APB Statement From Realtime Worlds
Neil Castle, the community officer at Realtime Worlds, has got in touch to deliver an official statement about the APB review embargo issue which we looked at earlier today. You can read the statement below.
The ‘Key to the City’ event is a demo event, not an open beta in the usual sense of the term. Players only have 5 hours of Action District playtime and are well aware that characters, customizations, vehicles, clothing and symbols created during the event are going to be wiped in time for launch.
As a result anyone attempting to review the game during this period would experience a somewhat unrealistic representation of what APB is offering the user and as such it was deemed inappropriate to allow reviewers to do so.
The decision was purely based on wanting reviewers to experience and see the full live server with players having both progressed and expressed themselves. Our service will also be down for the period between the end of ‘Key to the City’ on June 19th and the start of our ‘Early Access’ event in North America on June 26th. This too would have prevented reviewers from playing the game.
The initial July 6th embargo date was based on the UK street date of July 2nd and on press not having access to the game until said date. We are however moving the embargo date forward to July 2nd and giving reviewers invitations to the ‘Early Access’ event in order to ensure that they are able to properly experience APB and its community in time for street date.
Realtime Worlds is confident that APB All Points Bulletin is a great game and we have taken on board all the feedback provided to us by our community during the closed beta testing period in preparation for our launch.
If we were not confident in the game we would not have sent out hundreds of thousands of access keys for our ongoing ‘Key to the City’ event, we would also not be encouraging players to post their own videos and screenshots online.
The best way to make the decision for yourself is to jump in to the Key to the City. So head over to www.apb.com, grab a key and draw your own opinion.