By John Walker on June 17th, 2010 at 1:00 pm.
Review embargoes are a very normal part of games journalism. Companies will put restrictions on when publications are allowed to talk about games before they’re released. For previews this is done to control the dissemination of information. For reviews it’s to allow certain publications to have an exclusive, or more muckily, because they don’t want negative reviews to appear too much in advance of the game’s release. It’s potentially murky territory, but since it’s their game, they get to choose the conditions in which they make them available to magazines and websites before commercial release. It’s not unusual for everyone to be told, “Reviews of game X may be published at 5pm on the 26th”, and then you’ll see all the sites have their reviews appear at once.
What’s far more rare is a company attempting to control the publications of reviews after a game has been released. Especially not ten days after. This is what Realtime Worlds are astonishingly trying to enforce for APB.
The response to the closed beta has not been positive. Once the NDA was lifted (and in many cases well before) many players have reported that the customisation is extraordinary, but the driving and shooting are both poor. Which is an issue in a driving and shooting game. I’ve not played a single second of APB, and thus have no opinions on it either way, and am not in a position to break any form of NDA or embargo. But the impression I’ve picked up is negative. RTW could perhaps have picked up a similar vibe.
In such circumstances you might expect a developer to embargo reviews until the moment of release. The game goes live in the States on the 29th June, let’s say at 9am. So reviews might normally all appear at 9am on the 29th. So as expected, on 4th June, an email accompanying the Key To The City event details from PR agency Indigo Pearl, working for RTW, explained that the beta code is reviewable, with an embargo for the 29th June. Exactly as we’d expected.
But then on the 10th June, two days before the Key To The City open beta began, the a correction was sent out. We were informed that the Key To The City was in fact for previews only. We were told that reviews can be “finalised” when we have the released version of the game, which we’d get on 29th June. And then they added that reviews are embargoed until 6th July.
This is extraordinary. They are attempting to tell press that they cannot write a review of the game for a full week after the game is available for the public to buy.
It is, of course, impossible to enforce. The public will be able to write anything they wish about the game anywhere they wish from the very first second it’s available. Of course. Because to prevent this would, well, involve Realtime Worlds taking over the planet and beginning an international oppressive dictatorship. And while they’re certainly an ambitious developer, this is perhaps beyond their realm. So of course the gaming press can equally write about a released game whenever they choose, and a company attempting to prevent this is ludicrous and unenforceable.
So what’s the argument from their side? Well, we approached Indigo Pearl to ask for a comment from Realtime Worlds, and were promised one would be coming. That was a week ago and we’ve heard nothing. So we can but suppose:
MMO developers are incredibly sensitive about the amount of time a game is played for before reviews are written. It’s becoming increasingly common for negative or even average review scores to be met by the developer/publisher going into the reviewer’s account logs and publicising how much time they spent playing the game. Now, this is arguably simply imposing accountability on the reviewer, and is a discussion for another time. But in imposing a week’s embargo on reviews, they may perhaps be attempting to ensure that no reviews of the fully released code go up before they think a fair opinion might reasonably have been formed.
It’s reasonable for a developer to say that a review cannot be based on beta code, and to play in a beta you do agree to certain conditions. Most developers, by open beta stage, agree that it is suitable to be reviewed from, since it’s extremely unlikely it will be dramatically different from the boxed, released code that appears a couple of weeks later. Open betas are more about stress-testing servers than fixing the game in time for release. But there’s no reason why RTW shouldn’t refuse this. So perhaps in imposing their week late restriction they believe they’re ensuring fair reviews of finished code.
Or perhaps they’re trying to prevent reviews from appearing during the peak week for sales. Which, if the game proves to be poor, would certainly be to their advantage. If this is their reason, then they are attempting to silence criticism of their commercially released product, preventing consumers from receiving appropriate purchasing advice.
Whatever their reason is, they’ve crossed a very obvious, very ridiculous line. When anyone anywhere can post a review to their blog, a comments thread, or a site’s reader reviews section, it’s beyond daft to think that the site itself cannot.
Yes, it’s impossible to entirely separate this argument from that of for how long an MMO should be played for before publishing a review. But this is not a decision for publishers/developers to make. And certainly not one they can enforce.
But it’s one they’re still trying to. Today journalists received keys for the current open beta directly from Realtime Worlds, which were accompanied by this message:
“Please note that there is no embargo for preview coverage and you will be able to post screenshots from the game to support this.
Before finalising reviews, we want you to experience the full, rich experience of APB as it is meant to be seen. We want you to see wild customer customisations, player progression and clans making an impact on the living breathing city of San Paro. This key code also therefore grants you, along with our pre-order customers, VIP early access before the official launch day. June 26th in North America and June 28th in Europe.
The review embargo is Tuesday, 6th July at 8am UK time.”
It’s now, incredibly, ten days after the game is available to the public before reviews are “allowed” to be published.
17/06/2010 at 13:05 mrmud says:
Probably because the game plays like shit.
Dont get me wrong, I think the customisability options are fantastic and in some respects it would almost be worth it to buy the game for that alone (but its not, because they have linked the options you have in customisation to your in game progress). But the game itself is still terrible.
17/06/2010 at 13:09 Steven Hutton says:
Yeah, this, pretty much. It’s not very much fun to play.
17/06/2010 at 13:18 Sagan says:
I wouldn’t call it terrible. I had fun playing it. It had some problems, but they were never enough to make me want to stop playing.
17/06/2010 at 13:18 Sweedums says:
yeah i enjoyed the beta…. for the first hour or so, until the whole process got very repetetive and somewhat dull.
out of curiosity, what happens if a site like RPS breaks an embargo? is it a legal issue or just a trust issue?
17/06/2010 at 13:30 mrmud says:
Its entierly a trust issue.
What happens is that sites that break embargoes may stop getting review code and invites to events.
But i seriously doubt any of that would happen to any publication/site that published a review after the game had gone live.
17/06/2010 at 14:04 monkeybreadman says:
This in itself is a review of sorts…. a bad one
17/06/2010 at 22:14 RodeoClown says:
Couldn’t any review site *cough*RPS*cough* just not use their pre-release key and buy the game first thing on the day of release and run a super quick review before anyone else was able to?
20/06/2010 at 11:24 Tauron Xavenberg says:
I honestly don’t know what to say. I mean, personally the only way I’ve ever interpreted something like this is because a company knows they’re selling a crappy product, and don’t want people to know.
YET I was there in KTTC, played the game like crazy, and it was frigging awesome! There were no serious bugs that I encountered, and few otherwise noticeable ones at all. The driving certainly took an hour or two of getting used to but beyond that it was good. But the multiplayer missions, shootouts and car chases were just frigging spectacular. So I really don’t know what to say? And of course, it doesn’t even need to be said that the customization for character, car, music etc is beyond anything the world has ever seen by far.
How can a game that feels more fun than I’ve had in such a long while, seem to get so much negative feedback? Honestly, I just don’t know. Right now, I’m not worried that I won’t have a great game. I know I will. But I’m worried that people won’t get it because of so much pointless negative feedback, and that will affect the online world. I just don’t understand why? I mean, I like TF2, BF2, CSS, GTA, WoW, all the usual mass-products that practically everyone else loves as well. So why do I love this one, but others don’t? What’s supposed to be wrong with it?
24/05/2011 at 18:19 rdrcheats says:
There are moments in APB where I found my heart pounding out of my chest, beating faster than my assault rifle could empty ammunition. APB’s San Paro is a online city where the criminals fight the police on the streets, both sides player-controlled.
iPhone App Development Services
17/06/2010 at 13:05 greg wild says:
Are they placing a wot I fink embargo?
17/06/2010 at 13:12 Mr_Day says:
No, but they are implementing a new type of language which should, if all goes well, eliminate the ability for anyone to say something negative about APB.
How can you have bad thoughts if you can’t express them, eh?
17/06/2010 at 13:26 Sweedums says:
my telescreen is telling me APB is plusgood
17/06/2010 at 13:27 Alexander Norris says:
Thoughtcrime, Mr Day; thoughtcrime. I think it’s off to the Oppressive Dictatorship School again for you, as you seem to need a refresher course on 1984. :P
17/06/2010 at 14:35 Mr_Day says:
Aww, man. I hate OPS. I swear, Professor Hitler has it in for me.
And he has a gas chamber. And he doesn’t do science.
I can keep going with that. Should I keep going with that? I’ll stop.
17/06/2010 at 14:37 Mr_Day says:
Er, ODS. I miss you, edit function. Why did you leave me?
17/06/2010 at 14:52 MrPyro says:
A comment thread on 1984 in which you cannot revise history.
Not sure if that’s a win or a fail.
17/06/2010 at 18:17 realmenhuntinpacks says:
Orwell ZING!
17/06/2010 at 20:56 Bret says:
It’s to show that all of RPS is opposed to futuristic dystopias, and not just Gillen.
Might be a bit overboard, really.
17/06/2010 at 21:06 dethgar says:
It’s 2010, where’s my goddamn Speakwrite and Versificator?
17/06/2010 at 13:07 Meat Circus says:
Well, I’m not embargoed, and I can say that the impression you’ve picked up from other people (great customization, dated shooting and godawful vehicle handling) are absolutely correct.
Trying to use embargoes to hide the fact that APB is absolutely nowhere near good enough for release is absolutely shameful.
17/06/2010 at 13:07 Antsy says:
Surely this speaks volumes about the confidence Realtime Worlds has in their game. APB has gone from something quite exciting to a game that’s suffered one compromise after another in its development.
My final flicker of of interest has been extinguished.
17/06/2010 at 13:07 Jhoosier says:
As a knee-jerk reaction I’d say if a company tries to embargo their game until AFTER release, then the game’s not worth buying so I’ll skip it.
17/06/2010 at 13:08 Out Reach says:
combined with the ridiculous payment structure this is just another sign to me that APB will be terrible. I’m avoiding it like the plague.
17/06/2010 at 13:09 Freudian Trip says:
It’s not very good and sounds like a Publisher desperately scrambling to avoid a large number of 5/10s
17/06/2010 at 13:10 MrCraigL says:
Is RPS going to be honouring the embargo with it’s Wot I think?
17/06/2010 at 13:33 qrter says:
Is any self-respecting gamingsite going to follow this embargo?
There comes a point where you have to show a bit of backbone and push back, surely.
17/06/2010 at 13:46 MrCraigL says:
Some places have to be careful who they piss off – at the end of the day if you’re funded by advertising, ignoring an embargo date could well cost you income.
17/06/2010 at 15:10 jsdn says:
A game review site not writing reviews hurts income more.
17/06/2010 at 17:17 Tacroy says:
Lewie P has already posted his review. It’s probably one of the best I’ve seen.
17/06/2010 at 13:13 TotalBiscuit says:
Well on one hand it’s a perfect opportunity for bloggers and those of us not deemed worthy of receiving review code to drive great traffic to our sites, whoop!
On a less selfish note however, I’m surprised more MMO creators haven’t tried to enforce this. MMOs so very often fall flat on their face at launch due to all manner of problems. Server instability becomes part of many reviews and affects the score, consumers are naturally wary of new MMO launches since they are more often than not, bad. I don’t think it’s entirely unreasonable to ask a reviewer to spend some time with the game and get to know it before delivering their damning verdict, particularly since many reviews are haphazard, slap-dash and based on too short a time spent with the title (see IGNs review of God Hand, almost everything Gamespot has written that didn’t involved the current Giant Bomb crew, every non-firstparty review from an official console magazine, etc etc).
That said, to believe that a reviewer will spend 40 hours with a title instead of say 10 or 20, just because there’s an embargo is ridiculous. The reviews will be sitting there gathering dust until the embargo is lifted and in the meantime, bloggers with nothing to lose (rebels without a cause) will be putting out damning reviews of what has so far been shown to be a giant, expensive waste of time that needs more work before release. If RTW is attempting to control the message, all they’re really succeeding in doing is giving the other 98% of reviewers who don’t qualify for their press list a carte blanche to trash their game in front of an unusually large audience. Personally, I’m salivating at the potential ad revenue, but I do hope they manage to improve what is a very promising but currently extremely flawed title.
17/06/2010 at 13:14 Bantros says:
Well, I have to say the driving and shooting are poor and I played for a few weeks. Having played recent 3rd person games with actual cover mechanics and decent shooting ie. Mass Effect 2, Uncharted 2, APB is like playing something from 5 years ago. Graphics aren’t that great although I think they were locked to Medium for the beta and the lag was terrible at times.
I have to say I was disappointed as I was looking forward to the game for quite some time. Great idea, bad execution it seems. Unfortunate
17/06/2010 at 13:15 Songbearer says:
Oh god. As someone who has over 100 hours clocked in closed beta and have had this game preordered for a while, I love this game and know that lots of people have had problems with it and RTW have picked up a lot of flak for its flaws, but this is just (Forgive the expression) retarded.
It shows just how much faith they have in their product despite all their talk of supporting it after launch. People’s faith in RTW is already low, it’s like they’re actively trying to hurt themselves.
17/06/2010 at 13:18 Meat Circus says:
But the game only has around five hours of content. How have you managed this?
17/06/2010 at 13:19 TotalBiscuit says:
Meat Circus, by that same logic, TF2 has about 5 hours of content, since y’know, you have to repeat maps and objectives.
17/06/2010 at 13:22 Sagan says:
@ Meat Circus:
I have heard that Counter Strike has only about five hours of content. Even worse, DotA has only one hour’s worth of content. Yet they became two of the most played games on the web.
17/06/2010 at 13:39 Meat Circus says:
But games like these are infinitely varied, and have enormous numbers of combinations of ways to play.
The APB beta, there were about three cookie cutter missions, and everybody plays them exactly the same every time, down to using the same two guns.
I wish APB had the depth of TF2. Give it a year of extra development, it might grow some depths. But it#s got nothing right now.
17/06/2010 at 14:11 Kadayi says:
@Meat Circus
The more you talk, the more clear it becomes that you’ve really little if any understanding of the game.
17/06/2010 at 14:25 Meat Circus says:
Yeah, what do I know? I’ve only played the fucking thing.
Kadayi, why not try addressing some of the criticisms of the game head-on? I’m not the only one making them.
17/06/2010 at 14:30 Chris D says:
Ok, I’ll get some popcorn…
17/06/2010 at 14:54 Kadayi says:
@Meat Circus
You ‘think’ you’ve played it. But from where I’m standing as someone whose been in the test since October, it’s clear you haven’t esp with dumb comments like ’5 hours content’.
17/06/2010 at 15:17 user@example.com says:
Kadayi: Yeah, Meat only thinks he’s played It because he’s sat there facerolling and staring blindly at the login screen, he hasn’t actually experienced Its true transcendent glory. I bet he hasn’t actually managed to log in yet, and clearly hasn’t created a character and played even a single mission. If he would only accept APB into his heart and be recognise Its love for him, and for us all, he would truly be saved.
Alternatively, you’re coming off as a bit of a cultist, which doesn’t give a very good impression of the game’s fans.
17/06/2010 at 19:00 PleasingFungus says:
Having played seven hours of it (according to the in-game-o-meter):
It’s an okay third-person shooter.
Not amazing, not genre-redefining, but I’ve still had some fun with it. (Hurtling through the streets in a small convoy, sirens blaring, lights flashing… driving straight at a higher-level enemy player pouring rifle fire at us from behind cover and using it as a ramp to fly straight to the drop-off point, clipping his head off in the process…)
Certainly not going to buy it, though. Especially not after this.
17/06/2010 at 20:22 Kadayi says:
@user@example.com
A cultist? Hardly. APB has its issues (like all games), but nothing that’s insurmountable. In fact the devs have been very good at responding to intelligent feedback all through the beta and acting upon it, and I don’t think that is likely to change as a policy come release. Fact of the matter is though, even if you looked at the game in the most moronic & myopic way, there’s still way more than 5 hours content to it. If someone promotes a fiction as fact, is it unreasonable to bring them to account?
17/06/2010 at 21:28 DrazharLn says:
Having played the game for some 15 hours or so, I can say that I’ve had a lot of fun. The missions were a bit disappointing in that I would have preferred much more player control (say, player controlled factions dictating hit targets across the city to gather cash and buy sweet loot for their followers), but the missions are fun enough and it really is fun to have enforces chasing you or to chase criminals (I’ve played both).
The only times I haven’t enjoyed the game have been when there has been lag (making driving and shooting impossible, though this can be remedied by moving to a server with fewer players), those deathmatch style end missions and when playing on my own.
I’d say it’s a fun game. Given a bit more work in the missions and gunplay departments and it’ll be very good. If they remake the faction system to be player controlled then it could become my favourite game.
Oh yeah, and more variety in the animations. Everyone stands exactly the same way, regardless of gender and if you’re not holding a gun there are no idle animations.
A cover system would be good too, almost all combat is done from behind cover of some kind as weapons are quite lethal and snap to cover would be much better and more immersive than running up to a wall, aiming into the wall (watch your gun clip through the wall here) then leaning and slowly shuffling sideways.
It would also help the problems where you end up shooting the wall because you didn’t get the angle quite right (hard to do in third person).
17/06/2010 at 13:15 Chris D says:
It’s not actually a review if you don’t give it a score, right?
17/06/2010 at 14:53 LintMan says:
@Chris D:
Exactly. All the review sites should release “In depth previews” explaining the embargo situation and saying exactly what they think, and when the embargo ends, just change the title to say “In depth review”, and tack the score on the end. That’s the Passive-Agressive solution.
Better would be if all the review sites got together and as a whole decided to break the embargo. They’d all still end up on RTW’s shite list, but the games industry as a whole woudn’t be able to blackball all the sites for not honoring embargoes.
17/06/2010 at 19:59 DJ Phantoon says:
Sure they could. And you know the only games journalist that wouldn’t do the embargo and thus be the only one left?
Dave Tosser.
17/06/2010 at 13:16 Alex says:
My biggest issue with the beta was the performance – character customization looked amazing, but once I got on the server, the graphics looked very poor, and things were so choppy I couldn’t aim or drive. I didn’t play very much, but what I did was pretty frustrating. This was for the NA beta, the EU beta was even worse for me.
The game is a very cool idea, though, and I really enjoyed messing with the character creator.
17/06/2010 at 13:17 lhzr says:
hah, good thing i didn’t bother downloading the beta, then.
17/06/2010 at 13:17 Synoptase says:
Well, i’ve been playing APB about 12h and i’ve been having a lot of fun. Sure, there are bugs, content seems to be a little short. Still, i find this game attractive and very enjoyable. The driving looks a bit fishy at a first glance, but once you get past the odd camera postionning, it’s fun. Shooting is not bad too, it’s pretty accurate and dynamic.
I’ve also beta played global agenda (GA) and it’s nothing compared to APB. GA is really slow, it feels squishy if you know what i mean… APB is quite punchy, it feels right. Let’s just hope that content will be furtherly pushed and the game will get all the attention it deserves.
Cheers
17/06/2010 at 13:33 mrmud says:
Difference being that GA actually has varied gameplay.
Not that I think GA is fantastic or anything but at least it held my interest for 15 hours or so.
17/06/2010 at 18:48 Lilliput King says:
I didn’t really get Global Agenda. The interface was one of the worst things ever devised, the combat was laggy as hell with no feedback on opponents or locally, and the entire gameplay model seems to revolve around AoE spam. It had a couple of PvP modes which were interesting and a bunch of utterly appalling PvE modes which frankly should’ve been shitcanned well before release, and the global PvP was an incomprehensible mess.
So yeah, about 3 hours.
17/06/2010 at 13:17 ShaunCG says:
I found that the shooting was not entirely awful, but the driving was almost comical with players slamming into one another every 30 seconds simply because the steering is so clumsy and laggy.
I enjoyed the game and would have been willing to give it a try, but this embargo does disincline me from chancing it on release. I’ll wait until after the embargo is lifted to decide.
17/06/2010 at 13:18 DanPryce says:
Well they can wait ten days for my cash then.
17/06/2010 at 13:20 cliffski says:
Jesus christ I’m surprised this isn’t a 500 comment thread full of hatred and death threats, because that’s how shit like this makes me feel.
Attention all big website reviewers, if you are twiddling your thumbs because the developers of this overhyped demo-less pile of shit won’t let you even try their game, email me at cliff@positech.co.uk and I’ll send you free review copies of every game I’ve ever made, with absolutely zero expectations in return.
I’m quite happy to make a game, and live or die by how much people enjoy it. It seems developers and publishers who churn out lower quality games feel the need to stoop to shit like this to try and paper over the mess of their games launch.
I’d love to know if any big name sites refuse to cover the game on principle.
17/06/2010 at 13:22 Kieron Gillen says:
“I’m surprised this isn’t a 500 comment thread full of hatred and death ”
Give it time, I suspect.
KG
17/06/2010 at 13:27 Metalfish says:
Oh, Cliffski, don’t ever change.
17/06/2010 at 13:33 tekDragon says:
yeah seriously, people in the west are just waking up.
17/06/2010 at 13:35 mrmud says:
Im not foaming at the mouth because I believe (hope) that review sites will ignore the imbargo since it is so ludicrous.
Should they not ignore it… well then it’s another story all together.
17/06/2010 at 13:38 tekDragon says:
Also… this is so ridiculous, and so unlikely to happen, that it’s almost not worth the bile. Are published seriously considering obeying this comedic restriction?
Also… if there ever was an indication that a game was going to be a terrible mess at launch there you have it. “hello foot! have you seen this great new gun I just got?”
17/06/2010 at 13:41 Meat Circus says:
Don’t worry, Cliffski. This seems to be building to a full-on nerd rage quite nicely.
What may undermine it somewhat is that most of us played the Keys to the City event and experienced APB’s cackiness first hand.
17/06/2010 at 15:15 The Innocent says:
Hey, I’m really just posting to fulfill Cliffski’s request:
I hate this shit. You gonna DIE Realtime Worlds. You gonna die.
(Beyond the facetiousness, I really am rather pissed at the gall of the issue).
17/06/2010 at 20:04 DJ Phantoon says:
Man, I really wish you made games I’d play, Cliffski. Then I could give you all my money dollars.
17/06/2010 at 22:39 Malawi Frontier Guard says:
Yes, make games I like for a change.
PS: I like abattoirs.
18/06/2010 at 15:49 ascagnel says:
I wouldn’t say its demo-less (the current “Keys to the City” “beta” event is really a pre-release demo), but it doesn’t excuse trying to hold off on the reviews.
If RTW had instead come out and said “Hey, can you give us a few days so we can get all the launch problems squared away before you review,” I think they might have gotten a lot less flack. I’ve seen reviews of MMOs years after they launched where they were dinged a point in the review for a shaky launch, and that isn’t necessarily fair.
This whole situation reminds me of when a movie production company doesn’t screen a movie for critics — they know it’ll be shit, so if they hold off on the reviews, they might get a few more people to see it.
17/06/2010 at 13:20 Yfel says:
We should all be demanding demos for every game entered into the stream of commerce so we can make up our own minds. Too many games and especially MMOs turn out to be very disappointing when compared to the hype and developer promises that precede it.
Embargo-moves like this appear to portray an intent to not only withhold from us the opportunity to judge the actual product for suitability for purchase, but to withhold any form of counterweight to their marketing.
If they’re so sure it takes 10 full days to see the real value their game has to offer, consumers should not need to pay for those first 10 days, before making up their mind.
17/06/2010 at 15:19 The Innocent says:
“If they’re so sure it takes 10 full days to see the real value their game has to offer, consumers should not need to pay for those first 10 days, before making up their mind.”
This.
Also, if they’re confident that things pick up once there are more than three guns available and my character has stuff unlocked beyond a sweatshirt and exercise pants, then they should make more items unlocked from the start. Granted, everyone in the game I played had the same stuff so it wasn’t too imbalanced (other than singular random higher-prestige people showing up and owning with their three-upgrade-slotted super-rifles), but it sure was boring. I had some huge fat wad of cash from missions and nothing to spend it on. Maybe I was just doing really poorly and not building my prestige as quickly as I ought to have been.
17/06/2010 at 13:21 Vague-rant says:
Driving didn’t feel that bad to be honest. Sure it wasn’t great but if you were careful with the brake you could do alright. The shooting was much worse, which was a much greater crime in my opinion.
Very suspicious embargo though.
17/06/2010 at 13:22 TooNu says:
Idiots and their crappy games.
17/06/2010 at 13:22 Metalfish says:
I have to say, the customisation options are indeed excellent. I’ve happily infringed a copyright or two. The shooting and driving are bit unsatisfying to say the least, however. Plus it is looking increasingly like this’ll be a game where a large wallet (IRL) means you’ll be that much deadlier a lot quicker.
17/06/2010 at 13:23 toni says:
i think this sucks just like the game does. I can see ppl loving it but for me it’s just a muddled mess of nothing and forcing reporters in embargoes while the rest of the internet is getting ready for the next big thing is just stupid. even bad publicity is a publicity. And I’m sure there are enough fanboys from GTA around that like senseless shooting without any depth.
17/06/2010 at 17:18 Clovis says:
I’m a really big GTA fan, but the few hours of APB I played was horrible. I don’t see how it has anything in common with GTA at all.
It did manage make cars handle worse than GTA somehow.
17/06/2010 at 13:24 Bowlby says:
Unless this embargo is legally enforcible, I can see at least one major website/publication breaking with it on the day of release. And once that happens, I can imagine most other websites doing the same.
In addition, they’ve just generated more bad PR for a game which already has a lot of scepticism surrounding it. GG, Indigo Pearl.
17/06/2010 at 13:25 Mad Doc MacRae says:
I really wonder how “establishment” review sites will respond to this. It’s a ludicrous demand and in the very spirit of journalism to defy it.
17/06/2010 at 13:28 Erlend Grefsrud says:
Well, judging by the closed beta, the game is fundamentally broken beyond repair. Of course, that was some time ago, so they could have fixed a whole lot of their problems, but I don’t think that duff driving model, the loose shooting and the mediocre, plasticky graphics could realistically be fixed in less than a year.
Plus, the customization interface is possibly the worst mess I have ever seen. It’s as if no-one thought about how a user might want to use an interface for sculpting and applying decals. It’s hands-down the most awful piece of interface design I have ever seen (at least it was last year), and I laughed out loud several times while using it. It’s like Bethesda and EA’s terribly inept customization interfaces made a hell of a lot worse.
Incredible that they didn’t put more thought into the thing considering it’s their main sales point. I hope this all turns out for the best, there’s a lot of great people working at Real Time Worlds, and it would be an awful shame if their product failed.
17/06/2010 at 13:29 Bossman says:
The embargo does make sense because the servers don’t open until 3 days before the official release date and I’m pretty sure that reviewers won’t be able to play the game enough in just 3 days to write a review. Sure, they did have access to the previous beta even but that only had a very limited amount of playtime so nobody could really see how all the hgh level stuff works.
17/06/2010 at 16:17 Archonsod says:
It doesn’t matter how fantastic the high level stuff happens to be if playing the game becomes a chore after the first hour.
17/06/2010 at 13:30 Tei says:
A embargo make sense to me, if the game is about to suffer a huge change.
But I don’t think APB will get that.
Anyway is something betwen the journos and the devs.
17/06/2010 at 13:44 P7uen says:
And, possibly, a few people who might read the journos opinions of the devs’ work.
Maybe.
17/06/2010 at 13:30 Chris D says:
It’s ironic that this thread now contains a dozen mini reviews within half an hour of posting.
17/06/2010 at 13:31 Kadayi says:
I’d imagine that they are probably setting this out as they don’t want reviews based off of the Beta code, but rather off the actual genuine retail game experience, which makes sense tbh. The present KttC client is not the same build as the latest closed client for example (I can’t say more than that unfortunately).
As regards the naysayers, haters going to hate it seems. Personally I’ve had a blast through the beta, principally because I’ve grouped up with players and not tried to treat it like a simple player game, or attempt to judge it against them.
17/06/2010 at 13:41 poop says:
the major design flaws and terrible bullshit pricing in APB aren’t going to be magically fixed in the week between the prerelease promo and the game’s actual release
17/06/2010 at 14:15 Kadayi says:
@poop
Care to elaborate? Or are you going to hide behind murky generalisations? Also if your issue is with paying for a persistent game world, then I fear you were always going to be disappointed.
17/06/2010 at 14:18 IdleHands says:
That still doesn’t make much sense to me, why bother sending out beta codes to reviewers to play and well review but not want them to write a review on it. Why not just send out a PR piece to journalists saying they won’t get beta codes as they feel the game would change far too much all the up till release and even afterwards, so journalists will have to play the retail version.
17/06/2010 at 14:23 poop says:
okay.
the combat being awkwardly balanced and unfun with terrible design issues like cover that doesn’t protect the top of your head and a lack of locational damage is not going to be fixed in the time between beta and release.
the missions are terrible and unfun, espcecially the really common escape mission which is one of the few missions in a game that I have ever seen that are equally imbalanced and terrible to play for both factions
that and the shitty netcode that makes driving intolerable for about 2/3rds of players combined with the stupid pricing scheme means that the game will probably not live long enough for any of the issues to even be fixed, I am holding out hope for this game to be fun in a year from now but chances are it really wont.
17/06/2010 at 15:25 The Innocent says:
@Kadayi
Right up front I’ll tell you I’m not trolling. This is a sincere question. But since you seem like the APB apologist here, instead of making people explain why they think the game stinks, could you explain to me what’s redemptive about it?
17/06/2010 at 21:44 Kadayi says:
@The Innocent
I think Jockie sums it up nicely on the next page, I’d direct you there for an explanation. Is it perfect? Not at all. Is it as bad/terrible/the abomination some people purport here? Not really. A lot really depends on the type of gamer that you are. If you are really into solo play and can’t handle the idea of speaking to people, APB is not going to be the game for you (a headset is pretty much essential). If however you like cooperative team based games where you’re pitting your wits against others then it’s well worth a look see. Most of the opinions you are getting here are from people who seem to fall into the former camp rather than the latter.
18/06/2010 at 06:41 poop says:
every game is fun with friends though, I am glad that you have a really cool group of people that you play games with but that doesnt really mean that APB is actually good
18/06/2010 at 07:56 Kadayi says:
@poop
It’s a team based PvP multi-player game, to try and assess it outside of that context is foolhardy. In fact grouping up, making friends, forming clans & pursuing rewards are all part of the game. MMOs are all about interaction with others at the end of the day.
17/06/2010 at 13:33 Songbearer says:
@Meat Circus
Playing with friends transforms this game. Hell, playing in any random group can make this game a ton of fun providing they’re all up for a bit of screwing around.
I’m a sucker for customisation and just seeing what my team makes keeps me playing the game, I’ve seen some incredibly impressive stuff. The combat I’ve gotten used to at this point as well.
It’s flawed and a few months of solid work would make this game into something incredible. It’s a shame that the creators don’t actually seem to believe this themselves.
17/06/2010 at 13:49 Meat Circus says:
It is a shame.
APB has that most unreliable of MMO assets in abundance, “Potential”. There’s a framework for something marvellous here, but what they’re putting on DVDs in shops most certainly ain’t it.
Things it needs:
Vehicle hadling that doesn’t feel like you’re piloting the QE2.
A cover system. Seriously, guys. It’s not 2005 any more.
More, and varied mission types.
More and varied weapon types.
A range of different combat classes you can ‘fit out’ your character with. If you’re stuck for ideas, just steal all of Team Fortress 2′s.
17/06/2010 at 15:48 KindredPhantom says:
@Meat Circus
The vehicles handling is a bit off, i agree with you there but it isn’t that bad.
I don’t know why APB would have a cover system, it is a multi-player game and a cover system although making sense may be more of a hindrance than a help. Also, what other online games have cover systems? I can only think of Rainbow Six Vegas which is an multi-player FPS and not an MMO.
Again, i agree that the missions may be a little repetitive, but then that can and does happen in any MMO or multi-player FPS.
Why does it need combat classes? it is am MMO with a third person view point not some multi-player FPS. There are plenty of weapons in APB, their is enough variety in the weapons.
17/06/2010 at 16:19 Tei says:
APB as a cover system, but is very shitty, keys Q and E.
17/06/2010 at 16:32 KindredPhantom says:
@Tei
They are lean keys, a cover system is where your character can attach themselves to something which acts as cover.
17/06/2010 at 16:54 Jim Rossignol says:
Playing *any* game with friends transforms it.
17/06/2010 at 18:18 Lilliput King says:
I quite like what I’ve played and have no fear of internet rage, so I’ll play devil’s advocate for a bit.
The vehicle handling: becomes a lot easier once you realise you are meant to handbrake turn every corner. Its that kind of game, people, and I quite like that.
The shooting: Isn’t meant to be twitch gunplay, or perfectly precise. On a server with 80 people, locational damage just isn’t going to cut the mustard – you can’t do that kind of thing reliably with that many players. RTW decided to do things a bit differently, so combat is about positioning. You’ll pretty much never be able to shoot someone out from behind cover, but find some way around them while a teammate pins them down and the kills will fall into your lap.
The cover: Not really sure what the complaint is, here. Just tap C to crouch, seems to work fine for me.
The content: There’s a fair amount of missions, but really they’re just an excuse to fight people while in a city following various objectives. There’s also a very extensive level of aesthetic customisation and a fairly extensive level of gameplay customization, along with bounty missions and the like, but its largely made with an eye towards spontaneity rather than persistence – your ‘threat level’ persists, and give you access to new guns and vehicles etc, but your ‘infamy’ (+whatever it is for the enforcers) is reset every time you log out, and builds as you kill other players and complete missions. That’s what the game is, in terms of content. Don’t go in expecting to collect 10 Chav Pelts.
As for the review embargo, perhaps they just don’t want reviewers playing 3 hours of the inevitably laggy-as-tits launch and giving the game a bad mark because of it. I can’t recall any MMO of any form that hasn’t had a shitty launch, so it seems reasonable to me. But doubtless there’ll be another 400 responses to this very comments thread that go something along the lines of “This is wrong! We must get the word out to the people so that they will know how good a video game is! We will never be silenced!”
17/06/2010 at 21:55 Kadayi says:
@Lilliput King
Yeah. Threads like this remind me of this joke:-
How many conspiracy theorists does it take to change a light bulb?
Two. One to change it, and then the other to find out who really changed it.
It simply can’t be a case of RTW wanting to ensure that the reviewers give them a fair crack of the whip based on the complete experience, it has to be more than that, and undoubtedly it’s because they are hiding something.
You’d think with E3 on in full swing that John Walker would have more important things to write about, but apparently taking mock offence at a UK based developers review schedule was more pressing.
Sometimes a smile is just a smile.
17/06/2010 at 13:35 Dominic White says:
Echoing what a lot of others have said – I played the beta, and was horribly dissapointed. Mainly with performance, but the gunplay was just awkward. People say it’s outdated, but that’s not even the problem. There are first-gen PS2 games with more convincing gunplay than this. It doesn’t feel right at all. The weapons feel simultaneously overpowered and weak, and the vehicles seem far too bound to network stability in their handling.
Crackdown was great, if a little under-baked. What the hell happened here? The embargo is bullshit on an earthshattering scale, and I honestly hope that at least one major site makes a stand and releases a review – likely a scathing one – early.
17/06/2010 at 13:36 Godl1keStev3 says:
The alternative possiblity is they dont want reviewers to play for an hour and the bitch about how rubbish the tutorial is, and how bad the starter weapons are.
For the first hour, the game is terrible. I mean REALLY bad, your guns are cack, you get ‘naded from all sides and have none to retaliate with… its bad. Until you get the next rifle which is… just as bad as the first, but fires slightly faster.
Rank 10 is where it all turned around for me, I got my first SMG, grenades were abundant, and it all kind of came together. I was getting kills, I was actually winning occasionally.
The game is fun. I was utterly unimpressed by the closed beta, and firing it back up this time was a chore, but I havent played TF2 for three days now… that must mean something.
Just a devils advocate thought, I mean, they are shooting themselves in the foot with this one, whatever the reason. But it does kind of make sense.
17/06/2010 at 13:46 cliffski says:
Life is way way way too short for me to spend 10 seconds on a game on the promise that it gets better after level 10.
17/06/2010 at 13:48 P7uen says:
It’s not ‘alternative’, its the first reason John mentioned.
Don’t ever cross John again or his posse will get you.
17/06/2010 at 13:56 Kadayi says:
@Godl1keStev3
Spot on tbh.
@Cliffski
Because putting effort in to a Multi-player game is so much effort yes?
17/06/2010 at 14:18 Jockie says:
My guess would be along these lines, a lot of the negative feedback is along the lines of “I played for 1-2 hours and the guns were rubbish and I got beat a lot, and the cars drive like tanks”. Having sunk in well over 100+ hours into the beta, I didn’t do so because of a faint promise that things will get better.
I did so because it’s a skill based game, which I took the time to learn, improve my skills in and progressed naturally whilst having a great time. Someone spending the first hour in ANY multiplayer game, you might come away with a certain feeling that the game isn’t great, not because the game is poorly designed, but because multiplayer games are different from single player experiences and to understand the foibles and depth it takes more than the first hour or so of play.
Most people who’ve spent a lot of time in the beta will tell you the cars don’t handle poorly, it’s just a case of knowing how to corner using the brakes, handbrake, timing and other skills that you have to learn by playing. Perhaps RTW are a little bit cagey because of the negative commentary coming from the players who have broken the NDA or came down against the game, citing their minimal experience as evidence.
All that said, I’m not entirely a RTW apologist, I think their pricing model is designed to maximise first month profits (50 hours out of the box will fly by for a lot of hard-core MMO players who will end up topping up their account well before the standard MMO free month is up).
I can’t say I agree with RTW’s decision, but I can perhaps understand why they made it, this is a massive game for them (eggs in one basket perhaps).
17/06/2010 at 14:21 mrmud says:
I spent 10 hours or so with the beta (because I really wanted to like it) but it still plays like shit and the matchmaking is terrible.
Also of course the people who have played 100 hours are going to say that they love the game, everyone else would have quit by then!
17/06/2010 at 14:35 Jockie says:
True enough Mr Mud, but I can only give my own opinion on the game, just because my experience of the game is not the same as yours doesn’t invalidate either of our feelings about it. I don’t see why someone who has played the game extensively should have his opinions on it written off on that basis.
17/06/2010 at 14:42 mrmud says:
Of course not. But its just as dangerous to claim that people who dont like the game just havent played enough of it
17/06/2010 at 14:56 Jockie says:
Fair enough, to clarify, I’m not saying that everyone who didn’t have a great experience of the game is because they’re a stupid head who didn’t play the game enough. I’m just saying a lot of the criticism I have seen is down to people failing to give the game a chance beyond their initial impressions and knee jerk reactions about it not being how they imagined it would be. There are people who’ve sunk plenty of time into the game and didn’t enjoy it, which is fair enough and I don’t entirely disagree with all the points they make in some cases.
17/06/2010 at 15:31 Lambo says:
@Jockie “Someone spending the first hour in ANY multiplayer game, you might come away with a certain feeling that the game isn’t great, not because the game is poorly designed, but because multiplayer games are different from single player experiences and to understand the foibles and depth it takes more than the first hour or so of play.”
That, I’m afraid, is quite untrue. Some examples;
Wow – the first hour in that is very well put together (Because of good design of the the players opening hours, something APB lacks)
EVE online – although not as simple as more traditional mmo’s, the first hour is absolutely intriguing and, once you realize the scope of what you can achieve, incredibly inspiring. Good first few hours.
Champions Online – Has a very decent first few hours and a tutorial which shows off pretty much ALL the game has to offer in a quite decent way, making the player feel powerful and making them enjoy themselves. (Very good design there too)
Those are the games which are of the closest genre to this, none of which put down the player right off the bat because he lacks “skills”. However, I get the impression you aren’t thinking of actual subscription model large-massive multiplayer games, you were thinking of something like CS:S or TF2 or something, right?
Yes, those games DO require you to build up the skills to do well. The thing is those games do that WELL. They also do not require you to PAY BY THE HOUR when you are actually locked, in the early game FORCED to use the mandatory BAD CONTENT against people with better weaponry/upgrades/skills when the actual using (IE The shooting/Driving) is SUB PAR. The shooting is just 2 guys spraying bullets at each other until either the the guy with the highest level gun or the most advantageous position (EG Standing behind the oponent) wins after wittleing his health down. There is no peripheral action or hook to it. Compare it directly to online GTA. That may seem similar but the action in that is leagues ahead of this. Those other shooting games of skill make the time when you are mandatoryily being beaten, interesting and quite often fun. You think “Damn I lost, at least I can learn to shoot and think as well as that soon enough, though”, while in APB its “Damn, I got out-sprayed again, maybe someday when I’ve been sprayed with more bullets in my general hit box , I’ll finially rank up and be able to spray at a 10% more efficient rate and the win 10% more of the time.
And regarding your thing about learning to handle the cars, take this analogy. *Proving you can learn to ride a greased up, disobedient donkey does not prove that he is not a greased-up, disobedient donkey.*
I could rant on like this but I don’t see anyone getting any more out of this.
17/06/2010 at 15:45 Jockie says:
You’re seriously using Eve as an example of a game that captivates in the first hour? The Eve tutorial is infamous, for being confused, overcomplicated and mindnumingly dull. It also shows absolutely nothing of the actual exciting parts of the game like 0sec, or PvP.
Similarly, I’ve never subscribed to WoW, I’ve played the free trial and never got further because of the dull mindless mission grind of the first few hours, friends have told me that “It gets better at high levels”. But that’s not an excuse. Pressing 1,2,1,2,3,1,2 then running up to people with glowing question marks above their head is not my idea of ‘good design’.
Regardless, I don’t think playing APB really compares to traditional MMO’s as much as it does shooters. Think of someone going for their first hour of CS (getting pwned and called a n00b), or BF:BC2 (“Why do everyone elses guns kill me so much quicker!!”), they’re good games and competitive multiplayer games that take a bit of time to get good at. APB is no different in that respect.
17/06/2010 at 16:23 mrmud says:
Comparing APB to shooters makes it seem even worse because the actual shooting is abyssmal compared to something like BFBC2 or even CS (which is like 10 years old, and was better at shooting in beta 1.0 than APB is now).
17/06/2010 at 17:06 Lambo says:
Jockie, If you are going to reply to this for the love of god actually read it.
Maybe you did see what I wrote and simply were unable to address any of my points on shooting games, or maybe you just stupidly made the assumption that because you disagreed with my first few points, you wouldn’t bother reading the rest, while also assuming that you should put down your points and have me read them.
Regarding EVE I did not say that the tutorial was good. Its passable (these days), but its nothing special at all. I said the first hour. I was very specific to say that. And if you are telling me that your first hour in EVE was less enjoyable or at least less intriguing than the hour in the tutorial server I would be truly surprised.
Regarding wow. I mentioned how well put together it’s opening hour was for a mmo, as in, compared to how “well” designed the opening hour for apb is. You actually used the words “never got further because of the dull mindless mission grind of the first few hours” I’m sorry, but is or isn’t APB a game where you have about 2 alternating objectives in your missions? Run to a place and mindlessly spray bullets then hold down a button for 5 seconds OR run to another place and mindlessly spray bullets trying to stop the other guys from holding down a button for 5 seconds.
If you really want to say WOW is “Pressing 1,2,1,2,3,1,2″ is there truly something wrong with you that you can’t use that logic of yours on APB “Hold Left click………. Hold Use……….Hold Left Click”
See, anything sounds stupid when you abstract it.
I don’t even particularly care about wow, have barely played it at all. but it occurs to me that your problem with something like wow isn’t the the the repeated pressing of buttons, but the abstractedness you see in the combat, the lack of feedback, the lack of guns maybe. You think you get that in APB? At least in wow-alikes you can get at least SOME visual feedback in what you do in combat, you can at least effect them in various ways, doing different types of damage, in APB it is literally click and wait for their hit-points to drop, then they fall over.
Oh well.
17/06/2010 at 17:49 Jockie says:
I’ll admit I was a little bit too flabbergasted at your examples of good design in my focus on the reply you made to address the entirety of your post (although I agree that Champions Online shows everything good about the game very quickly, shame about the rest of it).
But your post really doesn’t suggest to me you’ve played APB, more than a cursory glance. For starters ‘an hour in the tutorial district’. If you spent an hour on the five minute tutorial, that’s your issue not the games nor anybody elses, it even pops up with a box flashing to tell you can leave and actually play the game after you’ve done the simple introductory levels.
For the 2 objectives thing, what APB does it takes classic shooter setups, and makes them into part of a dynamic persistant action game. It’s objectives are just masked game modes, so you have attack and defend, capture the flag, VIP, escape/chase, racing etc etc all encompassed in there. To say that it’s two objectives over and over is both ludicrous and ignorant of the action genre. CS has ONE game mode, BF:BC2 has 4, this has many more, randomised and made part of a persistant city, where the locales are changing constantly and strategies must be changed on the fly.
To claim that combat constitutes holding down a button and spraying suggests you only got as far as using the OCA sub-machine gun and never got as far as grouping up with other players. This is a strategic game, the team who works together and understands the game is likely to win, but it’s never set in stone because in each match-up the opposition is different. As more weapons and vehicles and things like Less than Lethal (which can be unlocked by Enforcers after half an hour to an hours play) come into play, you have more strategic tools as your disposal. So you have players focusing on the snipers and long range, some will focus on CQC weapons like the subby and shotguns, some on vechicle destroyers like the LMG, when these things come together in a group it’s about balance, strategy, adapting to the objectives and adapting to your opposition. It’s not “click and wait for their hit-points to drop, then they fall over.” That’s a gross oversimplification.
If you just used that turn of phrase to highlight my simplification of Wow, then fine, but Wow’s early level design is not tactical, it’s not dynamic, it’s not dependant on skill. It is literally pressing some buttons in a repetitive sequence, until you’ve proven that you’re willing to do so enough to be entrusted with another button to press.
As for paying for a shooter, that’s for each customer to decide really. As much as I’d like it to be free forever and receive consistant updates, that’s not a viable strategy for a developer like RTW who have to pay their server costs (games that used dedicated servers, like CS and like BF:BC2 don’t have to worry about those), staff and continue to put out more content to keep their players happy. I see a subscription to an online game as an investment in the future of the game, sometimes it pays off and sometimes it doesn’t, but whose to say there won’t be a metagame later in APBs lifespan?
17/06/2010 at 19:50 Kadayi says:
@jockie
“This is a strategic game, the team who works together and understands the game is likely to win, but it’s never set in stone because in each match-up the opposition is different.”
Well put.
17/06/2010 at 20:17 DJ Phantoon says:
Kayadi you said:
“@Cliffski
Because putting effort in to a Multi-player game is so much effort yes?”
I thought Gratuitous Space Battles was multi player?
17/06/2010 at 22:00 Kadayi says:
@DJ Phantoon
Relevance to the statement?
17/06/2010 at 13:36 Anski says:
If you think that APB is like GTA in the fact that there is “senseless shooting without any depth”, you haven’t played APB. I’m not trying to defend the game – people can think what they want of it, but it isn’t like you just walk down the street in APB shooting everyone. In fact, you can’t.
17/06/2010 at 13:39 Gary W says:
If they extend embargoes to a year, we might get less of this:
AAAA!! GOTY!! 11/10!! OSCAR WORTHY!! GAMING’S CITIZEN KANE!
Fuck it, make that a century so I don’t have to read any mainstream games ‘journalism’ ever again.
17/06/2010 at 13:39 Smithereens says:
@frightlever I would take anything Rory Cellan Jones writes with a mug of salt. Often Wrong Rory, he’s known as in tech journalism circles.
17/06/2010 at 13:39 Bob Bobson says:
I think this is perfectly legally sound, the review code is the review code and comes with conditions. However, I see no reason why a reviewer can’t buy the release code and write a review based on that. Of course this means the first to go to print will be the one that is based on the fewest hours of game time, and as such will be least well rounded but most read. Almost as if review code was a useful thing for companies to give to reviewers or something….
Maybe they think the income from various reviewers buying a release copy will put them ahead of forecasts for if reviews get to comment on day 0.
17/06/2010 at 13:40 IdleHands says:
I’m hoping RPS on the day of release will do a post for APB called “Wot u think” and then allow the comment thread to review the game, they can try to silence journalists but can they silence their own customer opinions.
17/06/2010 at 13:59 IdleHands says:
True I’d prefer an official RPS review of this game, but if the company want to impose a ridicolous embargo on reviewers then I’d prefer RPS to stick their middle finger back up at them and either give it no more exposure or work around their embargo. I don’t know the legal consequences of breaking the insane embargo set or if they would lose trust from other companies, so I can’t expect RPS to be as rebelious to break the review embargo without knowing what consequences they face.
17/06/2010 at 13:41 Synoptase says:
Varied gameplay isn’t what i saw when i tried. Maps are very repetitve, classes are dull and weapons are all look-alike. Let’s not mention the UI which is very, very disturbing, instrusive and not helpfull.
I do agree that it held me 10h also.
17/06/2010 at 13:42 Mojo says:
What exactly are the consequences of not following these “review embargoes”?
17/06/2010 at 13:48 Kadayi says:
Not getting access to preview events or review code etc, etc in future generally.
17/06/2010 at 20:22 DJ Phantoon says:
By some assholes after the game is already released? Please.
Oh no, you won’t get to review games by these guys with review code. But if we’ve learned anything, it’d be better to not get review code so you can review it day 1 without having a ridiculous embargo that says you can’t review it until it’s been out a week.
Do you work for the people that made this game or what? Apologists rarely do so because they really love the game.
18/06/2010 at 07:58 Kadayi says:
@DJ
Less Coffee, more sunshine maybe?
17/06/2010 at 13:43 poop says:
if I was a game journo I would just release an incredibly scathing preview with a mysterious 3/10 score and then remove the P from the title after the embargo ends
17/06/2010 at 13:45 Flappybat says:
RTW should have realized the word of mouth is a bad one and that the idea of pulling it together after release is never a good one. A six month delay for a Christmas release with big attention paid to adding gameplay, content and tuning the mechanics would have helped so much.
17/06/2010 at 13:45 Dan Lawrence says:
It disturbs me that the PR company even thought this Stalinist attempt to control the message might be acceptable behaviour. It’s as if they have gotten so used to dictating terms to journalists that they believed any terms at all would just be accepted blindly by their grateful subjects.
If this gets swallowed start expecting them to just email out the approved review score for each publication to give. The text of course will be left to the ‘journalists’ imagination.
Good on RPS for calling them out on this so strongly in public. With this and the Microsoft 360 journo bribe ealier in the week its been a dark time for game’s PR and potentially journalistic ethics.
17/06/2010 at 14:00 Bowlby says:
Oh, you mean the part where Microsoft gave new 360s to everyone present at their conference. That wasn’t a bribe. It was a PR move to get people buzzed, just like any other piece of swag. And if the journalists there felt it might impinge on their integrity in some way, then they could always give it away in a competition to their readers or simply not accept it.
17/06/2010 at 14:09 Dan Lawrence says:
Dude, it was intended as a bribe whatever Microsoft PR tell you. A corporation doesn’t give away expensive electrical items to the people supposed to be critically reporting on it’s products for no reason. There are loads of studies to show how accepting gifts colours everyone’s perceptions of the person giving the gift, and that goes just as much for those people who are utterly *convinced* that they can’t be bought off. Thankfully most reputable organisations have policies in place to automatically reject a gift like this for just such reasons.
I agree with you that any journalists worth of the name shouldn’t accept the bribe though.
17/06/2010 at 14:21 Bowlby says:
Don’t get me wrong, I agree with you that this was a blatant attempt to positively colour journalistic response to their conference, but that’s what PR is, and I don’t thinkActually, yeah, you’re right, it was bribery. I had this different idea of what bribery was in my head, and it was incorrect. I guess, with me, I don’t find it shocking, because this is what companies do. This is the job of PR, to positively influence the market’s opinion of their company’s product. And I imagine being a good journalist means being able to think of objectively and reject these attempts to colour opinion.
17/06/2010 at 14:42 Dan Lawrence says:
I think there is ‘good PR/Marketing’ which involves getting the truth about the product to as many people as possible in creative ways and also countering misinformation. Then there is also ‘bad PR/Marketing’ which takes advantage of psychological manipulation to spread false information, emotions and associations to as many people as possible in order to sell things through lies.
I agree with you that ‘bad PR’ is massively prevelant these days but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t call it out when it hits close to home (video games) and when it is a particularly egregious example of the form (a free 360 is much worse than taking a journo to the pub for a pint).
17/06/2010 at 18:33 FunkyBadger says:
I’m assuming you don’t work in either journalism or business?
17/06/2010 at 19:45 Jimbo says:
Being a ‘good journalist’ would have entailed refusing the gift in order to maintain both impartiality and the appearance of impartiality.
Let’s not kid ourselves though, you aren’t going to find many journalists of any kind in an E3 conference hall. Reviewing games, paraphrasing press releases and being flown out to press events etc. is only ‘journalism’ in the loosest possible sense. Some of these guys refuse to refer to themselves as journalists for exactly this reason – and it’s a credit to them that they do so.
17/06/2010 at 13:48 Snall says:
I’ve quite enjoyed my 5-6 hours of the game. The guns def have problems, but driving is very easy and shooting is pretty easy with certain guns…*shrug* People are just bitches. Could it be better? Of course, but it’s playable and fun imo, even though I like “mmo’s” where I can loot – this isn’t really a real mmo, max action zones being like 80 ppl.
17/06/2010 at 15:46 Lambo says:
So the masses of people whose opinion differs from you, who believe;
That a “Action Game”, as you yourself term it, with guns that “def have problems”, is ok because “shooting is pretty easy with certain guns”.
So the certain guns you have to spend your time and money ranking up to get, just so the bad shooting that has problems gets easier. All those people who believe that, and that it doesn’t make a particularly good game are “bitches”?
Well then I am absolutely proud to be a bitch.
17/06/2010 at 15:48 Lambo says:
My bad, you didn’t say “Action game” you said a MMO and that it has “action zones”. Sorry about that, I think the rest of my comment still stands though.
17/06/2010 at 13:54 Lucas Says says:
I feel like a 10 day embargo is perfectly reasonable for an MMO review, just because it’s difficult to experience most of the content that quickly, lag usually sucks the first couple days, and while not every reviewer will play more with an embargo, you have to feel that scrupulous reviewers (the gents here, for instance) would probably give it more time if they had more time.
However, APB looks more like Battlefield than World of Warcraft. So this is kind of absurd. And I imagine this embargo will lower review scores pretty noticeably because of the annoyance.
17/06/2010 at 14:10 Chris D says:
An embargo wouldn’t necessarily make reviewers spend more time with a game though. There’s nothing to stop them logging in for the first time on day 9. If that is the reason for the embargo then I’ll grant that it’s less cynical but it’s still equally dumb. Ultimately there will always be good reviewers and bad reviewers and making them wait longer to publish won’t make the bad ones any better. It will be a PR nightmare, however.
17/06/2010 at 13:55 Drexer says:
If developers want to make some kind of recognition towards review playtime then it’s quite easier. Create a time logger inside the game, that presents the reviewer with a certain code once he has played X hours. The reviewer goes to a link the publisher provided, inputs his review code and the code from the X hours and outputs a certain picture or something which can be direct linked and certifies the time of play.
If the developers make the number of hours public to all people who visit their website, the ‘badge’ becomes a mark of a good review, except in the cases where the number of X hours is too big, where the reviewer will be practically obliged to say “I can’t present the badge because it takes X hours and we think that is far too long to demand of a client for a flawed product” and the client will make their own judgement regarding the number of hours played.
I have not explored this from all angles, but it certainly is a better solution than their current one.
17/06/2010 at 14:33 RQH says:
The problem is you can almost always argue that you’ve never played enough, and a developer who wants to defend their game against bad reviews always will. If one reviewer logs his time and it’s fifteen hours, and another logs his time and it’s thirty, then the guy who’s played fifteen hours looks bad, even if his review may in other ways be better and more complete.
As for a reviewer saying “we feel that X hours is too big a requirement, given the quality of the game,” isn’t that essentially what the original Darkfall review was saying, implicitly. That statement itself is a review of the game, which the developer will respond to with cries of “well, you haven’t played it enough! It gets better!” Why we would tolerate wasting ten hours of our lives on a shitty game because supposedly after ten hours it gets better is beyond me. (Note that this is not the same as spending ten hours of our lives on a game we’re shitty at because after ten hours we get better–one is about learning and mastering a skill, the other is about eating shit because at the end we’ve been promised a hot fudge sundae.)
We might say that ideally, reviewers would play all the way through endgame, but even that may not be ideal. In my experience, there’s a sort of Stockholm syndrome that sets in beyond a certain time investment. Surely the review is useless as purchasing advice if it always boils down to “If you sink 100 hours into the game, you will love it.”
At the end of the day, the solution (for consumers, at least–devs just want to control the message; they really aren’t ultimately concerned with whether a reviewer is making a good faith effort) is trust. We trust that reviewers have played enough to form an opinion, and if we sense from the review that they haven’t, or if we think that the things they highlight as negatives might actually be positives for us, or if we read another review that disagrees, we play it anyway and form our own opinions. Or we just play what our friends play. It’s the same critical apparatus we use when reading any review. I don’t see why it should be different for MMOs.
17/06/2010 at 15:27 user@example.com says:
I don’t get the “the first ten hours suck, but then it turns into robot unicorn attack 2 and also cures cancer” claim. I can kinda see it in a twenty-hour or even fifty-hour game, where you might be able to justify it on the grounds that it’ll make the eventual awesomeness feel so much better, and there’s a good plot to drag you through it, but in an MMO? If hours 1-10 suck but hours 11-10,000 are awesome, by hour 1,000 people will have completely forgotten about the first ten hours, so there’s nothing to be gained for long-term players by making the introduction suck – it can only hurt the game, because it only affects newbies.
17/06/2010 at 13:56 futage says:
Is this embargo based on an already-signed NDA or is it a term/condition of downloading the review code?
Presumably if the latter, a site could just buy a retail copy and review that with impunity?
It’s an interesting one. Presumably (this is all presumption but I feel confident in my presumption) a review is most valuable to a site during the first few days of release? That being when the review gets the most traffic (and thus money for the site)? In which case this ‘request’ is even more fucked.
Of course I understand that MMO makers want reviewers to spend enough time in the game to come to an informed position but… that’s not a problem (and it is a problem) to solve with unenforceable legal restrictions. That will just generate bad will, which is the opposite of what they need. Crazy fuckers.
17/06/2010 at 13:57 Nomaki says:
I remember logging in with a bunch of friends into the EU beta after being hyped up about this game for ages; had an hour of fun with the character customisation and threw ourselves into the world to see what gangs and crooks we could take down. After a while we got into a few car chases, with all of them playing out in exactly the same way:
Every corner, every road, every anything, both myself and the car being chased would attempt to navigate past obstructions only to be steered by the lag and mechanics into every obstruction which presented itself. Most memorably, when trying to lose be across a plaza, we both spent five minutes pathetically crashing into each other and every bollard between us and the next road.
Like previous comments say, these problems may have been improved/fixed by now, but that single experience ruled out the game entirely for me.
17/06/2010 at 13:58 mandrill says:
I would say that the game has potential. It is nowhere near realising that potential at the moment. but Its good for a laugh if nothing else.
The points I think it could use improvement one are as follows:
- PvP missions sent out to you (with the Y/N pager thing) should be:
a) skill matched, too many times I’ve gone up against people who are miles ahead of me in terms of ability and equipment which has made the mission incredibly frustrating and not really fun at all.
b) relatively close by. You should be able to get to the mission location fairly quickly, say within 20s of accepting it, instead of having to spedn time stealing a car and driving to the other end of the district to get some action (again against players with better equipment and more experience).
The driving isn’t that bad once you get used to it. I certainly found myself powersliding and drifting with ease once I’d got the hang of it. I would like the option to play it as an FPS though. the over the shoulder view is irritating sometimes.
As to the embargo, I get the feeling that RTW are not as confident in their product as they could be. They have been hyping it pretty intesively for the last year or so and understandably want to cash in on that in the first weekend of sales. I don’t see the embargo remaining unbroken though, especially if the reviews are as bad as everyone thinks they’re going to be.
17/06/2010 at 14:29 Meat Circus says:
This is the thing I don’t get. If they’re not confident it’s good enough, why the fuck are they releasing it?
17/06/2010 at 16:06 KindredPhantom says:
@Meat Circus
Pressure from EA, to release now and get profit as soon as.
17/06/2010 at 19:43 Kadayi says:
@KindredPhantom
EA are the retail publisher, however they have no investment in the title (the money raised to make the game is from outside sources). If RTW wanted to delay the release they could. Frankly the game needs a few tweaks here and there, but fundamentally it is sound. Certainly not in need of the vast overall of features as some people claim. APB is at it’s heart a co-op based tactical shooter. Being skilful at the game is not about being fast on the draw, it’s about out thinking/out playing your opponents as a collective to win missions (and advance yourself up the organisation & contact ladders). It doesn’t require locational damage (random headshots..let’s be honest), or funky cover systems because such things make the game more about twitch or would slow the pace of the game down considerably (mission turnaround is meant to be fast).
17/06/2010 at 13:58 Peter Radiator Full Pig says:
While this pre sald embargo thing is utter ridiculous, i do think that an MMO, or most games requireing an online community should be reviewed twice, and tidbits told regularly, if it seemed good.
First review should be the code, just how the game handles. In APB, its the driving and shooting. Not very fun, but it had its moments.
For WoW, the single player was also like this. Never really had fun.
But add in some people, and it got much better.
So the second review should be for how the community effects the gameplay.
In APB, when it went right, everyone stuck together and no idiots were on the team, i had a blast. Driving around hanging out of the car, being chased and stuff.
When it went wrong, which it did for quite a while, it stucked. Running from spawn points over and over.3 v1 matchups because your teammates were half a city away. Trying to get to missions when the enemy have such a large headstart you can never catch up, etc.
Its defiatly the sort of game that requires some sort of free pay-micro payment option. That would improve it in my eyes.
17/06/2010 at 13:58 Mully says:
Kudos to Walker for stirring up the masses with his cynicsm.
The games enjoyment is directly related to the amount of players who have immersed themselves in the APB environment – pretty much like any MMO. It may be ridiculous to set an embargo like this – but it’s equally ridiculous to review an MMO before it’s had a fair chance to build a reasonable populace/community.
APB might turn out to be shit (ive been playing during KTTC, and i’ve had mixed experiences), but there’s simply no way you can fully appreciate an MMO without immersing yourself within it for a few weeks.
Regarding the public reviews argument – if people were genuinely influenced by random public reviews, then there wouldnt be any need for such well respected sites like RPS and Eurogamer. An official review is worth 100 random public reviews.
What they’ve done is unconventional – but there’s a totally fair argument for it. They don’t want their pride and joy sullied by a few journalists that have played it for a day. This is not a single player game that can be reviewed with one playthrough – and thus should not be treated like one.
17/06/2010 at 14:04 Kadayi says:
This.
Sadly way too many AIM (including a few people who should know better) are already hell bent on running APB down before it’s sailed. Sad sad wankers.
17/06/2010 at 14:31 Meat Circus says:
Kadayi, you’re (C’mon, Meat, you know that “you sound like” isn’t much of a fig leaf to hide an insult behind – KG). I’m not a hater. I really wanted (want) APB to be a good game, but what I saw by playing it WAS NOT GOOD.
So, when you couple widespread feeling that APB isn’t very good, and an overly-aggressive PR company playing silly buggers with embargoes, what are we supposed to think? The simplest explanation is that RTW are trying to silence criticism of a game they know to be sub-standard.
17/06/2010 at 14:45 Jockie says:
It’s the simplest explanation, true, but not neccessarily the correct one. John pointed out above that reviewing MMO’s in not an exact science. I don’t find it to be stretching into the outer realms of possibility that RTW/EA/whoevermadethisdecision want their game to be given a fair shout in terms of being played extensively, before being slapped with an arbitrary number and having its fate decided upon, especially in the light of recent controvesry surrounding the way MMOs are scored.
17/06/2010 at 15:04 Dan Milburn says:
It is simply not the place of game developers to tell journalists how to do their jobs. Of course someone reviewing an MMO ought to play it for a reasonable amount of time and take into account the fluctuating nature of the thing. If they don’t they should be held to account by their editors and by their readers, not by the people who have a very strong interest in making sure there are no negative reviews published when the game launches.
As for ‘immersing yourself in it for a few weeks’, who the heck do you think is going to pay for that? I will admit that I have no idea what the earnings of your average games journalist are, but for say a months full time play at a decent hourly rate, you’re talking thousands of pounds. This is unreasonable.
As John acknowledges and Kieron dealt with in his Darkfall review, there are obviously plenty of issues for the games journalism business in how it covers MMOs, but this is not the answer.
17/06/2010 at 15:13 Jockie says:
The problem is Dan that despite it being obvious to us that reviewers should play the games extensively, there have been some high profile examples of late, where that hasn’t occured.
In that circumstance, can you blame people for wanting to ensure that their work (Dave Jones for instance has described APB as his lifes work, the game he’s always wanted to make) gets judged in the light of the entirety of what it has to offer?
17/06/2010 at 15:32 Dan Milburn says:
Well, I guess he could have started by making a game that was fun to play from the beginning (I should stress here that I’ve not played it myself, but there are certainly plenty of people in this thread who are less than impressed). First impressions count, even for an MMO.
Of the cases I’m familiar with (the original review of Darkfall and Quinns’ review of the Conan expansion), I would suggest that it’s done far more damage to the reputation of Eurogamer than it did to either of the games. Which is of course as it should be.
Ultimately Dave Jones has to accept that people are entitled to judge his work in any way they damnn well please. I do so by not even bothering to get the beta key I could have had as a subscriber to RPS. Others were in the beta and clearly didn’t enjoy it very much. People will buy it in the first week, perhaps influenced by hype and unavailability of reviews, and may come away disappointed. And a decent number will of course buy it, experience all it has to offer, and enjoy it. Good for them. That doesn’t make this embargo any less ridiculous or counter-productive.
17/06/2010 at 15:36 Flappybat says:
i don’t think ten days is enough, or that the fact players will have more customization up actually makes a difference. I like the game but the problems are obvious and it doesn’t take more than a few hours play to be able to have an accurate opinion of the game, it doesn’t change from that.
17/06/2010 at 15:40 Flappybat says:
Sorry change that first sentence to,
I don’t think ten days is enough to actually make a difference. Players won’t have much customization up true but it doesn’t affect the experience much.
17/06/2010 at 16:19 Lambo says:
This has been bugging me. Take a Imaginary mmo that you could play for hundreds oh hours. Imagine at level 10 in the game it opens up with great community and good enough gameplay. Imagine at the endgame it has some interesting and decent enough things to do. Its a 7 out of 10 game by normal standards based on that.
Now imagine the first 2 hours are nothing but near impossible QTE’s and that by the end of it anyone would be half insane and have RSI or something.
It is absolutely and completely ok to for a review to come along and play the game for one hour, say what he had to do and give the game 1/10. It is ok for him to do that AS LONG AS THEY SAY THE AMOUNT OF THE GAME THEY PLAYED as long as you don’t bill the review as completely indicative of everything in the game it is completely ok to state your experience of it. The reviewers experience was that it was so bad he couldn’t play past that point any more because it utterly sucked.
Maybe you would have, that doesn’t matter. A reviewers job is not to tell you what you SHOULD think, but what THEY THINK in a manner that is put together well enough for you to take what you need from it to possibly help you. It is not a Guru-like source of knowledge of what is a “truly great game”. Think about it. If you think that it did sway your opinion. Grand so. If you think the reviewer is so flawed that they are a joke, that they are completely the opposite of what the correct opinion should be, you do not have to read their reviews from then on.
Now, this is a very general plea, if you hate something you see (Merely because of personal preference over say… a game. Not over something like whether killing orphans is ok, that isn’t what I’m talking about), going to its source and spewing hate and ranting and ranting that they are idiots and “bitches” are completely within your so called “rights” to do. Yes, you do have the right to not “get lost” when someone asks you to, but never EVER think that does not make you a asshole. This applies to people on both sides of this, particular, argument and most probably to me as well. Going to a place to spread hate because you disagree over something like this will always make you a complete asshole.
Anyways, thats my … well that can’t be two cents… must be a couple of dollars or something. Sorry about that.
17/06/2010 at 16:45 TheApologist says:
A bit odd to accuse Walker / RPS of cynicism. I want them to be telling me the conditions of the information I am receiving about a game. That is good journalism if you ask me. Indeed, Walker isn’t sullying APB at this point, their own PR is.
Even if you think reviewers are likely to be unfair to this game because MMO’s are a special type of game that the traditional reviews process serves badly, slapping crazy embargoes only serves to make me extremely dubious about the quality of the game. Their PR would have been better off working with the games press to do it justice.
17/06/2010 at 18:36 FunkyBadger says:
Why don’t they let players play the game for free until the embargo is lifted – then no-one gets ripped off.
Although, you could say this is what a beta-test phase is for…
17/06/2010 at 19:58 Jimbo says:
Kadayi, your position on this is insane. I agree with you that MMOs should not be reviewed after such a short amount of time and that RTW *requesting* that and explaining why they are, would be a good idea. Unfortunately, that clearly isn’t the issue here at all.
The issue is that RTW are trying to *demand* it, and seem under the impression that they have the right and/or ability to enforce it. That is crazy. Once a product is available to the general public and a potential reviewer can just walk into a store and buy it like anybody else, then all bets are off and they (or you, or I) may comment on it however they see fit, after whatever amount of time they deem appropriate.
17/06/2010 at 22:19 Kadayi says:
@Jimbo
I’m slightly intrigued as to where you pulled those words from in my contribution to this particular sub thread, given I just agreed with the OP.
17/06/2010 at 23:02 Jimbo says:
You seem the most determined in seeking to justify RTW’s position throughout this comment thread, whether with your own words or by endorsing the posts of others.
“I’d imagine that they are probably setting this out as they don’t want reviews based off of the Beta code, but rather off the actual genuine retail game experience, which makes sense tbh.”
This, in conjunction with your post about conspiracy theorists, implied to me that you were missing the point somewhat. The issue isn’t whether they have a legitimate reason for ‘setting this out’ as they have, it’s that they have no right to be ‘setting out’ *anything* beyond the point where the game becomes purchaseable by the public. Whether or not they have a reason for trying to do so is irrelevant. Trying to establish an embargo such as this is entirely beyond their jurisdiction, and their attempt to do so is totally unjustifiable.
If I pre-order the game, get early access and decide to put a review up before the review embargo ends; how exactly do you suppose RTW intend to stop me?
18/06/2010 at 08:20 Kadayi says:
@Jimbo
Oh noes, how dare they ask for something they can’t possibly enforce!!! (I call for a riot!!!) Seriously? John Walker loses the plot before he’s had his tea & crumpets over an unenforceable embargo (whose date has since been moved) for a game that let’s face it, isn’t something he’s ever likely to enjoy due to a lack of unicorns, weepy girls and narrative drive, and the Angry Impotent Men of RPS commentators decide it’s time for a bit of good old developer kicking, whilst self abasing themselves with tales of how they fail at multi-player gaming devoid of hitpoints or turns. Yet it’s wrong in your view to say ‘hold up guys’ or say ‘that’s not really accurate now is it’.
18/06/2010 at 09:33 Kieron Gillen says:
Kadayi: You liking the game is getting in the way of understanding the principle of the thing. They put an embargo on it. People would have obeyed it – because some of them are afraid of losing any form of access or ads money or having to deal with an angry phone-call. Us making an issue about it got the embargo moved back, so it’s no longer an issue.
But imagine if APB wasn’t good. Imagine if a publisher can do something like this and say “No reviews for 10 days” and everyone obeys them.
That’s why it’s a deal.
Put it like this: If APB was Deus Ex 1, I’d have written this story about it if Eidos had tried the same thing. This simply isn’t about the game’s quality.
KG
18/06/2010 at 16:30 Kadayi says:
Kieron
Games have coverage/review embargoes all the time. It’s hardly an uncommon thing for a publisher/developer to insist upon (in fact some reviews don’t come out to the day of release- I’m looking at you Alpha protocol). Sure it’s unusual that they might ask for one that extends beyond the intial period of release, but then APB is not your usual game. Rather than raising the war axe over this (like so many others seem to) I postulated as to why they might be doing this (and hey guess what I was on the money). Fact of the matter is in a way RTW are trying to tackle the ‘how do you review an MMO’ conundrum by putting a procedure in place. Now that might raise you journalistic liberal hackles, but lets be honest here, this is reviewing games, not exposing the blood diamond trade.
18/06/2010 at 16:38 Kieron Gillen says:
Kadayi: Enjoy the next Rise of the Robots when it comes along.
Really, I’m not working for RTW. That you think games journalists are somehow beholden to developers is the problem. We are not on games developers side. The only people we serve are our readers.
KG
18/06/2010 at 17:16 Kadayi says:
Kieron
Then as a journalist it’s fair to say you owe it to your readership to provide them with the best coverage no? You’ve participated in the Beta, would you say you could give an honest review based off of that alone? That you’d be doing them a service or a disservice?
18/06/2010 at 19:12 Kadayi says:
@Kieron
Also with regard to rise of the Robots, sure developers could pull a fast one back in 1994 when print was king (personally I wasn’t fooled), but in this day and age where information and exposure is just a few mouse clicks and a Google search away, I think generally the public has a fair idea of where a game is going in terms of critical reception. As it stands I’d say APB will probably be hitting the 60 – 80%/100% meta critic scoreline, which is probably about right for what it is (an evolution rather than a revolution), assuming you are game enough to buy into what it is (an co-operative team based 3PS shooter) rather than what it is not (WoW crossed with ME2).
19/06/2010 at 07:43 Nalano says:
Honestly, when did the metaphysics of release date debacles and media blackouts and first impressions of closed betas and public relations and predicting popularity and such and such nonsense become the dominant factor of gaming?
This kinda feels like handing a fetus his first pre-pre-pre-SAT. (or, I suppose, A levels for you Brits, if you’ll accept my mangling the analogy.) We’re so caught up second-guessing what comes out before it comes out that when it does come out we’re sick and tired of it and on to the next thing.
It kinda reminds me of the reams and reams of e-paper wasted on the melodramatic epic that was IW’s MW2: The previews, the “controversy,” the subsequent internecine warfare, etc., as if it deserved that much attention – like MW2 was somehow the bastard child of Quentin Tarantino and Martin Scorcese, when in reality it was an over-funded popcorn blockbuster that used flashy visuals to hide the fact that it was a (fairly short) bog-standard shooter that added nothing to the genre or the industry. Indeed, imagine if someone were to make a movie about the A-Team using ten times the budget of the original TV show and, and… oh.
17/06/2010 at 13:59 Radiant says:
I got onto the beta with the “Keys to the city” thing run through here.
I installed the game jumped on and created my character.
I then realised that I had to unlock all the good customisation options.
I aimlessly ran around the ‘social’ district, a weird future dystopia of clusters of people silently staring at the shop/customisation booths whilst awful techno music echoed around the featureless buildings.
I took off all my clothes ran around in my underwear completely ignored and then uninstalled the game.
17/06/2010 at 13:59 utharda says:
I’ve got mixed feelings about the sucker. I’ve played probably 10 hours all told.
The driving sucked at first. But eventually i figured out how to lead my turns, and can do a full bootlegger, if I plan ahead. Also realizing that killing gobs of pedestrians has no real impact on anything helped. Its a lot like driving in texas.
On the other hand, the shooty bits are horrible. The mish mash of fps and rpg has cme out all wrong. Aim doesnt seem to matter at all. I can shoot someone in the head repeatedly from pb range with a high damage revolver, and nothing happens. On the other hand, getting one of the ez mode guns you can pray and spray, and slaughter.
Since advancement is essentially pvp only, enjoyment is equated to getting one of the easy mode guns. Shrug.
I really want to like it.
I really do.
But in all honesty, I don’t.
17/06/2010 at 13:59 Flint says:
I really like the word ‘embargo’.
Emmmbarrrrgooooo~
17/06/2010 at 14:33 Meat Circus says:
It always makes me think of Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome.
Dave Jones is Master/Blaster. John Walker is Auntie Entity.
17/06/2010 at 18:37 Lilliput King says:
So overrated, that film. I mean, I did fall asleep for about half an hour in the middle, but the bits I saw were just rubbish.
In terms of 1980′s films, I rate it below The Running Man.
17/06/2010 at 18:39 Lilliput King says:
But above Weird Science.
19/06/2010 at 13:49 James T says:
There are very few people who would call ‘Thunderdome’ a good (even ‘decent’) film, it truly is atrocious. Watch ‘Road Warrior’ that’s the proper one (first one’s alright too).
17/06/2010 at 14:13 Ooofy McOoof says:
“To prevent this would, well, involve Realtime Worlds taking over the planet and beginning an international oppressive dictatorship.”
That’d just be a case of extending what they do inside RTW already
17/06/2010 at 14:13 jon_hill987 says:
I would suggest that prior to the release every mag and website should print a preview saying not to buy until the review regardless of how they intend to score the game. That would serve the pubishers right.
17/06/2010 at 14:15 William Main says:
I ain’t embargoed. You’ll get what I think nearing the time. And if the game is anything like what I played beta, it’s not going to be a nice review.
17/06/2010 at 14:22 Fatrat says:
I got into the closed beta around October last year. The game was fun but played terribly (especially driving) and lagged like crazy, but this was understandable since it was ‘closed’ beta and they had so much debugging etc running.
I played the open beta this week and it looks waaaay more polished than before, lag is gone, driving is much better. But still, the game feels very empty. After about 10 hours of play (or less) it starts to feel incredibly samey. I won’t be buying it.
17/06/2010 at 14:25 Walsh says:
I like how they have infinite customization but about 2 different guns available when you start out. 4 different guns when you’ve played for 3 hours. By like, I mean hate.
It’s fun when you have a good group, needs more guns available from the beginning with all the wacky customizations you can do in MW2.
17/06/2010 at 14:30 Walsh says:
Also unlocking clothing infuriates me. Why do I have to do 40 missions for a guy to be able to buy a goddamned forward facing baseball cap from him? I can buy the backwards facing baseball cap in the beginningk, why can’t my avatar turn it around so as to not look like a tremendous douchebag?
17/06/2010 at 14:41 Zwebbie says:
Because it’s the only way to get you to do those 40 missions!
17/06/2010 at 14:26 tims says:
it needs another 6 months to a year of development.
17/06/2010 at 14:27 dreadLock says:
Just to have my say, I have really enjoyed playing APB and i think its great. Why they would be so worried about reviews I just dont know.
Its not a very fair game as people have pointed out but when its works its fantastic, easily worth it for sometimes fulfilling all those gangster fantasy’s in way GTA never could.
A sad state of affairs.
17/06/2010 at 14:32 Tim Dean says:
That embargo is meaningless and unenforceable – farcical, really.
Once a product is publicly available, anything can be written about it by a journalist (providing it doesn’t contravene defamation laws etc), who is, after all, a member of the public.
As a former editor of a product review magazine, we used to get these kinds of embargoes – or even just proclamations that we were forbidden from reviewing a particular company’s product – but there was nothing they could do to stop us. Sure they could not send us a free copy of software or a review unit if it was hardware, but there’s nothing they can do to prevent us from obtaining the product in another way – you know, like buying it – and reviewing its bollocks off. And that we did, from time to time.
17/06/2010 at 14:32 airtekh says:
I’d love to try out APB just to see what all the fuss is about and make my own mind up, but I still can’t get onto the frackin’ site to access the beta. :(
17/06/2010 at 14:34 Don says:
Having played the beta I don’t see why they’re so twitchy. Needs some tweaking, very silly that having built a great environment for car chases they often end quickly with someone wrapped round a lamp post because key driving is so imprecise and there’s no mouse option. And gunfights often have odd results for no obvious reason. But it’s not bad game as it stands and could get better. Review restrictions give the impression they’re not looking to the long term possibilities.
17/06/2010 at 14:36 LewieP says:
Is there anything stopping publications for declining to review the review copy that they were sent, and buying a copy at retail, and reviewing that.
Or, even, just saying that they did that.
17/06/2010 at 14:50 Jockie says:
I should think it hinges on trust/not wanting to piss off PR people. Journos need publishers and vice versa, whether this embargo stretches the limits of that working relationship is for the respective parties to decide. Shouldn’t think that a lot of the major websites will be enamoured with the idea of a lot of smaller websites having their reviews out first though.
17/06/2010 at 14:42 Schmung says:
What a truly stupid thing for RTW to do.
Again, like many here I played it and didn’t really enjoy it. I could just about deal with the cars, but the combat was horrible and ignored every sensible improvement and innovation that’s been made with third person shootythings in the past ten years.
17/06/2010 at 17:45 Clovis says:
Yeah, especially the innovation that lets you hit a button to go into first person.
17/06/2010 at 14:42 Po0py says:
I was one of the lucky few who got themselves into the Beta. Never got to play it. Wouldn’t run.
17/06/2010 at 15:00 Mr_Day says:
I don’t believe it is very exclusive. I got about 3 invites – one from a friend, one from RPS and one for signing up to the PC Gamer forums. Currently, if you follow them on twitter and retweet a message, you get a beta key.
17/06/2010 at 14:42 Bascule42 says:
They killed free press. The bastards.
17/06/2010 at 14:54 KindredPhantom says:
The review embargo does seem a bit steep. I do wonder though because the next issue of PCGamer is due to come out on the 1st of July, so i wonder if that will mean they have to keep the review out of the issue.
17/06/2010 at 14:58 Mr_Day says:
Probably the most damning thing I can think of to say about APB is that it would work better as a mod for GTA IV.
That, and the vehicle controls are shit*.
But the embargo seems a bit pointless – as others have pointed out, they can’t enforce it. You aren’t locked into a contract which states you may not review the game until the specified date. The worst thing they can do to anyone breaking the embargo is to not send them review code of future games – which publishers try now and it doesn’t work, the reviewer simply buys the game at retail and comments about how they had to in the review.
Of course it could be part of a master plan for future releases. Think about it – “This game is so good, all the reviewers purchased it!”
* I’d compare them to trying to get around a corner in a car whose only means of control are 4 buttons, two lock the steering full left or right, and two lock the accelerator to full ahead or full reverse. I would compare it to that, but I don’t have to – that is what it is**. Couple that with vehicle physics that have them sliding unnaturally all over the place – press the accelerate button for a second, then release and press the handbrake button, and marvel as your car skids for too long. Far too long. Should have stopped by now. Why haven’t I stopped by now? Oh god that’s a truck. Oh shit. I CAN’T STOP!
** I realise GTA does this too. That is why I have a joypad. If you can use a joypad in apb, please point it out.
17/06/2010 at 15:14 KindredPhantom says:
You can use a joypad in APB, although it isn’t officially supported but it will work.
17/06/2010 at 15:30 Mr_Day says:
Good to know, worth giving it a second try with the pad at least.
17/06/2010 at 15:01 BigJonno says:
Being a MMO doesn’t give a game a free pass to be shit for the first X hours. That just doesn’t cut it any more. I totally agree that MMOs may need to be played for a bit longer than the the average single player game to get a balanced review, but it usually takes weeks or even months to get a real feel for a MMOs long-term worth. Do we really want to wait that long for a review?
17/06/2010 at 15:11 12kill4 says:
“Well, we approached Indigo Pearl to ask for a comment from Realtime Worlds, and were promised one would be coming. That was a week ago and we’ve heard nothing.”
Their response is embagoed until a week after the release of this article.
17/06/2010 at 15:18 KindredPhantom says:
Their response will be coming, one of the developers said they will be issuing a responce.
But they are pretty busy at the moment preparing for the release of their game whilst running a private test world and public beta/demo.
17/06/2010 at 15:17 colinmarc says:
150 comments and no Hitler comparison? Or did I miss it…
17/06/2010 at 15:23 Ravious says:
Stalinist came pretty close…
17/06/2010 at 15:26 Peter Radiator Full Pig says:
Who else keeps reading RTW as Rome: Total War?
17/06/2010 at 15:29 KindredPhantom says:
I do wonder that out of those who are commenting how bad APB is, how many have played for more than 5 minutes or have played at all.
17/06/2010 at 15:50 mrmud says:
Considering how videly avaliable the beta is/has been, I would say most probably have.
I have played 10 or so hours and think its terrible.
17/06/2010 at 16:10 KindredPhantom says:
Fair dues.
I think the 5 hours for the KTTC event was a mistake, they should have offered a lot more time. 5 hours is not near enough, the extra 5 hours were only added after. 15-30 hours i think would have been a better amount of time. But the reasoning behind it i was told was to leave players wanting more, i think that perhaps it may have done the opposite.
17/06/2010 at 15:33 Sonic Goo says:
Looks like there’s already a review out on APB. And Indigo Pearl/RTW just gave their game a big thumbs down.
Shame. I was looking forward to this, once.
17/06/2010 at 15:33 Calabi says:
I dont agree with this idea that you have to play a game for weeks to discover all the subtleties of a game. People dont have time for that anymore, or they never did. Its not just that way with games though its the same with movies and books. If the movie is not interesting in the first few minutes they why should it be interesting in the remainder. If the first chapter of a book is no interesting then what about the rest?
I think its 101 of book writing that you have to make the first paragraph the draw the hook, to keep people reading otherwise they will just give up.
Its the same with games if its not interesting in the first half an hour then people will become disinterested and probably quit.
It is entirely the fault of the game, book or movie for this. Some of the best movies make the first few minutes some of the most interesting.
If they cant be bothered to make the first bit interesting then it says everything about them. No ones going to read a book because something really interesting might happen seven hundred pages down the line.
People do not consume media like that, they consume it for what it gives in that moment, that which they are consuming it.
If a game is only interesting for some promises down the line, you are required to complete sixteen boring challenges of monotony until you attain the golden fleece, why should anyone expect any better of it, or waste their time with it.
This ten days after realease its blatant bollocks. Their is no logical reason for it.
17/06/2010 at 16:36 Lambo says:
@calabi
I’m not sure whether I think that you should be of the mentality that should say; “The book didn’t hook me, its not great” to paraphrase what I think you’re saying.
Or
what I mentioned above about simply stating “I tried to read it it but i wasn’t hooked and I stopped. The bit I read was truly shit but I didn’t read most of it”.
17/06/2010 at 15:39 ffrank says:
If they changed all the cars to Hover Cars (just remove the wheel polygons should do it), then it would play better.
Rather than request reviews are held back, perhaps they should do what most developers do (or used to do?) delay the game.
17/06/2010 at 15:48 Player1 says:
Well, honestly I have much more fun playing than APB. Why? It’s much more polished and even lacking the customisation options it’s just plain fun, which APB isn’t from what I’ve seen.
17/06/2010 at 15:51 Dominic White says:
If the issue is that the game is a community-based MMO, and should be judged as such (which is entirely fair), then here’s how RTW should have gone about this:
Issue a public press release, saying that the game is heavily multiplayer/community-driven, and that pre-release reviews would likely be missing out on a large part of the game.
Do not put an embargo on it, but strongly reccomend that reviews be put on hold until the game can be judged properly once it’s out in the wild.
If a reviewer clearly hasn’t played it online, or only looked at it for an hour or two (they should be able to track this, being the guys running the servers), then they should be named and shamed, as it’s gross unprofessionalism.
Putting out a blanket embargo on reviews until they’ve been on the market for a while is a really good way of pissing people off, and making a lot of people very suspicious.
I’m all for multiplayer-centric games being only reviewed once they’re live. Worst thing I ever saw in reviewing was one site (I forget which) giving the excellent 360 mech-sim Chrome Hounds a terrible score. Why? Because the game was apparently far too short, easy, linear and there wasn’t enough customization. The problem with this review? The reviewer had judged it based on the tutorial missions, which are 2-3 hours long at best, and only give you a tiny sampling of first-tier mech components to build with. The actual campaign mode is online-only (there is no singleplayer besides the tutorial), but the review didn’t even acknowledge it.
17/06/2010 at 15:53 Urthman says:
The real problem here is “review code.” Reviewers should buy their games and review the actual game that the gamer is going to play. Anything else is a preview.
How many Assassin’s Creed 2 reviews, for instance, ended with something like, “We didn’t get to try the actual DRM, but we hear it’s bad, so you might want to factor that in to our 9.8 AWESOME score”?
17/06/2010 at 16:07 LewieP says:
None, seeing as review copies used the same DRM as the retail release.
17/06/2010 at 16:12 Greg Wild says:
I do agree their experience should be exactly that of the player – or should at least make an effort to ret-con them if necessary. I would point out, having gone through it a couple of times that review code DRM is often far worse than retail DRM. If anything, the reviewer has to put up with a more difficult experience. They’re often pre day-one patches or a pre-gold version. If anything they have to try to guesstimate what the retail experience will be like based on what developers suggest is coming up on a release patch. Napoleon Total War is an interesting example – in PCG their review pointed out that supply/attrition was a little shit. By release they’d actually tweaked that.
But I’d love to see journalists being able to afford to buy every game they wish to do a review of. Y’know, with their “huge” salaries. In my time reviewing in a semi-amateur capacity I spent a lot more on games than I could really afford, even with review copies here and there.
17/06/2010 at 16:19 Interesting says:
The fact that they allow anyone to try a demo for free totally negates this rant. Why is it even a story? Try the game, don’t like it then don’t buy it. Why do people need a review from RPS, make their own minds up!
any why no RPS preview given the article states they are happy for that to happen? Seems some good ones out there…
http://ve3d.ign.com/articles/previews/55312/APB-Hands-On-Previewhttp://www.twincannon.com/2010/06/16/apb-is-pretty-damn-good/
17/06/2010 at 16:21 CMaster says:
It’s fascinating how many people say (reasonably enough) that noone wants to know if the game gets good 5-10 hours in, people shouldn’t be forced to sit through it or whatever.
Yet among the countless 9/10 reviews that the latest Final Fantasy game got, one of the most common comments was that “it gets good 20-25 hours in”. And noone seemed to think this was a problem at all…
17/06/2010 at 16:26 Snidesworth says:
I’ve been reading through the comments and waiting for someone to mention FF13.
My own two pence; loads of technical problems, uninteresting gameplay, driving was hellish and shooting was mediocre. Even the excellent customisation can’t save this game.
17/06/2010 at 16:29 mrmud says:
uh,
Alot of people seemed to think that was a big problem.
PA even made a strip out of it.
17/06/2010 at 16:31 Greg Wild says:
The way I look at it, APB lives or dies on three aspects (bugs/server connectivity issues aside): Customisation (Works, and works very well), Shooting Mechanics/Combat (fucking awful) and Social Aspects (certainly functional, lots of scope for those who persevere). Without all three of them being there, there’s no future for the game. At least not for me.
Especially if we’re talking the combat. It really is atrocious. Sub-par animations. Clunky movement. Horrible weapon handling. Dodgy environment design. The combat is just awful, from what I’ve found playing the beta intermittently throughout.
17/06/2010 at 16:48 Archonsod says:
Thing is, if I say I’m going to give you cake, but will spend the three hours beforehand punching you in the face, that does not make the cake very appealing. Particularly not when you can buy plenty of other cakes which don’t involve three hours of facepunching to enjoy.
It’s the same with the “community based” excuse. Any game tends to be improved (or in some cases worsened) by the community. The question is, why would I want to buy an intrinsically bad game which is improved by it’s community when I could buy an intrinsically good game which is improved by it’s community? Surely the second one is always going to be better?
17/06/2010 at 17:52 Clovis says:
They hella’ discussed that on the Joystiq Podcast for like a month. The main defender pointed out that he was enjoying the early parts of the game, but hoped it would get better 20 hours in. That is different then simply hating the game for the first 5 to 10 hours.
17/06/2010 at 22:09 Dan Milburn says:
You obviously didn’t read the Edge review then, which gave it 5/10 for exactly that reason.
19/06/2010 at 12:34 Kadayi says:
@Greg Wild
1) Get to know the City. Spend some time driving around getting to understand the layout of the City and exploring it. Knowing the terrain pays dividends.
2) Try grouping up. The game is all about group play. The team that communicates well, is generally the team that wins.
3) Consider weapons from the perspective of the right tool for the right job, rather than ‘I’m a sniper’. You can swap out weapons mid mission at an ammo vendor (which you can locate using the map), or when using a field supplier/mobile supply unit (which you can acquire fairly early on in the game).
17/06/2010 at 16:30 terry says:
Alas, you can’t put the internet cat back in the bag. Beta leaks aside, this game was doomed by forum word of mouth months ago.
17/06/2010 at 16:39 Eight Rooks says:
Tried the beta for an hour or two. Didn’t like it. When I talked about it to anyone on the internet I did attempt to be very clear I had only played it for an hour or two, that I could see it being great fun with a group of very dedicated friends and that it would no doubt be a success. But for me the visuals I saw didn’t look particularly interesting or impressive, the tutorial missions were staggeringly boring, the gunplay didn’t feel particularly satisfying, the driving mechanics were odd and as a lone wolf the whole structure of ‘pick random mission, run to location, on your own, die, respawn, run back, die’ etc., etc. was more frustrating than anything else.
Again, I did not play very much of it at all. I’ll happily admit that. But Crackdown blew me away inside fifteen minutes (and mentally I mean that quite literally; I was utterly astounded at how much fun it was to play, almost from the moment I picked up the joypad). I’m not paying any kind of time-based fee for anything – especially from the same developer – that can’t do the same. And I don’t feel particularly interested in slogging through ten or twenty more hours of grinding tedium or however long it’s supposed to take to get to the point where I start enjoying it. I’m not very good at competitive multiplayer games, I’m well aware of that. If they’re good, I can still appreciate how well they’re put together right from the start even if I get shot in the head repeatedly.
I’m sure tons of people will love it. But Guild Wars 2 gets my money over ATB, for what little that’s worth. Sorry, RTW.
17/06/2010 at 16:39 Juice says:
I’m not surprised Real Time Worlds is doing this. Just take one look at the beta forums and you’ll see a lot of discontentment among testers. The game is unbalanced, driving is clumsy and it’s extremely repetitive. Not to mention there is no matchmaking system in place what so ever, so you are often paired with people with rating/ weapons much much higher than you and often times you are severely outnumbered.
I will say the core game idea can be very fun, if you can get an even match going, but those are few and far between. Also, the designing and customization aspect of the game is quite a lot of fun too, but it’s definitely not worth buying the game just to try that out.
Overall I’d say they have a great idea for a game, but an equally good development of that concept just isn’t there.
17/06/2010 at 16:46 Hatch says:
I’ve played the game for a few hours and enjoyed it. It’s certainly not perfect.
I just don’t get all the negativity, especially with so little playtime for most of the people being negative.
The criticisms of the driving uniformly boil down to “I was terrible at the driving and gave up without learning it”. If you learn to use the handbrake, it’s fun. I actually found it easier to control than cars in GTA4.
I desperately missed the ME2 cover system, but I don’t think the shooting is bad, especially after getting a gun upgarde and getting used to how the shooting plays.
When I first tried TF2, I was shit. When I first tried Unreal Tourney, I was shit. I don’t get why the expectation is that you’ll drop into a shooting game and kick ass at it in the first hour, especially with the crappiest guns in the game against people who have probably already made some progress in the RPG aspects of the game.
That said, I hate that so much of the touted customization is locked off and the interface for the customization is not as good as it should be.
I’d probably only give the game a 6/10, but I’ve been having more fun with it than I’ve had with a lot of other games, especially MMOs. I don’t get where all the hatred and claiming the game is *terrible* is coming from.
17/06/2010 at 17:55 Clovis says:
But TF2 was fun during the first few hours. And since I wasn’t out-armed, I didn’t mind that I wasn’t doing as well as others. The mechanics of the game were immediately fun. Pretty much the opposite for APB. There’s just too many other great games to play for me to waste another 5 to 10 hours on possibly getting to the fun part.
17/06/2010 at 18:32 Lilliput King says:
Took me about 20 minutes to get to an SMG, and that’s including the tutorial. Its just not that steep in terms of time requirements.
I spent about 4 months waiting for Eve to get to the fun part my goodness but seriously.
17/06/2010 at 20:53 Tei says:
In APB, once you know what you are doing, you can jump in combat and be efficiente very fast. But most players will not know what to do for a few hours.
17/06/2010 at 17:00 MajorManiac says:
RTM taking a big, if interesting, risk doing this.
By removing professional level-headed reviews on the most important week of the game, and replacing them with reviews written by random looneys like us.
17/06/2010 at 17:12 Tei says:
What if theres a lost tribe of canival journos on the jungles of Java? these people can get out of the woods and post a review anyway.
“Driving is good, but what can I say? I have never drived, or see, a car before”
“The shotting can be better, and theres not cover system. I don’t know what is a cover system but everyone is commenting it, so sould be important”
“I like the customization system, I love to paint lines on my face, and my body, before going out to hunt people. And I can also do that in the game”
“Theres less than 100 players in a server, so often you have to fight against the exact same team of dudes, if these people have destroyed you before, bets are you will get destroyed again”.
“You can’t eat the enemy body to gain powers, and for this lack of realism, I will reduce the game score in one”.
17/06/2010 at 21:49 yogSo says:
Qué grande eres, Tei.
17/06/2010 at 17:20 Dmitry says:
I am not trying to defend anyone but i am in the game right now and am really enjoying it. I am a hardcore gamer with many hours in GTA 3 so i doubt id accept bad driving and shooting, i just dont see these problems.
The game isnt perfect, the biggest issue sometimes is balance on a mission on the number of players, but overall the game is VERY FUN and i recommend it to all my friends.
17/06/2010 at 17:26 jerkbot says:
Played it for eight or nine hours in Keys to the City.
The game’s amazing, but play it with a group (Not that hard as there’s a from what I’ve seen fairly good LFG function) and don’t be an idiot rushing in with an SMG.
Once you’ve been playing around in random groups for a while try to find a good clan/team of people to play with.
The handling’s not bad at all after you’ve been driving around for a while and get out of the terrible default car. It can be annoying when the matchmaking dumps you in a 3v6 or the game splits your team into two separate missions because one person got sighted and bountied before everyone else zoned in, but the good times outweighed the bad.
I’m pre-ordering it.
17/06/2010 at 17:31 Burningpet says:
If the developer doesnt have the insight to produce the early bits of the game as fun and interesting as the late, then the game deserve bad reviews by reviewers who havent played past the early-mid game. thats all there is to it.
17/06/2010 at 17:37 Moonracer says:
This is indeed strange news, especially with the whole Key to the City “hey everyone try the game out for yourself!” demo program going on.
I will admit the game play is, primitive. I laughed when I realized headshots don’t make a difference. Still, after my 5 hour run I went and pre ordered the game. I wanted more for some reason.
17/06/2010 at 17:38 Duck says:
Thank God that RPS comments are not representative of what everyone else in the world thinks.
So far, 40% of the people who tear the game to shreds haven’t played it (or didn’t get past the tutorial), and are just going on what they’ve heard from other people.
30% have actually played it, have genuine concerns, but are so caught up in the storm of hatred and generalized ad-hominem “arguments” that they over-exaggerate any problems they have.
The other 30% really do hate it, and they have every right to their opinion, but they insist that the entire world agrees with them and if you don’t, you’re an effing retard.
“Stalinist”? “Oppressive Dictatorship”? Sure, a review embargo like this is ridiculous, but I’m sure that, given a chance to ignore a stupid review embargo, or watch your family killed in front of you by the KGB, you would pick the “ignoring a stupid review embargo” option.
I agree, the game has flaws. I agree, the opening moments are not the greatest, and at first I was extremely confused. Once I got a hang of it, though, APB was the most fun in a game I’ve had in a long, long time.
I’m seeing stories on here of “once I got to level 10 it was good, I bought an SMG”. You can buy an SMG after doing your first real mission with any contact, not at level 10. The problem isn’t that the game is screwed up (in regards to what equipment you can buy at which level) but that the majority of equipment options aren’t explained well. That can be fixed. It’s not “broken beyond repair”.
I’m seeing a lot of complaints about “unvaried gameplay”. That has changed since the closed beta (A LOT), and while the open beta still has some repetition issues, that will change as the game goes along. RTW has plans to be updating this game constantly. So it might be a little barebones now, but after a couple months, that claim won’t hold water.
My last point on this subject is one of perspective. A lot of you are attacking this game as if it shot your father, burned down your barn, and owed you money. Chill out guys, it’s just a game. A game you didn’t even pay for. Not a single cent. I suggest we all calm down *oh wait, that’s not capable on RPS comment threads* and let everyone think for themselves, instead of the current crapfest of shoving your opinion down everyone’s throat.
17/06/2010 at 17:42 Nick says:
Look boys, someone’s talking sense! BUUUUURNNN HIMMMM!
17/06/2010 at 17:43 Stijn says:
I’m not sure what you base those percentages on, but apart from that I agree with you. I actually planned to pre-order the game, but this move on RTW’s part doesn’t do much good to my trust in them supporting the game well post-launch.
17/06/2010 at 17:51 Duck says:
Guys, the whole reason for the embargo, however ridiculous it is, is not that they are trying to prevent anyone from saying it sucks, but that they have a better understanding of their own game than you do. The players affect the world of APB more than any other multiplayer game. Reviews of APB at Day 1 and Day 7 are going to be completely different reviews, and this is not marketing rhetoric. If you don’t give the game time to ferment and become a sweet wine, you are going to be reviewing a bunch of sour grapes, and that’s really quite unfair. Do wine connoisseurs “review” wines based on the immediate product and not what results from years of fermentation? RTW is simply saying “give the game a week to get itself going, so you can see what it really is”.
17/06/2010 at 18:02 Ooofy McOoof says:
Where do you get those nonsense percentages from?
The most constant and directed flaming of the game I’ve seen were on the beta forums on where 100% of the flamers had played APB.
Honestly, the game has plenty of issues. Unfortunately for RTW and there are plenty of other titles out right now there with no problems and offer great fun from the kick off. And they don’t involve placing a bet on RTW getting their sorry shit to shore at some point in the future.
The truth of the matter is they’ve spent five years and $80m on this game to date and it’s far from compelling. I can’t justify making a £40 bet that over the next few months that the game is going to get good when their performance to date has eroded any confidence I initially had in them,
It’s all a bit of a shame really.
17/06/2010 at 18:49 FunkyBadger says:
but that they have a better understanding of their own game than you do
Awh, err… maybe they should write a review about it then.
Hmmm, hang on, I’m sure there’s a problem with that idea…
19/06/2010 at 05:46 Kadayi says:
@Ooofy McOoof
You don’t really get ‘beta testing’ or ‘feedback’ do you?
Also £40 where?
17/06/2010 at 17:58 Dan says:
Apparently the date has been brought forward to July 2nd now:
http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/realtime-worlds-brings-apb-embargo-forward
17/06/2010 at 18:19 Juice says:
““Stalinist”? “Oppressive Dictatorship”? Sure, a review embargo like this is ridiculous, but I’m sure that, given a chance to ignore a stupid review embargo, or watch your family killed in front of you by the KGB, you would pick the “ignoring a stupid review embargo” option.”
Censorship is Stalinist and how does the “kill your family” remark even make sense? Are you trying to say that we should not call censorship what it is because ignoring it is better than having state police kill your relatives? Or are you trying to say that it isn’t Stalinist because they won’t kill your family? Either way, that was a dumb statement. You can have elements of Stalinism without the Gulags as well. Not sure why that would be a hard concept, but given the rest of your post I’m not too surprised either.
The people who are hating on the game aren’t forcing their opinion on others. Unless you consider merely making someone read their post “forcing it on them”. In that case you’d be guilty of it as well, genius. And yes I did play the beta for quite a long time, so I do have legitimate experience with the title to warrant the opinions and issues I have with it. That being said, I’m going to express those opinions whenever I can because I do feel that APB has some serious issues and in my opinion people will be wasting money on a poorly developed game. And in light of this “review embargo” RTW has placed on news outlets, it’s even more important for people who have experienced the game to share their opinions with people who are considering buying it.
There’s only one reason that RTW would enact this embargo and that’s because a large percentage of beta testers weren’t satisfied with the quality of the game; and it’s a good chance the reviewers for publications like RPS might not come out with glowing praise for the title either. Either way they are trying to sucker as many people into buying a game before they know what it is they are getting for their money.
Love it or hate it, people shouldn’t be scolded by you for expressing their concerns and impressions on a game that needs them said the most in light of this ridiculous “review embargo”.
17/06/2010 at 19:44 Stijn says:
I think the point is that “Stalinist” carries a lot wider connotations than just censorship. Like, concentration camps and indeed the KGB killing people all around. It’s not quote a Godwin yet, but the simile is equally overblown.
17/06/2010 at 19:44 Stijn says:
Quite, I mean. O edit function, where art thou?
17/06/2010 at 18:38 Hurion says:
RTW kind of has all it’s eggs in the APB basket, right? So if they game sucks and it fails, who cares if your review gets you on a (soon to be) defunct devs shitlist?
17/06/2010 at 18:56 HighMemetic80sHero says:
I think some people are being overly harse on this game but yes it’s not without problems. It’s not alot of fun to play without friends and some of the cars are rubbish but the combat is alot of fun once you get used to it and some better weapons. Just needs some tweaks and more varied missions really.
When played with 2-3 friends the game is completely different and alot of fun. Given some time and updates like any mmo it will improve.
This review embargo was a bad idea tho…
17/06/2010 at 19:23 Freud says:
Behaviour like this should result in a Spinal Tap-esque three word review.
“All Poop Bullentin” 2/10.
17/06/2010 at 19:35 fucrate says:
I actually thought the symbol designer was pretty neat, I’m pretty impressed by all the customization stuff.
17/06/2010 at 19:42 Name (required) says:
“First impressions count, even for an MMO.” and all the other wow was completely different and had the most amazing start ppl….ARE YOU ON CRACK? the start of WoW stank worst hour of any game ive ever played boring and repetitive and it stays like that even after you leave the noob area, boring collect quests but in different locales.
17/06/2010 at 19:52 mrmud says:
Im going to guess you didnt play very many MMOs before WoW was released?
The thing to remember with the starting zones of WoW is that its an old game, by the standards of when it came out the starting zones were pretty damn good. Today the landscape is different.
17/06/2010 at 20:12 JUMP says:
That may be the case but I was saying that after you left the start zone the game was still the boring repetitive collect quests that it had been from the start.
19/06/2010 at 07:20 Nalano says:
Not to mention raiding hadn’t been implemented at launch.
Not that it matters: How good the game is at launch isn’t necessarily a good indicator of how good the game is a year later.
TR and AoC had decent launches. TR died and AoC is floundering bad. EVE was bug-ridden, and as far as I’m concerned still bug-ridden, but it plods along happily. MO is fucking terrible and feels a lot like work, but I’m sure there’s enough hardcore UO-heads to keep it going for a while yet.
17/06/2010 at 21:29 LOLATGAMEBLOGS says:
OH GOD. CALL THE PRESS. CALL THE PRESIDENT. IT’S FUCKING 2012!
Who gives a shit? So a majority of people here don’t like the game. Amazing. And RPS is appalled that RTW don’t want a Gamespot Global Agenda “5.65 hour” review on their game.
Let’s discuss how sharp cheese is better than regular cheese while we are on topics of major importance.
29/06/2010 at 16:16 Eric says:
Why are you bothering logging on a game blog if you’re so offended by the coverage?
17/06/2010 at 22:09 Kadayi says:
@DJ Phantoon
Mojo asked a question about embargoes and I answered it.
I’m not to sure what (if any) my relationship with either APB, or RTW has to do with it. I like it, you apparently don’t (that’s your prerogativ)e.
Perhaps if you knew anything about games publishing, you’d understand that embargoes are fairly common place. That an online games developer wants to be judged on the games final release and not the beta code should hardly come as a surprise tbh.
17/06/2010 at 22:19 Dan Milburn says:
Right, but the issue is not what they want, it’s what the games-press reading public want, which is some idea of whether the game’s any good before they buy it. All this nonsense about how this game’s so special that it can’t possibly reviewed in the same way as other games is a distraction from the fact that the company is trying to force journalists to withhold information which may affect buying decisions. Along with everyone else, I think there’s only one reason they’d choose to do that, and it’s not because they’re expecting 10/10 reviews across the board. And given that the main purpose of a beta these days is to be a promotional tool, they should have damn well made sure it reflected well on what the final game would look like. If they have failed to do that, it’s their failure, not that of the journalists who write about it.
18/06/2010 at 17:13 Kadayi says:
@Dan Milburn
Is anyone forcing you to buy the game prior to the reviews coming out? if you want a taster to see if it’s your cup of tea, there’s an open beta of sorts going on at the moment.
18/06/2010 at 01:13 Alt says:
I agree with the first post. I will also point out that the game is insanely CPU intensive. And this is from a guy who plays ARMA 2.
18/06/2010 at 01:34 RvL says:
I think you meant to say “A large number of 8/10s”, if you were trying to indicate that the game is ‘Average.’
(Review-site ZING)
18/06/2010 at 01:48 Jinny says:
All I had was problems with the game in the Beta…It played horribly for the first 30 minutes, then it crashed…but, unbeknownst to me, it kept me logged in. I couldn’t get the game to start up again and gave up…I went back 4 hours and 15 minutes later, got the game started up and logged in to find I only had 15 minutes of playtime left… -_- It played terribly though in the 45 minutes I was able to play…driving was a nightmare and shooting was even worse…and there didn’t seem to be much to actually do…I can understand the embargo though, it’s just to keep the reviews saying “This game is horrid” out of the press until they can make some easy money off schmucks.
18/06/2010 at 02:15 Cog says:
Just finished putting 10 hours into the Keys to the City Event.
It’s frustrating, because there are some parts of the game are really pretty fun (Customization, I actually like the driving), but overall, it’s irreparably marred by a terrible matchmaking system (eg. 3 vs 1 capture and hold mission isn’t uncommon) goofy over the shoulder point of view swinging around randomly during gunfights, and serious balance problems with weapons and upgrades. Nothing I’d pay for, especially not an ongoing fee.
So, in summation; While there are some good parts, no matter how many chocolate chips you put in it, I’m not going to eat a chocolate chip turd.
18/06/2010 at 15:42 nmute says:
personally, i feel APB is probably in the best shape for release of any MMO in the past few years. 20ish hours and 3 keys later, i’m dying to play more. atmosphere is great. sound effects are great. customization is great (you can MAKE YOUR OWN KILL MUSIC). shooting can be a bit dodgy, but effects can be minimized by learning how best to employ each weapon. i’ve had lots of kills with the starting rifle -shrug-.
my biggest issues are grenades never killing anyone (in my experience) and all the idiots allowed to run rampant with racist/sexist epithets scrawled all over their vehicles and clothing. also the odd occasion where you’re matched against not only higher numbers but higher ranks, with no one answering backup calls.
APB has issues sure. other than that i’m kinda taken aback by the hate shown for it here. the embargo seems a bit much too, i guess.
then again, i’m willing to bet there would have been more 5/10 scores for RotG if reviewers were made to play longer. then they’d realize it was little more than a cynical grindsink.
18/06/2010 at 15:55 nmute says:
@ Kieron
But imagine if APB wasn’t good. Imagine if a publisher can do something like this and say “No reviews for 10 days” and everyone obeys them.
That’s why it’s a deal.
thats quite true and a point well made.
but conversely, my cursory observations of many of the comments made here tell me that a lot of the howling and outrage is based on DISLIKE of the game. that, and vague assertions of majority opinion.
19/06/2010 at 05:52 Kadayi says:
“but conversely, my cursory observations of many of the comments made here tell me that a lot of the howling and outrage is based on DISLIKE of the game. that, and vague assertions of majority opinion.”
This does seem to be the trend at the moment, and a rather ugly one at that.
18/06/2010 at 16:58 Kadayi says:
Kieron
Then as a journalist it’s fair to say you owe it to your readership to provide them with the best coverage no? You’ve participated in the Beta, would you say you could give an honest review based on that?
19/06/2010 at 12:23 Kieron Gillen says:
Kadayi: I bounced right of the surface. Played for an hour, and then the time limited nature of the sessions got in the way. I’m busy.
Regarding best coverage – yeah, I do. And we decide what that is, not the things that we’re covering.
KG
19/06/2010 at 12:46 Kadayi says:
@Keiron
Well in light of what RTW post walkers rant do you still find their position unreasonable and objectionable?
19/06/2010 at 12:56 Kadayi says:
@Keiron
Well in light of what RTW said, (post Walkers rant) do you still find their position unreasonable and objectionable?
19/06/2010 at 07:13 Nalano says:
I rather believe they’d be hurt more by the PR of this embargo than the reviews of their game.
I wasn’t in closed beta but I did get a good ten hours in the Key to the City open beta and, while the gunplay felt like Counterstrike circa ’99, it had what no MMO at launch ever had, to my knowledge: Stability.
I pre-ordered Mortal Online so long ago that when it was released I totally forgot I pre-ordered it. When I got on I was slapped with the worst interface I’ve ever seen, an abject lack of documentation on how to do anything, and a server that not only went down every half hour, but didn’t tell you it went down. You’d just discover you’ve been playing off-line for the last ten minutes.
Of course, comparing MO to APB is comparing apples to oranges, but I’ve also attended the launches of TR, DDO, WAR, AoC and WoW, while dabbling in EVE, and I’m impressed with how robust the infrastructure holding APB together is keeping up, especially considering its insane individualization feature.
Creating a character and futzing about with your fashion is fairly intuitive (and pretty much half the game if not more), it’s clear that adding new stuff is basically grinding out faction reputation, but practically everything you do gives you faction rep and, indeed, in the action zones the factions won’t leave you alone long enough to realize just what you’re doing until after you’ve done it.
Most missions are PvP-based, so you never feel alone nor do you feel overwhelmed (which is a gameplay element that is very well done, consequently, and something WAR never really achieved). Driving is not difficult at all, in my opinion, though it does remind me of the arcade gliding of FlatOut more than anything else.
The gunplay is GTA meets CS. GTA because it’s a TPS with a very simplified aiming system. CS in that everybody who’s been in the game a while basically plays one of two standard ways: Camps, snipes, moves, repeat; or busts in with an SMG and bunnyhopping. (Also in that it’s already rife with aimbots, wallhacks and other annoying FPS stuff, but people are quick to find the culprits and it’s not hard to avoid them)
Other than the fact that everybody looks like a 14 year old after a shopping spree in Hot Topic, it’s a very polished little MMO. I hate the 100-large instancing, but the game’s so fast-paced it doesn’t quite strike you like AoC did.
19/06/2010 at 11:56 pudson says:
“Review embargoes are a very normal part of games journalism.”
The release date in other parts of the world is after the US release date.
I hate to add any actual thought to this conspiracy discussion – but just thought I’d throw that out there. Maybe they’re doing it based on the release date in other countries.
19/06/2010 at 12:55 Kadayi says:
Generally it’s long been the case that games in the US are released on Tuesdays and games in Europe are released on Fridays.
It’s only really when games are viewed as the seconding coming (GTA IV, MW2) that the release dates are the same.
20/06/2010 at 01:56 Funky J says:
I think all MMOs should be embargoed until a month after launch.
Look at the high scores for Warhammer and Conan – and what huge piles of shit they were at launch!
MMO’s are different, and to continually treat them the same as normal games is like reviewing classical and pop music to the same standards.
RTW are just trying to get game reviewers to do their job properly for once… what’s so bad about that?
Oh that’s right, you don’t like being told how to do your jobs, do you?
Because you’re the experts… YEAH RIGHT!
20/06/2010 at 04:04 Chris D says:
Well that was needlessly abusive.
You’re wrong on several counts.
Whatever you may think of individual reviewers, publisher’s telling reviewers how to do their jobs is not in anyone’s interests except the publishers.
A review embargo essentialy means they’re denying anyone information on the game for a week. Either those people who would have been swayed by the review will just wait, in which case the embargo is pointless, or they expect that customers will buy it without the benefit of a review who may not have done so if they’d had all the information. This is disingenuous at best and shows no respect for the customer. Those who would have pre-ordered wouldn’t have been affected by a day one review and so again it’s pointless.
Even if you were right an embargo is still a stupid way of going about it. It’s unenforcable and will lose them goodwill both twith the press and with potential customers. Had they worded it the form of a request I suspect people would have been much more receptive to the idea.
Making people wait an extra week will not make bad reviewers into good reviewers. It shows no respect that most reviewers will try to make a fair judgement, nor that most customers can tell a badly written review from a good one.
20/06/2010 at 04:20 Vinraith says:
I think all MMOs should be embargoed until a month after launch.
That sounds like a brilliant way to kill off the MMO market. Sounds good to me.
20/06/2010 at 03:46 Jake says:
I know this is a bit offtopic but some people are asking how you can judge the game after a short amount of time, well for me the main reason I didn’t like APB after just a few hours was the customisation. I fought a lot of characters that looked like crap, with poorly designed vehicle liveries and both factions tended to look quite similar. APB has an amazing level of customisation that in talented hands can lead to a great level of personalisation for your character, some art on the beta forums was great – but most people are not talented it seems and the vast majority of characters looked like day-glo strippers or x-treme tattoo enthusiasts with all the aesthetic sense of an xbox. Obviously that is the game’s style to an extent, but it got a bit ridiculous.
I’m torn, on the one hand I would like to see this level of customisation in future games but on the other there is a reason that companies employ actual designers to come up with characters and if you give people too much freedom with the editor you might lose creative control. (And on the third hand, it might not matter as much if the game was a lot better). I just don’t want to see day-glo stripper space marines in the 40k MMO.
20/06/2010 at 15:15 Tal-N says:
APB has several significant problems at it’s core which effect overall enjoyment of the game and it’s longevity. The central issues is how repetative the game is. By the developers own admission, the game is intended to play like Counterstike but in an open world environment. So what you basically have is one CS round after another in various places around the city which you are told to go to and defend/attack/capure.
The game is built on a rock/paper/scissors weapon system meaning you may well lose an encounter simply because you didn’t have the right weapon to defeat your opponent. APB is therefore a mix of luck and skill. The other issues are also with the teaming system (join a team and you have to wait until they finish whatever mission they are on already, leading to inactivity for as much as 15 mins or more) and a broken matchmaking system which frequently send players against a team of superior armed opponents who also outnumber you or your team. In APB beta a poll was made asking how frustrating the game was, more than 60% said it was at least very frustrating or extremely frustrating. Less than 7% said it wasn’t frustrating at all.
This embargo is an attempt at damage control by RTW. APB has potential, but it isn’t living up to it and once the shiny new game atmosphere wears off you’re left with a mediocre title with some infuriating flaws and limited gameplay.
21/06/2010 at 00:24 Kadayi says:
A poll was made you say? When and by whom exactly? Because I don’t recall any official poll of that sort tbh. I recall a lot of whining on the forums from vocal minorities about the fact that APB wasn’t more like Mass Effect, or Gears of War or (insert name of single player game here). but I don’t ever recall there being an offical RTW poll asking ‘on a scale of 1 – 10 how frustrating is APB?’.
You know I get it, you’ve fallen out of love with ApB. The game didn’t turn out to be what you expected, the honeymoon period is over, and you’ve realised it was never going to work out between you and your upset about it as you had such high hopes. But guess what? Not everyone feels like you do (that’s the beauty of life, people liking different things). Instead of spending your time pushing disinformation out there in an attempt to publicly undermine a game your are clearly never going to buy now, why not instead go find the game you are looking for ? I think you’ll find it far more productive an endeavour.
21/06/2010 at 02:07 Corwynn says:
I don’t think RTW has anything to hide concerning APB. I played during the KttC event, and for a game I had no intention of buying prior to doing so, I was absolutely blown away by how much fun it is.
Looks great, runs smooth, works well when you get your head around the fact that it’s NOT a clone of “x” game or “y” game, and is instead just APB.
Tons of issues people have brought up in the thread are not gameplay issues. They’re user error issues. They’re the result of trying to apply another game’s mechanics to APB, and failing.
If you play the game for what it is and learn how it works, you’ve got a fantastic title.
Why the embargo? It’s not out in the UK until the 2nd. On the 6th all the review sites worldwide will have had a chance to review over a full weekend of release gameplay. Not limited by anything. No Action District limitations. No pre-order limitations. Nothing but what APB is meant to be.
If journalists are unable to review a game that revolves around community when the actual community of the game is present and able to play as much as they want, then I think there is something seriously wrong with their work ethic. It’s as if they WANT to find something to take issue with. Like they’re TRYING to spot a developer that is up to no good.
I’ve played more MMOs than almost anyone I know. From betas to pre releases to release day to weeks, months and years afterwards. I’ve written a scathing account of a release (you can find it on MMORPG.com’s Age of Conan coverage.) I have no pity for developers who try to put things over on people.
This does not in any way appear to be the case with APB. Yes, some people will like it more or less. But it is the task of a reviewer to do their best to put personal issues aside, and take a look at the game itself. Not what they think they game should be.
One can hope that sites around the net assign a reviewer to the task who will play upon the release of the game, and write a review on Monday so that it can be published on Tuesday. Because THAT is when you can be sure that your favorite publication has done their best to do a good job. Cutting corners to get scoops or sensationalize isn’t journalism. Or not any kind of journalism I’d want to be associated with as a writer.
21/06/2010 at 06:56 EnjoyedIt says:
I dont know what everyone is talking about. This game is fun and I’m not seeing the issues that yall are unless you decided to only play for 30 mins or so. If yall heard MMO and are thinking this is an RPG, then you’re sadly mistaken, but for a third person shooter game, this rocks. For those that play shooters, its not like you’re NOT use to the same thing over and over, but thats not why you play it, you play it cuz its fun to shoot & kill people. This adds to the shooter genre in my opinion, and sets a pace for newer games to come.
Dont get me wrong, there were some slight lag issues whenever I played the beta… but its a beta and the game isnt even out yet. From playing games for almost 20 years, is that really unexpected??
21/06/2010 at 14:57 rmyroberts says:
APB is pretty bad, and the worst thing is how adulatory the beta forums were in spite of the fact that there were a series of issues that existed no matter whether you loved or hated the game. But nobody really liked having those pointed out; often the only thing you would get in response is a puzzling “but it’s just a beta”, despite the fact all of this was taking place in a beta forum.
I find the commenters here praising the game and heaping scorn upon the doubters a bit odd. Sure, there’s nothing to stop you from liking the game and pointing out unfair criticism, but telling everyone with a negative opinion of the game that they should be doing something else is kind of missing the point. I think we’re allowed to debate the game’s merits here, especially since this article is about the company apparently trying to stop people from doing just that (for a while, anyway).
21/06/2010 at 23:35 Kadayi says:
I think you need to couch that with ‘in my opinion’ also I’d say the beta boards were far from adulatory. Plain truth of the matter is when a game reaches beta, the general principles are set in place as to what it is and how it plays (APB = fast paced tactical team based shooter in a persistent game world), and what isn’t there is generally absent not because the developers didn’t think of it (these are not people living in a gaming vacuum, they are game smart ), but because it didn’t work out when it came to internal testing. locational damage, melee weapons, cover systems were undoubtedly all looked at and were rejected for various reasons. What the developers are looking for from a beta and it’s testers are bug reports and suggestions that enhance the gaming experience they are offering.
People coming in with less than 6 months to on the development cycle and saying stuff like ‘the combat really needs to be more like (insert name of beloved single player game here)’ are never ever likely to get entertained by the developers (though they can in themselves be entertaining). What you see at adulation is simply a case of testers who understand what a beta test is for (and have accepted the game play for what it is) and those that don’t. With a beta any changes are going to be an evolution, not a revolution.
22/06/2010 at 04:37 rmyroberts says:
I don’t think the testers I’m thinking about understood much of anything about the beta process or game development; they were usually the ones prefacing their posts with “I don’t know much about this, but can we…” (though usually in a less legible way), but that didn’t stop a lot of them from flooding into any thread that had even a slightly negative impression of the overall game and proudly proclaiming that the thread starter was an idiot that wasn’t willing to accept the game was just awesome/didn’t know how betas worked/was a whiner/etc..
I don’t know if you were in the EU or NA beta, but the EU forums at least were like that, with the added problem of a lot of the forum population being (apparently) teens for whom English wasn’t a first language.
I guess in a way I don’t know what the beta was for either if they weren’t willing to change anything (like the driving, which apparently was a problem right from the beginning) and only ran for a couple of hours to a dozen hours a week except at the very end when it was more of a PR move. The forums seemed to be far too disorganized for any input to be gathered (though admittedly I got in with one of the late batches), and like a lot of people on the beta forum itself mentioned, the whole thing seemed like an attempt to generate a buzz for the game if you looked at it from a certain angle, rather than any actual beta testing input.
It is just my opinion, obviously, but the awkward way they handled the beta playtime, the beta forums and now this embargo business feels like either RTW doesn’t know what they’re doing or they know exactly what they’re doing, what they have and what the reception will be like if they don’t somehow spin this the other way.
22/06/2010 at 11:12 Kadayi says:
@rmyroberts
The answer to pretty much all all of your questions lies in putting yourself in the shoes of a game developer and thinking about what you’d need to test in order to get your MMO game working. When you do that, you’ll begin to appreciate the ‘why’ of things, and get away from this idea that the beta was all about creating buzz.
As regards the driving. Frankly it’s simply a case of familiarity.
22/09/2010 at 17:29 rmyroberts says:
Look at how that turned out.
21/06/2010 at 18:54 Snall says:
I quite enjoyed my 15 hours or so in the game and pre-ordered on the 17th. Some people seem to have problems with the driving but I’ve found it pretty easy even without adjusting settings. You can also ADJUST the speed of movement for aiming within and without of aim mode so you should be able to make it fit your tastes in both options. Now the MISSIONS are very similar, but these can always be added too very easily, and the whole point of the game is that it’s vs. other people. Facing people with better equipment is a bitch sometimes, but that’s true in any MMO…*shrug*
I could see this game doing very well with additions as well if it survives a few years. I haven’t messed much with the designer options for custom stuff but from what I’ve seen it should be pretty good. Also they’re working on a ‘Chaos’ district which I IMAGINE will be full on PvP vs. everyone not in your group. Anyway I hated the tutorial crap and having to do that but it only takes a few minutes if you just do all the missions quickly.
(Also hoping they add a larger district population, maybe 200 max would be nice if they could do it)
22/06/2010 at 14:41 Pigskin says:
I’ve just cancelled my preorder with Amazon as a result of reading this. something smells off if the press cannot review until after launch. The only reason I preordered was that PC Gamer magazine has been giving the game good coverage. I generally will only buy a game after I’ve read good reviews from the PC Gamer crew.
PS Thanks Kieron and Jim for all your great work over the years.
23/06/2010 at 05:14 Anon says:
What are you guys like 5-years-old? Wah, we didn’t get the rights to the reviews we expected so we’ll slander the game without breaking the NDA, wah. WTS, seriously? Articles like this make me not want to return to your site.
24/06/2010 at 12:49 Cid says:
Go to Youtube there they have podcasts with Q&A there you will get most answers about info and I have pre-ordered the game because I like that style of games, if you don’t then don’t buy the game it’s that simple. No need to go all out flaming shit that isn’t even ready, the final product may or may not be much bigger and better then the beta test was and beta tests is just what it is a test. Of course they will adress issues and stuff, but flaming and branding a game as poor and crappy is just lame when it isn’t even out on the market yet. I agree about holding reviews 10 days after or so because a review is supposed to be from a played the full and final version of the game not on a first look, half-done game.
Peace
29/06/2010 at 16:11 Eric says:
Why did it have to be a shooting game? Why is such awesome customization going to waste?
I wish to god this level of customization was in an actual grand theft auto game… Or even better, the Sims.
30/06/2010 at 18:35 Pat says:
Its a pvp game and not meant for pve pussying around and u know how those little pve fairies get when they arent catered too! This game will attract a mutitude of mmo idiots expecting wow and they will complain that the game needs an overhaul just cause theyve got no real skill, and arent anygood at fps or tps type shooters. Maybe someone should have warned them before they picked the game up, well, guess what? They did!!
Shut up with the whining, and give the game a chance. Its a hell of a lot of fun and quite addictive, both soloing and playing with groups are fun. In solo mode you can try and fly under the radar or build notoiety until an enforcer agent is sent after you and this is where the fun really begins. Grouping up adds a whole layer of strategy to the game and is undoubtedly where youll have the most fun.
02/07/2010 at 01:24 Kaies says:
Shits going to be funny when the 360 version comes out, i wonder how much they have to change so the 360 can handle it servers an all. If the PC version has so many bad things about it then the 360 version will be worse imo.
To be fair i really do like this game even though so many people say its not that good, i havent had chance to play one single second but looking from the videos on youtube it looks decent. What intrests me the most is the customisation, seems to me you can all most do what you can imagine. The music editor looks the best so far.
One small question, if i were to buy the steam version how many characters do you get per account?
12/07/2010 at 13:32 stiliom says:
I found another review also worth a visit.
So much stupid …
http://www.gladriel.com/reviewFull/content/3031/All-Points-Bulletin-review/
12/07/2010 at 16:29 stiliom says:
I found another review also worth a visit.
It’s that just can not be wrong.
http://www.gladriel.com/reviewFull/content/3031/All-Points-Bulletin-review/
16/09/2010 at 23:50 Gruppa says:
Stupid reasons like this are why this game failed. The servers are shutting down soon so there will be no 360 version. Ever. Sucks to be all you guys who pre-ordered.