I used to be going to open this put up by saying ‘Remember APB?’, however Graham already did that in 2013. Um. Do you bear in mind remembering APB? It’s the cops and robbers MMO that launched in a shonky state again in 2010, inflicting Realtime Worlds to sink simply weeks after launch. Then the sport received picked up by GamersFirst, who turned it free-to-play, slapped ‘Reloaded’ onto the title, and made it…a little less shonky?
This week, the story continues. Little Orbit have purchased GamersFirst, and their CEO is promising to take care of the somehow-still-existent APB group with large content material updates and a shift to a more moderen engine. Will it’s sufficient to make these cops price robbing and the robbers price copping?
You can learn Orbit CEO Matthew Scott’s letter to the group for your self here. He’s eager to emphasize how open the dev course of goes to be from right here out, and desires to shake up each the world of APB and the tendrils outdoors the sport itself:
“In the next 30 days, expect to see GDPR updates for GamersFirst including new privacy policies, code of conduct, and term & conditions. We will also be cleaning up the social pages, implementing a new forum, showcasing a general roadmap for the game and announcing a significant change to our banning and cheating policies.”
“This is all crucial for establishing an surroundings the place you may give us suggestions.
“After that we’re going to focus on content. I’ll be working on an exact roadmap that we can publish soon, but over the coming months we would like to add a new mode, maps, clothes, guns, vehicles and a new matching system for competitive play. Alongside all of that we are committed to upgrading APB Reloaded to the Unreal 4 engine.”
He additionally warns that the engine change is prone to take a very long time, and – extra strikingly – that he doesn’t anticipate the change to make a lot distinction within the brief time period.
“Personally I don’t think Unreal 4 is going to have a big impact on the look or speed of the game”, he says, including that “it may not even be noticeable to some.” The transfer is absolutely about making certain the sport’s “long-term viability”, says Scott.
I haven’t performed it myself, however all the things I’ve heard means that a lot of the sport’s issues are ones that content material updates received’t care for. As Brendy puts it: “Presented as Grand Theft Auto meets MMO it had neither the confidence of the former nor the lifespan of the latter. It was ambitious but also doomed. Poor driving controls, humdrum shooting matches and a lack of variety couldn’t save it from the ire of heartless critics.”
You can discover extra of Brendy’s heartless, correct criticism in his review.
