If it wasn't bringing in profits now, it wouldn't have helped them at all if they went with the free-to-play scheme. That stuff only works if you already have a huge community.
From what I know the D&D Online game didn't bring in profits either until it went free to play.
If you have a huge community of subscription payers then there is no need to go free to play though.
Well then... that was fast. On one hand I feel like I'd be raging if I heard this news. On the other, it sounds like I wouldn't be playing the by now anyway.
It was part MMO part GTA, gameplay wasn't bad, but it for some reason took massive mount of hardware to run it smoothly, so they had to break down the areas into "gameplay rooms"
I have about 200 hours logged into my character on APB. I realize it was in development for 5 years but if they had just extended the release date and put 6 months in of pure content building then APB would've had more staying power. You got 50 free hours of action district gameplay(which is the shooting/driving part) and the custom shop stuff in the social district is all free all the time.
The issue is that you've experienced everything there is to do and see in APB within those 50 hours. There's no reason to play further than that. There are like 10 missions total and none of them mean anything even in the short term, and by that I mean story... of which there is none. None of them were remotely fun or involved any kind of thought. It was just "Go here and press 'F'", whether it was to set a room/car on fire, to break into a room, to plant/diffuse a bomb, take pictures... I mean it sounds varied but it all amounts to is going where you're supposed to and pushing 'F'. Take note of what the devs of Amnesia/Penumbra did, where moving your mouse reflects interacting with an object. If you're setting a car on fire, then have the player interact with the gas can that they're holding and let them flick the mouse around to cover the car. If you're using a battering ram to break a door down, then have the player move their mouse to move the battering ram. It would've made it a little more interesting and involved at least. And there are only 2 action districts, which are smaller than the size of one of the areas that you're limited to at the beginning of GTA3/GTA4. Combined, that's like an hour of gameplay, tops.
I think the biggest thing wrong with the game is the 4 on 4 restriction. Sure, you have the occasional match where it's like 8 on 8 or something but those are few and far between, and sadly the game was more fun when you had big matchups like that.
Then there are the gameplay concepts that really were not thought out very well at all and prone to massive amounts of exploitation. When APB launched, you could level up Fashionista by spending time customizing your character's clothing, and leveling up Fashionista would give you in-game cash, a significant amount of it at later levels. What people did was create characters and just sat them there overnight while they slept to level up Fashionista. Once that character leveled up high, they made a new one and did the same thing to earn it all again. That's a great way to start the game, right? Immediately and irreparably screw up the economy so all the prices in the auction house are obnoxiously overblown and anyone who didn't exploit can't buy anything. There's enough exploitation in real life, I don't need it in my games too.
Matchmaking in APB was determined by your threat level. Your threat level was determined by how many matches you've won... or something of the sort. Criminals in APB can steal any car on the street from a pedestrian and turn it in for cash. They can also ram raid window shops, put the items in their car or van, and turn the stolen items in for cash. Doing this makes your wanted level go up and you have a chance of having an Enforcer called against you as your notoriety goes up. Sounds good in concept. What criminals did was accept backup calls or dispatches and would completely ignore the mission in favor of doing ram raiding or car theft. This prevents an Enforcer from being called against them, they get rewarded for being in the mission even if they lost, nobody on the opposing team knows where they are in most cases during the mission, and they just farm cash this way for upgrades. What this does in turn is because they're losing matches their threat level goes down, and when they actually do decide to play, they've got all these upgrades that they bought by basically cheating and are matched up against players that may legitimately have a low threat level because they're new or they suck. This in turn puts off anyone new to the game because they can't get a legitimate match up. APB also thinks that a lower amount of high threat players against more low threat players is fair so even high threat players are affected by this as they're overwhelmed by people with low threat who have no business having low threat.
This is all compounded by the fact that you can only have up to 80 players in an instance. Assuming 40 criminals versus 40 enforcers, there's really not much the system itself can do to give you a fair match up in the first place. It needed cross-instance matchmaking or bigger instances altogether(which would mean bigger districts because they're already cramped in certain high traffic areas as it is).
The other major problem is that the main drive for playing for an extended period of time is gaining rep with factions. There are 2 factions per side, and there are a handful of individuals on each side to gain rep with, many of them need to be unlocked before you can start getting rep with them. With 39 other members on your side to choose from on a particular instance, it's impossible to get a group set up so everyone can benefit from the rep gains. This encourages solo-play. Playing missions solo, like 1v1 or 1v2 or whatever is no fun because the guy with the most upgrades wins basically, and 1v2s are nearly impossible even if you're the guy with the most upgrades. To add on to the problem, you gain significantly less cash for smaller matchups like this. So do you continue playing 1v1s, earning less, sometimes facing impossible odds, or do you answer backup calls? Answering backup calls against a group of players(you are shown the threat levels of everyone that's going to be against you before you take a backup call) usually means that you're going up against a preset group, which means you'll probably lose as no preset group should lose to a pickup group, so you still have the impossible odds factor in groups too. You're earning more money by losing these 4v4s sure, but you're losing... over and over and over again, which is not fun... which goes back to asking yourself "Why the hell am I playing this to begin with if I'm not having fun?". There was also massive(warranted or unwarranted) hysteria with regards to hacking. I've never paid attention to it, not a whole lot but every once and awhile I believed that someone against me was hacking so I think it was a problem but not as much of a problem as most people believed it was. Apparently it had hackers during beta and they didn't do anything about it which means that they were available upon release.
Overall, APB was poorly thought out. It had a very solid foundation, it handles vehicle crashing well in multiplayer, lag was virtually non-existent for me until they tried turning Punkbuster on which happened to everyone so it was a server issue and not me, graphics were passable but atrocious in it's level of detail(in 2010 APB decides it's acceptable to draw a building in the distance as a rectangle with a tiled texture painted on it which gets much better looking when you're within 100m of it... this is not a PS2 game guys, it acted much like GTA3 did if you notice how it handles roads, cars, buildings and other props at a distance) and still had the balls to require quite a bit out of your hardware, customization was very good as well. Though it lacked actual models to work with, you could do a lot in terms of texturing.
I believe that they didn't give a crap about what their internal testers and what their beta testers gave as feedback because these were monstrous issues that needed to be addressed before an official release. 5 years of development time and even some of the most basic things with the game seemed to have been thought out by someone who hasn't played very many games in their lifetime. I think the worst part about all of this is that this was the brain child of the guy that basically created Grand Theft Auto, which is pretty prestigious to be known as such, but now he's also got APB as his brainchild which cancels out GTA. His stock has diminished down to nothing.
Last edited by Viperfish; September 23rd, 2010 at 08:48 AM.
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Re: APB shut down 
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