I write this article knowing full well of the rumors that Epic Games is in talks to buy All Points Bulletin and either strip it to its core to figure out its secrets (Sylar style from Heroes) or relaunch the title under its own rule, but I want to make a distinction. No matter what happens in the future, this “What Happened” article is about All Points Bulletin under the reign of Realtime Worlds. Oddly enough, if Epic Games does pick this title up, then at some point in the future it will shut down again, meaning if MMO Fallout is still around at that point, that the game will have two funerals. Note to future self when I’m linking back to this article: Remember to point out the irony, even though it won’t be ironic at all.

It would be easy to say that Realtime Worlds went bankrupt and leave it at that, but the issues with All Points Bulletin lie in a problem that kills many hybrid games. I am, of course, speaking of the “jack of all trades, master of none” approach, where the developer attempts to cross two or more genres, and ultimately produces a product that is overall unimpressive in either category. In this case, Realtime Worlds attempted to cross the fast paced shooting and driving of Grand Theft Auto with the large scale, persistent world of an MMO. Early on in July, I wrote an article about how All Points Bulletin needed to find its identity, and soon.

On one hand, if APB is an MMO, then we’re all playing one of the most shallow MMOs on the market. Transcending genres, imagine if World of Warcraft comprised of nothing other than battlegrounds, fighting players for experience and cash. As an MMO, All Points Bulletin was shallow in the leveling system, the longevity system, and the atmosphere of the world around you. At some point Realtime Worlds forgot the biggest difference in World of Warcraft versus Call of Duty, in that Activision could care less if you get bored of Call of Duty, you’ve already paid your $50-60, whereas Blizzard has to keep you interested if they expect you to continue pumping a subscription fee into the game. On atmosphere, APB was a lot more fun with a group, but ultimately the small world that compromised the action and social districts felt two dimensional and unchanging. Instead of being in a living, breathing city, you were simply driving around waiting for your next mission to appear.

On the other hand, if APB is a shooter/driver, they offered no reason for players to pick up that game over the myriad of other non-subscription shooters on the market. The shooting mechanics were unresponsive and uninteresting, while the cars could fool you into believing your character was perpetually drunk, not a help when everyone you run over as an enforcer costs you prestige. Of course, Realtime Worlds made an effort to fix the driving and shooting mechanics down the line, but unfortunately they did it too late.

One of my more important lessons I teach to developers on MMO Fallout is that silence is deadly. Any gaps you do not fill will be filled by your community (and dedicated trolls), and the filler they use is not to your benefit. When Realtime Worlds place and embargo on reviews for seven days after the game launched, players who had not given the open beta a go were redirected to those who had. Although Realtime Worlds didn’t want professional publications making reviews based off of the lower-population beta experience, they only accomplished sending their prospective customers to the non-professional players who have absolutely no inhibitions when it comes to portraying their gripes over a video game. Remember, Eurogamer will never call your game a huge failure created by a bunch of scam artists, but your beta testers will. I believe I said at the time:

Now that the news of this embargo is being reported on, when the game does come out and widely reported issues with shooting and driving become even more publicly available, people may assume the worst: That the embargo was an effort to stifle critique.

But broken mechanics and bad PR a dead game does not make, and one simply has to look at Warhammer Online to know that a free-fall in subscribers post-launch can be turned around with the right allotment of time, and sadly Realtime Worlds was not afforded that time. There are a few ex-developer blogs floating around, talking about how the company became exactly what you saw being discussed on forums: Ignoring criticism from the beta community, growing a massive head, and believing they could compete with World of Warcraft. As one ex-employee put it:

The middle management – and there was a LOT of middle management at this company – they were on that game for years and they continued to run it as though they were managing an architecture project or something. Fun never seemed to be a criterion for what they were doing

As Luke Halliwell pointed out on his blog:

“I must say I was shocked at quite how quickly it went down in the end. It felt like we were being let go decently, and then BOOM – not getting paid anything, owed last month’s wages, our notice periods, redundancy pay and unused holidays. A substantial amount of money, all told.”

Was All Points Bulletin a grandiose letdown? Yes. Could it have been a great game? Yes. Should it have shipped the way it did? No. If Epic Games buys APB, can they make it into a masterpiece? Yes.

But as the Realtime Worlds saga comes to a final close, we are reminded that All Points Bulletin can be summed up as the product of a company pissing away millions, as Luke Halliwell’s wife put it.