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.
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.
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.
All Points Bulletin and Earth Eternal shut down around the same time last year, give or take about a month, and since then only one of the two has been getting much of any news coverage, and that tile is not Earth Eternal.
Over on the APB front, K2 Networks has been putting out regular blog updates on how the company is planning on dealing with free players, cheaters, private servers, and more. The latest blog post details hopes for a late-February launch of the APB closed beta, although any difficulties may extend that date into March. Closed beta details will be listed next week, but those of you tech-inclined folk may find some interest in the rest of the blog, detailing what K2 is currently doing to get the game back up and running.
Meanwhile, we’ve heard nothing new out of Earth Eternal. Neither the game’s Facebook or Twitter have been updated since around September, although off-site reports indicate that the game has been sold to Time Warner and will be rebooted sometime early this year. I am somewhat disappointed to see the lack of news out of Earth Eternal, especially since the buyer has never officially come out and announced themselves.
With All Points Bulletin, Earth Eternal, and hopefully Hellgate: London being brought back this year, who knows? Perhaps 2011 will be the year of MMO necromancy!
I get something of a twinge in my leg when a company somewhere either says or does something that provokes a potential customer to say “well they just saved me the cash I would have wasted checking this out,” so naturally I carry a House-like limp at all times. So when my femur fractured in three locations last week, I had a good feeling that something was up and after four or five days of investigation I came across an interview between Eurogamer and K2 Networks (also known as GamersFirst), the new owners of All Points Bulletin, to be relaunched as APB: Reloaded next year.
Currently a team of 24 people are installing a free to play, microtransaction model into All Points Bulletin, where players will be able to lease weapons in order to get into the game quicker. The game that was once promised to players by defunct studio Realtime Worlds? That is going to take a lot longer to release, in fact you’ll likely be finished with Left 4 Dead 5 by the time the fully realized APB is out. According to owner Bjorn Book-Larsson;
“Oh no [six months isn’t long enough] – we think it’ll take four or five years,”
Four or five years, so by 2015 the full incarnation of All Points Bulletin should be out. Larsson then goes on to explain that K2 Networks plans on launching APB as close to the notorious unreleased patch as possible, with the addition of leased weaponry, and a few other updates. In other words, APB is going to relaunch small to test the market, and go from there.
“After that, presuming there’s an interest in the game, we expect this to be a multi-year development process where we continue updating the game.”
Key phrase being “presuming there’s an interest.” There is still no guarantee that K2 Networks won’t shut down APB again, gut the code like a fish, and make use of its extensive customization engine. K2 has committed two years to the game, hopefully enough time to bring back old players and flesh in some new players.
It’s a good thing APB: Reloaded is launching as a free to play title. I’d hate to think my subscription money was going towards a five year long beta.
Rev up the Wikipedia, because All Points Bulletin has a buyer…well, it always had a buyer, but now we know who that buyer is: K2 Networks. To save some of you the work, K2 Networks is the gaming company behind the Western localizations of Knight Online, WarRock, 9Dragons, among others. Given that K2 operates solely on Asian f2p grinders, the likelihood that All Points Bulletin will follow the free to play cash shop model are very high.
An official statement is coming next week. You can read the full story on Eurogamer, and I guess it’s time to stick All Points Bulletin in the Upcoming category. Bet you never thought you’d see that. But today the Realtime Worlds APB saga comes to an end.
If you’re like me, you still have All Points Bulletin installed on your computer, and occasionally start up the client. For those of you who don’t, you can still read the news ticker here: The ticker is occasionally updated with news on APB and Realtime Worlds, the latter still going through the negotiation process to find a buyer for the former.
A couple days ago, the following appeared on the blog:
=== 22/10/2010 ===
It’s looking like there might be light at the end of the tunnel for APB. The end of the administration process is apparently close and there appears to be a buyer for the game.
You can find more information at the above website, or by launching your APB client. We may see APB come back by the end of the year (or early next year). Perhaps Webzen will take it on, they have something of a history picking up dead MMOs. I think this is the longest an MMO has gone postmortem still being covered here on MMO Fallout.
Those of you who purchased APB before its demise are likely aware that Electronic Arts, as distributor, is offering out free games if you can prove that you once owned the crashed MMO. Over multiple forums, players are reporting getting everything from Bioware bucks (that can be used to buy full games), EA store credit, and full games of the player’s choosing. If you are one of those players, you might want to check yourself before you email EA about the silent promotion, especially if you preordered APB.
I found out the hard way that Electronic Arts is only allowing people who purchased APB from July 15th onward into the program, and everyone else is out of luck. As the customer service rep put it:
I understand your frustration over this issue but there are a few things to remember. Real Time Worlds was the owner of the servers for this game, as well as the owner to the rights of the game as well, EA is simply trying to help out its customers through goodwill as we have no responsibility to refund or issue free games to customers for something out of our control.
I’ll reiterate an important lesson I brought forward in another MMO Fallout article: It is rarely a good idea to pre-order an MMO. If you just have to preorder an upcoming title, however, ensure you order it directly from the publisher, not from the developer or Steam or other platforms. This way, if the developer goes belly up two months after the game ships, and are unavailable/bankrupt, you can still go after the publisher for a chargeback I mean, compensation.
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.
I normally don’t talk about rumors, but if Earth Eternal can get bought up I’d like to think 130,000 player strong All Points Bulletin can get a reprieve as well. There are rumors flying around that Epic Games is gearing up to buy All Points Bulletin, no doubt a disappointment to the players currently working on private servers for the fledgling, if slightly cancelled, MMO. Say what you want about APB, the game didn’t really deserve to crash so early after launch, if anything for the sake of the people who still had 30+ hours of their gametime left (me).
If Epic Games picks up APB, hopefully they will relaunch it as a free to play game with microtransactions and VIP, ala Crimecraft. With the recent updates to the driving and shooting mechanics, APB improved vastly over its previous incarnation.
For those of you who are still wondering how this rumor came to be, Epic’s CEO Mark Rein loves APB. Loves it, almost like a man loves his football. Epic’s spokesperson commented that if there are talks going on, they are in full confidentiality, so there won’t be any information until it goes official, assuming it is credible.
MMO Fallout 