players). Thanks to your hard cheating work, we are now much better equipped to deal with you going forward. How? I guess you will find out.
I wish GamersFirst the best of luck with APB, and I will be there when the game comes out. Unlike their other titles, however, APB isn’t going to survive if it is filled with cheaters. The first failed launch should have been enough of an indicator.
Who wants All Points Bulletin: Reloaded? Scotland wants APB: Reloaded. So much so, that Scottish Development International offered a cash incentive for K2 Networks to open up an office in Scotland, as well as a two hundred thousand in “regional selective assistance” from the Scottish Enterprise development agency, in order to set up shop. Well, K2 has bitten the line, and opened up a new office with the intent to hire 22 people, with future expansion.
This is where the story gets weird. Gamasutra notes that the General Manager of the new office is Michael Bonafice, previous IT Director at Realtime Worlds. In addition, the location itself isn’t too far from the old Realtime Worlds offices. The CEO of Reloaded Productions, the subsidiary of K2 Networks, and the team that are working on the APB: Reloaded relaunch, said:
“After visiting Scotland, meeting some extraordinary game development professionals and also seeing the Scottish Government’s enthusiastic support for creative and technical ventures, we decided to invest in a Scottish team focused on the core game engineering and key creative design tasks.”
APB: Reloaded is already showing major interest, especially in the ongoing beta test. If K2 are wary about the relaunch’s potential, they aren’t showing it. Then again, Realtime Worlds opened a new office right before their launch, too.
You know, I’d forgotten how good All Points Bulletin looked, not to mention Realtime World’s plans to overhaul driving and shooting before the shooter went defunct last year. The latest video from K2 Networks showcases driving like you’ve never seen in the game: functional. Although the driving isn’t perfect, the system is leaps and bounds ahead of what RTW presented when the game went live last year. Back when the original APB was still being patched, the developers laid forward plans to overhaul driving and shooting, and it looks like K2 Networks has fully implemented both.
By the way: If you watch the video, pay attention to how many deceased civilians are laying strewn about the sidewalk, that weren’t hit by either the criminal or the cop. Also note the improvements to the ragdolls and AI. The less civilians that run in front of my cop car, the better.
There is something to be said about this video from GamersFirst. If I had a nickel for every time I didn’t laugh during this show, I’d put those nickels in a sock, give that sock to Hal Sparks, and sit idly as he uses it to beat Jonenee Merriex for yet another spin-off of Talk Soup, minus the funny.
In case you hadn’t noticed, I’ve been out in North Carolina for the past week or so (hence the lack of updates) in a period of what I can only refer to as not having the internet, at all. But, now that I’m back, it’s time for a quick wrapup of what I should have written about at the time, but didn’t, so now the news is coming a few days too late. Just like getting a newspaper, right?
1. Enjoying the Rift Beta
I tweeted two RIFT VIP keys before I left, and hopefully those two people are enjoying the current beta event, which was extended to Saturday morning. I hope to have more of these giveaways in the future, so subscribe to my twitter in the right hand side, or follow @mmofallout so you can take part, and so that my internet ego my grow to epic proportions.
2. That Superhero MMO Is A Bestseller
DC Universe became Sony Online Entertainment’s best selling MMO to date, also topping Steam’s sales charts over the past week. In fact, DCU is selling so well that the title is having a hard time staying in stock in many retailers, I imagine partially due to people like myself who put down a few bucks to reserve the game, but went ahead and bought it somewhere else instead.
3. All Points Bulletin says “Two Strikes, and You’re Out”
At least according to Jagex, not having a no tolerance policy on cheating works to keep paying customers who may have gone out of line once, but are indeed salvageable by the great legitimate-promoting gods. So K2 Networks announced on their blog that they will be instituting a two-strike policy when APB goes live. Cheat once and you are temporarily banned, cheat twice and you are permanently banned. Of course, one could glance at Valve, whose previous policy of banning for five years was rescinded because the accounts went right back to cheating, but I wouldn’t want to distill the hope well.
4. That Other Superhero MMO Is Now Free
Champions Online may not be Cryptic’s first MMO, but it is their first AAA title to go partially free to play. Launching on the 25th, Cryptic is reporting large increases in population (most of them free players). Free players will find themselves with access to all of the game’s content, with restricted arche-types, with access to purchase the premium packs from the Cryptic Store. The premium packs are made up of the expansions that were released over the past year or so.
5. No Loving For EA’s MMOs, Say Investors
At least according to Gamasutra. With Star Wars: The Old Republic on its way, investors are a bit scared to support the giant corporation, looking back at the poor performance of Warhammer Online and especially after the two month lifespan that was All Points Bulletin. Bioware may have had successes in the past, but this is the company’s first dive into the MMO genre, and if Richard Garriot has taught us anything, even having a successful past in the field does not guarantee that your current project won’t go directly into the trash bin.
The Old Republic is being backed by a powerful company and developed by one with a name in the gaming business, both of which mean absolutely nothing in terms of whether or not the game will succeed, especially against the odds of its budget.
6. Codemasters Reveals Anti-Hacking Service
Codemasters hates account thieves, and for players of Lord of the Rings Online (in Europe), they are now offering a service for those of you who have had your accounts stolen. Players must be eligible to raise a support ticket, report the incident within seven days of it occurring, and the service also requires GM verification. Meeting these three requirements will reimburse the player and allow them to get back to where they were pre-account cleaning. A word of warning, however, abuse of the system may lead to a permanent ban.
I feel like I’ve been gone for a good month. Oh well, back to the old grind stone!
MMO Fallout 