Yet another ambitious MMO project, but how will A.P.B. go beyond merely imitating World Of Warcraft?

Eminem's “We Made You” video is pretty hilarious. Not so much due to its actual comedic value – which is, let's face it, nonexistent – but because of how people reacted to its April 2009 release. Seven or eight years earlier, the petty celebrity baiting and petulant, limp-wristed chauvinism would have ignited the world. The Daily Mail would have heralded the inevitable dissolution of humanity – somehow incorporating “feral youths” into its diatribe – and Courtney Love would have threatened to sue. Sullen, platinum-blond young men the world over would have giggled approvingly while waiting for naked pictures of Jessica Alba to drip through their 56k connections, and Dr. Dre would have gleefully surveyed his bank balance before punching a female reporter in the face.

In 2009, though, it was almost instantly forgotten. The jokes had already been tapped out by Perez Hilton's pig-fingers. The music, which had once terrified so much damp tweed, had been diluted into parody years ago. And ultimately, I suspect the idea of a 37-year-old man-millionaire taking potshots at Kim Kardashian and Jessica Simpson seemed a little, well, pathetic.

This is a fate that Realtime Worlds hopes its upcoming MMO, A.P.B., will avoid. We're all perfectly capable of earnestly anticipating something for interminable periods, as evidenced by that wide-eyed, childlike feeling of hope triggered deep in the thalamus while making vaporware jokes about Duke Nukem Forever. The main problem, as with Eminem's single, isn't so much its extended development, but the fact that the world has kind of moved on.

Announced in the aftermath of San Andreas' publicity fallout, A.P.B. seemed perfectly pitched: urban, edgy, mouthy, subversive, and a little puerile. But now that Grand Theft Auto has evolved into intelligent social satire and billions of teenagers have emigrated from Curtis Jackson to Edward Cullen, the Toys 'R' Us take on urban crime that was so popular in the early-to-mid noughties now seems a little outdated.
Having said that, this long-delayed MMO's gameplay premise is still in a league of its own.

Various contenders have come and gone over the years, promising fast-paced, reflex gameplay in persistent worlds – Tabula Rasa, canned; Huxley, AWOL; CrimeCraft, execrable – but A.P.B. remains the locus of most discussions about the topic. The game owes its continued relevance to a number of factors. First, and perhaps most important, is its pedigree. Realtime Worlds isn't your common-or-garden MMO startup. It already has Crackdown to its name, and David Jones, the creator of Grand Theft Auto, as its founder and creative director. At the very least, this is a studio that understands its content.

As for the MMO side, well, other than the participants in the closed beta, nobody really knows yet. Jones certainly knows how to tantalise his audience, and recites A.P.B.'s virtues thus: “We want to create a fresh experience for action-based online gaming that is only possible with high-end dedicated servers. Like with most developers, everyone at Realtime Worlds is a gamer and we all enjoy fun online games. We were privileged to get the opportunity to create an online game world that was very different to anything seen to date. A living, breathing, persistent world that is contemporary and urban, being set in a dynamic city. Bringing hundreds of players at a time to these cities allowed us to create a whole new experience in online gaming.”

… continued

The Waiting Game

Depending on when you began paying attention and what you read, A.P.B. has been in development for five or six years now, and much has changed in that time. Despite initial plans for a dual-platform release, the planned Xbox 360 version has been indefinitely postponed. What's with all that? Jones responds: “Everything we are doing is new: an online game with hundreds of vehicles and thousands of NPCs, all fully [interactive]; amazing customisation of the player, their vehicles, their music, their audio; real-time dynamic matchmaking; full support for trading of everything created by the players. The list is extensive. All of this takes time, but more importantly it takes time to do it right.”
The industry may have been threatening a world-beating console MMO for several years now, but if A.P.B. is any barometer, “doing it right” in this genre is still very much in the domain of the PC.