By RPS on June 29th, 2010 at 4:13 pm.
You there! Have you been playing in APB‘s extensive beta and Key To The City Event? Then why not talk about it in our comments section for the consumer-purchasing benefit of your fellow readers? We’d like it very much if your comments offered some critical insight, some laughter, some tears, some thumbs up or down, and perhaps some reports of personal experiences in the game. Are you going to keep playing? Perhaps you’re running a clan that could help RPS newbies? Are you a creative type who just can’t get enough of that startling set of editing tools? Not played it? Why not ask some questions?
But above all, tell us what you think.
Thumbs down from me – gameplay is chunky, and not very satisfying. It’s certainly not worth paying a fee to play. I was planning to buy APB when it was first announced, as I thought they were following the Guild Wars model, but having experienced it and seen the pricing model i’ll pass.
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Really fucking dull.
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They should have that on the box …
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Yep, it’s terrible. The game will be in the bargain bin by the end of the year and people will realize very soon that it isn’t worth a subscription, so it will be free to play soon too.
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Let me know when it’s Earn to Play. I’d say, what, £1.75 an hour. However since this game is so labourious, £1.75 may be breaking the law with regards to the minimum wage. Does it beat being on the dole? Tough one.
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I’d be interested to know exactly how much of APB you played and when Lewis.
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I tried the beta. But I don’t have a super computer so I can’t play. Quad-Core and 4 gigs of ram? Fuck off…
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To be fair that was only for the beta. I was running the beta fine with a 3.0ghz Core 2 Duo, 512mb 8800gt4GB of ram and 64bit 7, a friend of mine with a similar setup with only 2gb of ram and 32bit vista had a few problems but it was playable. Near the final release he had no problems.
As for APB I found it really really fun up until people got mad league rewards and upgrades, then it came down to whoever had the better guns :/
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I don’t have a quad core, and it runs just fine for me.
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Yeah, I’m running a Dual-Core with 3 gigs of ram and it runs, although it’s a bit choppy.
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Yeah to be fair it WAS the beta. Also, I read that it is a problem unique to Vista32bit. So if I upgraded to Windows 7 or bothered to install Vista 64bit it would work? I have an Intel E6600 Dual Core, 2 gigs of Ram and a Radeon 4850. I’ve also read that a 64bit system needs at least 3 gigs of Ram, anyone know if that’s true?
Sorry for all the questions by the way!
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Get 64bit 7, 32bit OS’s can’t allocate enough RAM to it or some shit like that. So even with 3gb of RAM 32bit still has some issues.
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I would buy the character creator as a separate app.
Not sure about the game itself.
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If you buy the game you do get access to that stuff even without game time, right?
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Yes.
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Yes you do. I can still access that part via the beta. I haven’t tried actually completing the creation though, since part of it is choosing a server.
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Can you?
Much of the clothes, symbols and decals have to be unlocked by game-play or bought with in-game money though, or at least that was the case in Beta
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You can’t really because a decent amount of customization items are locked away on Contacts instead of just being gained via Fashionista/Tuner levels (i.e. sitting at the kiosk AFK overnight). To unlock the last ~25% of items, you need to spend time in the action districts.
As for the game itself, it really is quite fun with friends. You can say that about anything, but the freeform nature of what is essentially GTA4 MP with lots of customization really makes it something special.
The customization is only deep if you’re really into tattoos or very loud shirts and car liveries, so that’s actually a bit of disappointment (on top of some of it being gated).
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Ah, you’re right, I forgot about the in game unlocks. But you can still make a pretty good avatar. They’ll just all be in trainee clothing.
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The level of customisation strikes me as a double edged sword, especially as it seems like something that will be carried forward into future games. On the one hand, it is an incredible system, and the icon editor especially is a giant leap forward in terms of adding personal touches to your character.
On the other hand though, there is a reason that games companies employ creative people to design their characters – because otherwise you risk just getting a big mess. For every person that lovingly crafts an authentic police uniform there were ten that made half naked people covered in bad tattoos with glow in the dark cars.
I’m just a little worried about this carrying over into other games. I guess it doesn’t matter in single player games when people mod Morrigan to look ‘more attractive’ but in online games it would be possible for customisation tools like the APB one to make games look really tacky.
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Soo… very similar to my feelings of Spore? I wish a company could take that level of “creation” and apply it to a solid game. I’ve still never really felt like BioWare customization is quite enough for me.
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Oh man. APB Customization plus Fallout: New Vegas. Just imagine. Maybe some better voice acting too. And as long as I’m making wishes, I’d like a pony.
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Think bigger. A pony that I can customize and put decals on.
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I will admit to only playing a bit of the beta so things may have improved. Driving was painful due to lag between you pressing and it turning, shooting was often dumb luck rather than skill. The interface had more bugs than a whole entemology department, and incredibly unresponsive. The whole thing left a our taste in my mouth after such high hopes.
Though the pricing model is interesting as the social part doesn’t count towards your play time, so if you’re only clocking 5 hours a week as opposed to per day then it might work in your favour.
Could have been soooooo much better.
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From around three hours of playtime in KttC.
APB is plucky.
Well, it’s terrible, really. It’s a bad game. The third-person shooting is ancient, the combat areas favour defenders, the cars handle worse than any vehicle I have ever driven in the real world (including tractors, lawn mowers and boats) and it’s horribly imbalanced. That said, I really, really, really want to like it. I want to play it in spite of how miserable it becomes when the volume starts getting turned up. I absolutely can not recommend the game and know better than to even bother with it, but I want to play it. Mostly, that comes from the game’s character. It presents the gangland warfare between irresponsible police and brash criminals with charm and swagger. Most of this comes from the customization tools which are absolutely the best of their kind. You can create a GANGSTA and stick FORKS in people, MOTHAFUCKA!
It really doesn’t deserve to be played but I want to play it. So it’s plucky.
The only thing that’ll keep me away is one small little incident: I got shot by a teammate while we were on a mission. No big deal. He shot me again. A few more times. He was trying to TK me, so I started shooting back. He killed me. And then he got “Team Killing Medal 1″. I don’t want to play a game that directly rewards griefing behaviours. It might not even still be in there, but that it was at one point, so close to release, is a serious indication of Realtime Worlds’ ability to guide, direct and understand players.
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That is an intensely weird metal, but I think they put it in there for people like me who just have really shitty aim. I remember when I accidentally killed three teammates with a misplaced grenade throw and got that metal, I felt like the saddest man in the world. You’re right, though, it is a problem to give achievements for stuff that can be straight griefing.
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[I don’t want to play a game that directly rewards griefing behaviours. It might not even still be in there, but that it was at one point, so close to release, is a serious indication of Realtime Worlds’ ability to guide, direct and understand players.]
Where do you live? With the care bears? Come on .. their is no PvE Grinding shit .. Kill or be killed. Easy way, on the same faction.
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Well, medals aren’t persistent (I think), so I just assumed it was to show you just how much of a nob you’d just been, and to humiliate you in front of the rest of the players in your match.
These captchas are horrible.
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I thought the point was that when you earn a medal it gets broadcast across the zone. So when that dude TK’d you, everyone playing at the time got a message that he’d earned the medal. In other words, everyone now knows he’s a TKer.
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Well, generally speaking, I know when I’ve been a nob. No need for them to hang a lantern on it.
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Having trouble figuring out why it is worth a reoccurring-fee-to-play in the age of Guild Wars, Team Fortress 2, and now Lord of the Rings Online.
Sure, it’s little niche of stealing cars and shooting moving props that look like pedestrians is their own, but it is not worth ANY sort of subscription (hourly or monthly).
It does have potential. Hopefully the first round of early suckers…I mean adopters… will give them enough cash to keep working on the game. I might take another look in 6 months when it goes on sale in Steam.
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Easy answer, it isn’t worth a recurring fee. It probably isn’t worth the $50 price tag. If I recall, the game comes with 50 free hours. Most players will be bored and done with the game before they burn through all their time. Two instanced areas with relatively small population caps does not merit a monthly fee.
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I thoroughly enjoy it. I’m not even close to boredom after 30 hours of playtime. If you enjoy GTA or Saints Row 2 and don’t expect this to be some magical combination of R6:Vegas and Burnout and WoW, you’ll likely enjoy APB.
For a new game launch, it’s got very few rough edges. There are some problems with the UI in that there are many cool things that it never tells you about (like pledging to someone anywhere on the map by double-clicking their circle). Likewise, their gametime/RTW point system is confusing and somewhat complex, which would be great if they didn’t want to make any money. Camping on rooftops and an excess of enforcers are a couple gameplay gripes, but there aren’t any horrid physics bugs or falling through the world or huge lag spikes to deal with.
TLDR: There are some problems with the game that RTW will hopefully fix in the coming months, but it is perfectly enjoyable right now as long as your expectations aren’t astronomical.
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I also really enjoy it. I have a group of 3 other people that I play it with every night and we’ve had a great time making a uniform for ourselves, trying out different weapon combos, buying new vehicles and responding to APBs.
It’s hardly game of the year but all of us are really enjoying it.
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Hellgate: London, anyone?
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I preferred this to Hellgate, the shooting is no better, but forcing PvP makes it a lot more exciting than Hellgate.
I was so excited about that game, it was the first MMO I was genuinely excited about. I was so young :’(
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I played it in closed beta. I think was one of the test cases for hardware the beta wouldnt actually run on (not enough ram), so my play experience wasn’t the best. That said the tools were always excellent and the matchmaking system and everything else was intuiutive and seemed to work well. Unfortunately the driving was atrocious and the gun play felt quite weak. Some of these things have probably inproved a lot since I last played, of course.
When I heard about the pricing model I decided not to go back to the beta. It’s just not something I would pay for on a recurring basis.
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I played in the Beta for a few days and somewhat enjoyed it but nowhere near as much as I had hoped.
The Good:
-Seeing what I’d eventually be able to use to customize my stuff.
-Making cash as a Criminal was stupid easy. Almost depressingly so.
-My absolute favourite moment(s) came from when I attracted enough Enforcer attention that I got one of them sent after me. Not talking about the bizarre King of the Hill challenges, but the literal running for my life for X amount of time. Those chases were rather fun for me. I remember once I hid behind a scalable fence and waited for the enforcer to jump over and as soon as he did I jumped in the opposite direction and ducked into an alley waiting to get the drop on him.
The Bad:
-So much of the customization stuff was infernally locked until way way later. This resulted in some horrible player customization that burned my art major eyes.
-The shooting and the driving.
-The fact that I could do absolutely nothing to other player owned vehicles. Well at least in terms of if they weren’t in them I could not remove them from the area. There were so many plain unmoveable starter hatchbacks littering the streets.
-There was no indication of how many cars I had to steal before I advanced to the next level. One day I spent 30 minutes doing nothing but stealing cars and it wasn’t until an hour later that I went up to lvl 2 of whatever stat that was.
-The pointless King of the Hill missions they kept injecting into missions. I had no personal investment in that area so why do I care if they control it?
-I felt more like a petty thief than a hardened criminal. Sure money was easy, but it was immensely boring to do smash and grab after smash and grab.
-How the voice thing works. I was doing a bit of smashing and grabbing when someone started shooting in my general vicinity. Fearing an Enforcer had Witnessed my crimes, I hopped in my stolen ride and sped out. I slammed right into a criminal group in their own SUV and flipped it. They all then proceeded to tell me to f*ck off and get the f*ck out of there and other angry internet men things. Their vitriol was justified enough, I mean I did knock them over, but I don’t really feel like hearing people telling me to f*ck off for a video game accident.
-Despite the customization, at the point at which I played it anyway, only a small chunk of people actually customized their characters/rides to any extent other than maybe buying a new hat.
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It sounds like a lot of your complaints have already been addressed. The player-owned vehicles, for instance, interact with everything else as you’d expect. You can absolutely push them around with your car, run them off edges, etc., even when you’re not in a mission them. You just can’t steal them.
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I have played GTAIV this weekend, and is awnfull. I was not expecting Saint Rows 2, but come on.. could al least peple drop money or something? Is the sandbox game with less sand EVER. Also the engine of GTAIV is awnfull. I have read somewhere that ir render only half the lines, and interlace then with the other part in the next frame. Even with crappy tricks like that, the game is slow and ugly. Driving is horrible too, theres some accuracy levels on the simulation, but is almost imposible to drive. I suppose it works better with a different controller type, with the keyboard and mouse, is just stupid.
Please, somehone burn that hole of a game that is GTAIV.
Saint Rows 2 driving is very stupid, but is a game so fun, that is not important. You can literally wait in a corner, and the life of the city will amuse you. Some bastard will run over other bastard, the police will come, a ambulance will crash into the police car and explode. I love it, even with the bugs and the consoley feel.
APB. The driving is about right, and I accept this is a mater of opinion. Maybe theres also a learning curve?. To me is perfect. I like the pew pew pew.. It could be very good game with a group of good players. The game can be a bit unfair at times. Since any encounter finish in about 1.3 s, if the other dude have 10% health, or 10% ammo, is enough to unbalance the game to these people. There will be always these teenagers that play 18 hours at day, and have everything unlocked. A poor PUG group versus these dudes suck big time.
The city of APB feel mostly “empty” and is somewhat “dull”. The best comparation is the world of FUEL…. with npc bastard to run over with your car. Theres a city, but is just decoration, don’t look it too much, or you will break the inmersion. APB is not saint rows, so all you have to do is pew pew pew to the oposition, and finish missions, to unlock hats. APB is the best HAT combat game ever. Everyone loves hats.
APB is not Counter-Strike with vehicles. Don’t call she that. She don’t like it.
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I really tried to like Saint’s Row 2. I bought it on Steam and it ran so badly on my pc I gave up.
Then later on my girlfriend and I got it on Xbox to play through together. We had so many crashes and bugs we gave up then as well. On top of that the driving is just dreadful. Why did they decide to map accelerate to the face buttons and not the analog triggers?
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I didn’t mean to on ON my girlfriend. When obviously…
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@Tei: “APB is not saint rows, so all you have to do is pew pew pew to the oposition, and finish missions, to unlock hats. APB is the best HAT combat game ever. Everyone loves hats. ”
I love you Tei but I’m sorry man, I can’t let that stand. Team Fortress 2 is the best HAT combat game ever.
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How good is the character creator?
I made a character I would _actually_ sleep with. And then proceeded to have her appear in my dreams. (in a not-naughty way)
Unforunately Keys to the City ended before I could do any actual gaming.
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Same here, I’m a little bit in love with mine. (well, I poured so much time into designing her clothes and look).
But as for the game, it’s generally a pretty horrible experience. But when I start playing I mightn’t stop for hours. Some times it’s great and you’re playing with good people but other times it’s just an exercise in frustration.
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That is pretty impressive. Does it link to the RealDoll site?
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To me the game answers the question “What if you have to drive up to your Counter-Strike map before each round?” Invariably I am camping waiting for someone else to show up, or someone else is camping and waiting to show up, and that’s about it.
Once I realized this, I lost all the joy of this game. I’m not sure that I have any constructive criticism on what could have been better, either. I have minor nitpicks like the fact that I think this game should be in first-person but for driving (much like Rainbow Six Vegas switched between first and third-person to great effect), but that doesn’t change the underlying game mechanics which I just don’t find satisfying.
If I had something more interesting to do with vehicles than just drive to buildings.
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You’ve pretty much just summed up what I thought of it.
Drive to area where you need to shoot/steal/set light to someone/something, get out of car, get shot by camping mofo.
I quite enjoyed creating tattoos, images and the like, but to be honest I’m not going to buy a game just to do that.
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Guarded optimism.
The game has a lot of edges to polish off — the shooting seems a little too decided-by-dice-roll for my tastes, the PvP can be lopsided to the point where it can become a meatgrinder, the always-on VOIP can get a little irritating, not to mention the audio ads — but the parts that are well done are really well done. The thrill of being pursued/pursuing other actual players is a neat kink in the MMO formula, and the cars are fun to drive once you acclimate to the way they drive.
Like any MMO, who you surround yourself with is key to enjoying the game.
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Been playing for quite a while now (we’re talking 100+ hours here) and what I found out is that it’s only fun when you’re gaming with friends. But when you do it’s a blast.
Sure the shooting might feel a bit simplistic and approximate, but the whole deal of this game is taht it isn’t your shooting skills that make you win, it’s your coop skills. APB is all about tactics and bumping into people with cars.
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So much potential, such ropey implementation (played keys to the city, am currently on the EU early start).
I’ve already pre-ordered (in a moment of excitable madness), so I guess they’ll be getting the benefit of the doubt.
Lets see if they start making more of the right noises again as the first couple of months unfold…
Thumb determinedly horizontal for the time being.
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I wrote a very long thing about it on my blog (PLUG! PLUG! PLUG!), but the short version is that it isn’t worth buying. Parts of it were fun, such as getting together with a group, all four of you jumping into a van, and driving from goal to goal, trying to beat the time limit and fight off a gang of enemies, but every mission just kind of feels the same. There is, obviously, a certain amount of grind that is part and parcel to subscription games, but at least with games like WOW they try to make the grind feel different each time. The thing that bothered me the most was that there was actually a kind of interesting story to the game. Legalized vigilantism is something that will occur on occasion even in first world nations, and I thought the game would play with the idea of being the lesser evil. Unfortunately, every mission has the exact same flavor text, and the flavor text is in a small box in the corner, making it abundantly clear that the makers of the game do not care one bit about that aspect. I wasn’t expecting a lot, it is a PVP multiplayer game after all, but I wanted to at least have a story in my head about what was going on in the city. The game doesn’t give you that.
Also, I will repeat a joke I thought of the cars in the game, because I continue to find it funny. Small cars drive like Mac Trucks, and Mac Trucks drive like .
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Aww, my joke got cut off. Let me try again:
Small cars drive like Mac Trucks, and Mac Trucks Drive like Megaweapon.
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World of Warcraft does a better job at making the grind not feel the same all the time? That is the most depressing thing I’ve read all morning. Now go and bring me twelve policeman hides.
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I know I know, it was always get this from those, but at least the things you were fighting had different abilities and spawned in different looking environments. Here, I go do the exact same mission and fight nearly identical people in a building or backalley that looks like every other building or backalley in the game. The only difference aesthetically between the two districts is that there are a line of boats in the middle of the waterfront district, so it’s harder to drive around.
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I realized then I was born of two fathers: Elias, and Megaweapon.
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Played a few hours as an Enforcer and a few minutes as a Criminal. APB is full of potential, but it’s nowhere near to realising it yet. Needs a LOT of work, then it could be a very good game. Could.
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It could definitely do with being reeled in for another year of development (actually, maybe two).
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The game has real optimisation problems, with random memory leaks that maxed out my 4GB ram.
Furthermore the car handling is REALLY SHIT.
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I haven’t played but this is beginning to sound a bit like Spore to me. The customisation may be great but if the basic game isn’t interesting enough then you’re not going to stick around just to see what’s out there.
Also Brink is looming on the horizon and appears to be trying to occupy much the same kind of territory. It seems to be more interesting at the moment, especially given that I haven’t heard mention of a subscription fee for that one.
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I played about eight hours of the beta.
I did not enjoy it.
I dearly, dearly wanted to love it and tried my best to have fun. With a group of five of us using an external app for chatting and doing missions and going up against similarly sized groups of other people and getting ourselves in trouble it was almost fun.
The combat mechanics are outdated, ill-considered and clunky as hell. Genuinely awful. The driving is crappy and simplistic, but about bearable. It feels pretty lifeless when you’re playing as well – like you’re in an arena that looks like a city or a very large soundstage.
Based on the the advertising and the way they were pitching it I was hoping for GTA with loads of people and some sort of character progression. APB is not that game. APB is an MMO with a GTA paintjob. As an action/shooting game it is sadly not worth the price of entry. I can’t really comment on it’s value as an MMO as it’s not a genre I’m hugely keen on.
The customization and creation tools are every bit as awesome as you’d hope though.
In closing – more or less what many others have said. If you want a massive online GTA, then don’t bother. If you don’t want that and are prepared to take the game on it’s own terms then you may find something worthwhile there.
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The game is a worthy game. Its suffering from horrible network issues which are really a big deal when the game is how it is. The game doesn’t push teamwork enough but i guess i can hardly call that an issue with the game but it is a problem.
Seems rather limited, but then so are the likes of tf2 counterstrike, call of duty 4 and battlefield 2. The problem is, its got fee’s (whether monthly or hourly) and its not really as good of an action game as any of them. Less means of tactical expression than all (baring counterstrike) and less platform for cooperation. In battlefield 2/tf2 you can be in a specialised role supporting your team. Hell, the game doesn’t even reach the heights synergy of other small scale competitive games with emphasis on teamwork like splinter cell’s or rainbow 6 vegas. I’d play it lots without a sub, but with a sub its not even worth trying to get to the chewy centre.
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Everything about it is great apart from the bits that you play :(
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Well said.
The customization tools are pretty great but as soon as you make it out in to the real world it’s just dull and unsatisfying. Bland environments, floaty driving, wimpy shooting and (in the beta) lag.
Playing with friends, as with any game, made it tolerable but only for long enough to satisfy my curiosity.
So, thumbs down basically.
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Enjoying it a lot, although I seem to be getting more of a kick out of it as a fashion designer than as a rampaging GTA style crim. Enjoying the criminal side more, so spending most of my time on that until my aim improves.
Enforcer on Obeya 1 (Gunn) and Criminal on Patriot 2 (BloodyBill) if anyone wants to say hi.
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@Al Ewing – So, you’re more of a GTA style-crim than a GTA-style crim?
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Sorry – meant more Criminal than Enforcer.
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I had fun with it, me and my mate would cruise around doing random team missions. Think of it as a quick drop-in drop-out match making system rather than a full on MMO. I can see myself playing it on and off for an hour or so at a time and with the pay by hour model I’m not wasting my subscription that way.
Currently the variety of missions is a bit limited and there’s no real story arc or mission progression or any other MMO stuff you expect and the 3rd person shooting is a bit off (give me a scope when I’m sniping!) and all the cars drive like ass but I suspect that’s to encourage people to buy faster cars.
It has potential and I’ll probably be picking it up when I have more gaming time.
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Pretty sure the game will go down in flame for most players, as you know it has already a bad reputation but here is my take.
I like this game, sure there are some problems, it is far from perfect but is offers things that you won’t find anywhere else.
People will say driving is bad, yeah if you rob people cars, drive the “starting” car it is bad, if you use the “player” car they are usually more responsive and can take more damage as well. And they can be upgraded to carry ammo, be more resistant….
Shooting has a bad reputation, thing is the first guns you will get (lets say the five first hours) are going to be crap, the equivalent of the “rusty” sword you get in fantasy games, but yeah you might not like the lack of punch of the fighting, the 3rd person view doesn’t help as on PC people like first person (I don’t mind 3rd person). Once you get upgrades for you guns you will feel the differences.
Mission are repetitive as well. For me it is not a problem as I play in groups which tend to change the dynamic of those mission, different spot needing different takes. If you want to solo, don’t play this game, go and buy GTA4.
Customisation is great but it doesn’t show a lot in game, especially for the avatars, basically you are mostly shooting from far, or when you are close you won’t have time to really look at avatars. Also people tend to go for the same trend (black and white is the new black) which is a shame. You will also have the running naked brigade…
One annoying thing is, when you get a bounty on you during a mission, everyone can kill you and your buddies can’t help you, it is a bite annoying.
Another problem is sometime the lack of coordination in the opposite team if they are not a “proper” group. If the game send one guy against a group of 3, usually he will call for backup. So sometime you will gets a group growing against you but those guys are all over the map, by the time they coordinate their effort the mission is over.
So far I didn’t have any issue with the match making but experience might differ.
So what is it to like is: group play! When you play with a good group that communicate the game is really fun, the missions are not that different but you can change the way you play some of them. For VIP (where you have to protect a guy), you could camp somewhere “safe” or just drive around, same for evasion, where you have to stay away from the opposite team. The action can also be quite intense when things escalate, having a battle of 10 v 10 or more with car ramming each other and exploding is something you have to see.
Upgrade for your clothes, new weapons, cars come quite fast as long as you succeed in missions, it feels a bite artificial and you might get frustrated if pitched against better armed opponents. This will probably even out after a while.
Customization is great and the car is the thing people will notice, also you can create your annoying death tune, that will play when you kill someone (some are really horrible), which is a nice touch.
Car chase can be also quite interesting, they are some jumps are the maps, shortcut and negotiating those while you have people shooting your car and people hanging by the windows shooting is something quite awesome.
And the greatest thing for me is that you can jump right in the action, no need to wait for X to join you or get to you, mission come thick and fast (down time are never long), and you do get rewards as well, there is a sense of continuity not present in FPS games where after a round you will start from scratch. For player like me that do not have the luxury to wait for the action that’s a big plus.
If RTW does add new district (turf war is in the pipe it seems) and if they start improving some of the mechanics of the game they can have a very good game. For the moment I am having fun and that’s what’s count!
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Actually, the Team Killer ‘medal’ is actually a negative modifier on the mission score.
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I too was planning on buying it way back when and jumped in the beta to selfishly try-before-buy. I am happy to report that I will not be wasting my money after-all.
I found the character creation and other customization tools very interesting although disappointed that I couldn’t just buy what I wanted in game – I had to unlock them all through missions first. I’d much rather have to save up to afford something really cool rather than being able to afford anything but only once you’ve unlocked it by randomly playing in-game.
Had no problems with the driving, seemed basically what I expected. Didn’t experience the lag-effect other posters have mentioned.
The PvP was my least favorite part. I felt hopelessly imbalanced. I’d take aim with the perfect shot and unload into the guy, and he’d turn around to me with a different weapon than mine and take me out with no problems. I bought a different couple of weapons and it seemed like whoever I was fighting always seemed to have the upper hand. Maybe I’m just crap? I’ve played plenty of GTA games though and not felt crap.
I also found that if you were playing a defend mission and the enemy got ahead of you, sometimes, I’d be chasing them around the city and they’d complete it before you caught up to them.
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You do need to wait to have the better weapons, the first few you have access to are really crap (even after a few hours), or buy at the action house. So maybe you are not bad, your weapons are…
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I won many rounds with the starting gun, against more advanced, supposedly “superior” weapons. The later weapons aren’t better, they’re just different. The starting gun has decent damage and accuracy, but is a bit slow for really short range fights. It’s best used at medium range in aim mode.
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Only played the closed beta, so can’t comment on any super recent patches, but it was really fun early on, then once I got to about threat level 12/rank 200 I started hitting ridiculously unfair matchups 9 times of 10, which really killed it for me.
I don’t mind a challenge..quite the opposite, but there’s no challenge when you’re outnumbered three to one, or all of your enemies have weapons with three level 3 upgrades that decimate you while you can still unload a clip or two into them and they just stand there laughing.
If the matchmaking system ever gets sorted out though, I’d probably pick it up, for the occasional play here and there.
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I have to admit, the critical savaging that APB seems to be taking here rather accords with my own impression of a game that demonstrates that most ambivalent of MMO attributes, “potential”.
Sadly, almost all of it is unrealized, and Realtime Worlds’s attitude and PR suggests likely to remain such. This is a game that need *at least* another year of development, and it beggars belief that they would insult our intelligence by pretending this game is any state for release.
That said, I have a certain amount of admiration for a company that wants to charge for a box copy of, the charge for subscription, and run voice ads in a DRIVING and SHOOTING game in which the DRIVING and SHOOTING are rubbish.
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The beta was really unimpressive. The missions are the same repeated run here and pick something up/do identical action/stand on something stuff again and again. The king of the hill capture style is poorly thought out, and those missions last way too long. The way that only the last few seconds of many minutes really matter isn’t great, and makes the optimal strategy pretty meta-gamey and stupid, especially with less people. If you try and do anything on your own half the time you’ll be stopped by a bunch of higher levels dispatched against you and if you get backup they often don’t even turn up to help in time. It’s pretty much impossible to chase someone down alone. Why allow it if it clearly isn’t intended and doesn’t work? The system for joining people up in missions dynamically is good in theory but there’s just nothing interesting actually making use of it. This deserves commendation for making steps in a direction that could be really cool though.
They could have done so much more to make the actual gameplay fun and interesting, rather than just having a cool game in theory. People defend it by saying it’s fun with friends, but what isn’t? Any multiplayer game is awesome with a bunch of friends. What co-op skills is it testing? One person has to be able to wrestle a car that feels more like a laggy tank down a road, others have to be good at putting their crosshair over large targets and pressing fire.
So yeah as everyone says the driving feels horrible, especially after the great balance between weighty realism and arcade fun that gta IV hit. The shooting is again really basic and unsatisfying. I didn’t even realise there was no locational damage while I was playing so was aiming for heads the whole time, made it feel at least a bit skillful. Now I realise that was just a liability and I would have done better clicking and holding on people’s centre mass. This makes the dps of weapons and who fires first the most important thing and allows an annoying mmo feel of unbalanced items and being weak against people with some of the most commonly used powerful weapons if you try anything else. This is especially problematic when you consider how much of the combat involves one side camping and the other side running up to them.
The city areas are small and lifeless and it’s really annoying to have your prestige (or whatever it’s called) go down when you accidently hit a slow pedestrian. No individual areas of the city really stand out as being of interest, it just blurs into one boring mass. The ‘gangster attitude’ that people seem to like is pretty childish, and there’s nothing special about any of the mission writing. It bills itself as a large scale game but in practice you really don’t have many people in a combat server at a time, and even less in any individual firefight. Yet it still charges like an mmo if you decide you like the game. The focus on pvp could really use some more creative mission types, or simply more of them. If it’s not an mmo why bring in the worst parts of the genre and not the best?
Good job with the customisation and some parts of the UI though I guess. Definitely doesn’t make for a good game. People jumping on this ship with the hope that it’ll all be fixed up later seem sort’ve deluded to me when some of the fundamentals are just so boring and repetitive after any decent amount of time.
It also runs horribly despite not being that much of a looker. Wasn’t interested in buying this anyway but was hoping the beta would be good fun at least. I will say it was strangely compelling despite it all for a bit but this soon faded. Some of the ideas here could be used to make a good game, but I really doubt this will ever be that game.
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My take on it (as a closed beta-er) is that it has interesting ideas but failed to build a proper game around it.
The customization options are immense (although I would question the sanity of whoever designed the god-awful GUI). I never saw two people that looked the same and it’s obvious this is a feature the community really cares about so you’re unlikely to see many immersion-breaking asshats with bright pink clothes or whatever.
I also love the idea of having a perpetual matchmaker PvP action going on (In my limited experience it was pretty bad at ensuring the teams were balanced, but YMMV), and one thing this game has going for it is that there’s never any downtime unless you want there to be.
This said, everything else about this game suffers from execution, which ranges from mediocre to plain terrible. The weapons are unbalanced, the driving is barely adequate, gunplay is clunky, unwieldy and just not fun at all.
This wasn’t helped by very simplistic and repetitive missions (which greatly favor whoever was closest to the objective when it started), and the fact that the end of the day your only real use for all the money you’re making is buying the upgradeable versions of your weapons, which are potentially far superior to what the newbies get.
Now I really wanted to like this, I honestly did, and to the game’s credit it can be genuinely entertaining for a few hours if you bring friends, stack up into a single vehicle and run some missions together, but I just don’t see this holding my or anyone’s interest for long enough to justify submitting to their ludicrous pricing scheme.
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That medal’s not a reward, it’s a penalty.
It reduces the amount of standing you get and drastically reduces the chance you’ll get the MVP award.
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The best moments of APB are the (sadly very rare) times when you’re actually playing cops and robbers. Tearing down the streets with sirens blaring and a buddy hanging out of your window is awesome, despite the absolutely terrible driving and shooting mechanics. If you spent more time doing this the game would almost be worth recommending, but these missions come up so rarely that their only purpose is to remind you of how much fun the game could have been.
Instead, you spend most of your time running or driving from place to place, clicking on generic action hotspots that are mechanically identical (burning a building down or stealing a PDA are both effectively just clicking on a door and waiting about five seconds). If whatever you’re doing is opposed by the other team then you end up in a pretty generic multiplayer shooter match with cars, except that the driving feels awful and the shooting is mostly based on luck and equipment. Camping is rampant because you gain an incredible advantage from finding a high point to hide and snipe from.
It doesn’t help that everything about the game aside from the character creator just feels outright lazy and buggy. Cars go through a couple of visual damage states, with absolutely no dynamic damage at all. It’s not actually possible to shoot someone in a car, but some weapons are so powerful that they’ll destroy a car and its occupants in about five seconds flat. On top of that, driving mostly feels terrible due to a half a second or more input delay that seems to be universal and unrelated to network lag or computer performance. Pedestrians also sometimes react very oddly, occasionally running directly AT cars that are barreling towards them. This is particularly bad since Enforcers are penalized for running people down. And to add insult to injury, the AI pedestrians and cars don’t even react to the Enforcer sirens. Where’s the fun of being a cop if you can’t drive down the street with sirens on and have everyone dodge out of your way?
There’s just no way to recommend APB to anyone, even though it could have really been something cool. It’s executed poorly and on top of that it fails to even attempt to live up to its promise thanks to the incredibly generic mission structure. I might be a little more generous if they at least TRIED, but in the end the whole game just feels… lazy.
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(This uh… got really long. Sorry >_>)
I played the KttC event with 3 different keys, and then pre-ordered the game along with 4 friends. Played my 10 hours of “early start” over the weekend and finally got in to the game proper last night. Obviously I enjoy the game then.
More akin to an online, persistent TPS than an actual MMO, as there will only ever be a max of 100 players in an instanced zone at once. That said, the city streets never feel lifeless or empty. The nature of APB’s mission structure has you constantly on the move, so you’ll pass car chases and massive shootouts by other players as you travel from one end of the district to the other.
Some people have taken issue with how they don’t allow you to shoot people that aren’t involved in your mission. While that bothers me too on some level, having played the game for a good while now, I can’t see how it would work as a mass, open free-for-all. It’s bad enough when you are in the middle of a mission and your notoriety goes up to level 5. This places a bounty on your head and lets anyone and everyone in the zone shoot you. So you’re in the middle of defending a strategic location for the final part of your mission, and some random dude who has nothing to do with the situation comes over and caps you. The focused mission structure does a fair enough job of keeping the intensity level up, in my opinion. Such that having an open free for all is unnecessary and overly chaotic.
But speaking of the missions, they could certainly be more interesting. Whether you’re spraying/cleaning graffiti, raiding apartments, planting/defusing bombs or delivering organs, they all boil down to: Go to point A, hit space, go to point B, hit space, go to point C, stand in the circle, kill anyone who gets in your way. This repeats ad nauseum with slight variations, tying in to why I consider it a persistent TPS more than an MMO. They’re simply excuses to get you into firefights and car chases with other players.
And those can be a lot of fun.
All the proper controls are here, including ducking and jumping, focused aiming (no iron sights, this is TPS), sprinting, switching which shoulder you aim over, and even lean left/right (admittedly the leaning doesn’t work very well as it’s based on the location of your avatar’s gun, rather than your crosshair). You load out with a primary weapon, secondary weapon, and grenades, of which there are a variety of options (shotguns, SMGs, assault rifles, sniper rifles – even rocket launchers later on), some of which have upgrade slots where you can increase things like magazine capacity or reload times, etc.
My friends and I try to coordinate our loadouts so we’ll have a sniper, some mid-range, and someone with a shotgun or SMG for when things get up close and personal. When you start pulling off tactics with a group of friends, the game really shines. I’m usually the designated driver, and it’s a sweet thrill to kick the emergency break, drifting into a perfect slide to pull up next to the team as they escort someone carrying the objective, while enemy fire rains down on us. They hop in, lean out the windows and lay down cover fire as we speed off towards the drop off :D
Driving takes some getting used to, the keyboard being what it is, but once you get the hang of it, it is really satisfying. Every vehicle has a very different feel to it, something I really appreciate. Vehicles you buy can also be upgraded with various things like having a delay before they explode, better armor, a trunk full of ammo where you can restock and change loadouts, etc.
I do have some gripes with district play, however.
The shooting can be a bit wonky. There is no locational damage (ala headshots), and the hit box seems to be artificially set, rather than being based on your character’s size. So you might shoot at the edge of a big ol’ fat dude and miss, or have your skinny little chick hidden just behind the corner of a building, but still take fire. It’s not a huge issue, let me stress that – I’m a big, big shooter fan and I’ve yet to feel cheated by those two issues – but it is there. There is the aforementioned leaning problems where my cursor is pointed around a corner, but my gun model is sticking into the wall, so I can’t shoot. Hard to figure out just where you need to be to get it to work (and thus it largely goes unused).
I don’t fully understand how accuracy works (in full) yet. At range I’ll dominate by crouching and shooting in short, controlled bursts. But when caught in close quarters I always seem to loose out to the guy who straffes side to side like he’s having a seizure, and holds down the trigger.
Playing as a criminal can be annoying at times, when you have a high notoriety rating. You’ll be standing around doing nothing, perhaps looking at what new guns you can buy, when Enforcers will suddenly be dispatched against you (meaning they see you on their map, and are coming to kill you). This can be particularly annoying when group members are joining your district, but not yet loaded. If you start a mission before someone joins your group, or existing members load your district, they have to wait until that mission is done before you can do things together. Yet during that time, they can also get missions or, in this case, be dispatched against. One night we kept having this horrible back and forth where I’d get enforcers after me, so my friend would wait – then just as I finish with them, he’d get enforcers after him – and on it went.
The initial load into the district zones (non-social) is atrociously long. Like in the realm of 3-5 minutes long, which can also lead to problems with group members not getting in on the first mission. However, once you’ve loaded the district once that play session, it is much faster loading into it again.
Max group size is only 4 :\ Team sizes can get larger, resulting in big, awesome battles, but as far as I know teams are only set up when you call for backup, or answer a call yourself. It sucks ’cause there’s 5 of us that have the game now, but we can’t all play together at once.
This post is way the hell too long… I didn’t think I’d go this much into it. And yet there’s still so much to talk about :S Like the creation tools. Well I’ll just say they’re MASSIVE and totally awesome. I spent hours and hours yesterday just creating music!
Last point I’ll make here, about the pricing structure. The initial purchase lets you play in the Social district for free, for forever. That’s where you can buy and customize everything and hang out. The retail package comes with 50 hours of “district play” (where the actual game takes place). After that you can pay $10/mo. for unlimited play. $10! Every other MMO these days is $15/mo., so I’m quite happy with that price myself. Also you can use in-game money to buy game time. So in theory you could make a bunch of awesome stuff in the various creators, sell it on the player market, then use that money to buy your game time – and play for free!
If you like actioney shooters, customization and driving around, I highly recommend checking out APB out if you get the chance.
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The same sized hitbox is by design. If you altered the hitbox based on the size of the avatar, people would just make smaller avatars. Frankly I prefar not having localized damage in a game like this, it gives people who aren’t sniper shooters a chance to win from time to time.
For a lot of people, and for you it seems, the game seems to be good only if you play it with a group of friends, but that isn’t really a reason to play the game because friends are going to be fun irrespective of what game you’re playing.
As far as the Sniper/Midrange/shortrange variance you’re crew did, it points to the most glaring problem, which is that there are no classes. Everyone plays just like everyone else, which kills a lot of the replayability of the game. In TF2, I played Pyro for a long time, then switched to Engie, then played Medic for a while, and lately I play spy. It makes the game feel different every six months or so when I change things up. six months from now in APB I’d still be battering down the same doors, with the same set of abilities.
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There’s a massive thread over on the APB forums about the locational damage thing. somewhere in there is a very lengthy series of posts from myself explaining why the lack of if it is a bad thing and how same sized hitboxes are just as prone to exploitation and are in many ways less fair.
It’s just one of a number of design decisions that RTW made that moved the game miles away from what I (and judging by some of other posts there are here) wanted from the game.
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Oh, shit Schmung that was you? You’re wrong still, as everyone else in the thread articulated to you.
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Schmung
The lolcat damage thread was quite possibly one of the funniest threads ever. There sheer amount of retards ‘demanding’ locational damage (insta kill headshots in reality) in a game where player customisation (including character model size) is one of the main cornerstones was frankly hilarious.
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Kadayi : nearly as hilarious as watching you leap on every negative comment that’s been made about APB on RPS in the past few weeks.
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i gave up on APB early into the beta
vapid, pointless, repetitive, ugly, turd of a game
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“APB is the best HAT combat game ever. Everyone loves hats. ”
well said that man!
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As for me, I’m enjoying it, but you have to take it for what it is: a casual multiplayer shooter with vehicles. The hardcore shooter fans who *really* care about scores are going to be frustrated as hell by the jankiness of it.
I’m finding killing someone is more about spray & pray, with the addition of a second shooter from another vector pretty much a confirmed kill. Don’t bother with headshots or anything; they don’t matter. And don’t get all bent when you die, you’re gonna respawn nearby in 3 seconds. Just have fun. And coordinating with a team mate is more important than aiming accuracy.
I’ve spent enough time driving to feel like I’ve got the hang of it and I love cruising around screwing with people… demolition derby time!
And I have enough Gamer ADD to know that there’s no way I’ll still be playing when my 50 included hours get used up, so I’m not bothered by the subscription model. This isn’t an MMO in the sense that you’re going to be looking at /played and see a number that indicates weeks of time spent in-game. It’s a game you’ll buy today and by August you will have forgotten all about it. I get about 5-6 hours of gaming in every week. If I do nothing but play APB I’ll run out of time at the end of summer.
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What wrong said. I know I’ll get my money’s worth of fun in the next 50 hours of gaming. After that, I’ll probably move on – only to return to the game once they’ve added intriguing new content.
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What i thought i’d get from APB is what i’ve been getting from multiplayer GTA IV all along.
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I actually really enjoyed this game, however, there might be a reason that you guys hate it and I seemed to love it.
I think it’s because of my friend-blinders. I played this with two very funny friends of mine and the entire time we played APB together, we where chatting and joking on skype, setting up pretty interesting flank positions to dominate our foes, and in general attempting to fuck over the enemy team because we had the voice advantage.
My favorite part of the pre-order headstart event was when we all got in a seperate ambulance and randomly blocked peoples cars with them, the siren running and all. We’d scream out in chat: SIR, YOU’VE BEEN IN A TERRIBLE ACCIDENT and try to get them to get out of their car. It was fucking hillarious, and no one in the game, much to my surprise, actually got pissed off at us. They laughed it off, which was pretty cool.
The gameplay itself is actually kind of twitchy. The combat works well enough to be a good game, but I can see people with lesser computers having lots of issues with this game. One thing for sure, the shooting is 100% better then fucking Fallen Earth. The missions tend to repeat themselves a lot, but the points where you have to go change on the map and you’re fighting against entirely new people almost every time. You don’t complain that TF2 is boring cuz you’re just capturing the point over and over because theres new challenges in enemy players each time.
The car driving is pretty okay. They can control like pieces of shit sometimes, but people that can successfully press “s” to brake, will have no issue. I took the worst handling car in the game [unfortunately, the cops pre-order car despite its cool as hell tricked out look] and tried using S to brake instead of the spacebar handbrake and found my driving to improve tenfold. I didn’t even run into shit.
The game, audiowise, is fairly bitching. The music is old stuff, new stuff, and a blend of genres. I heard some rap song with an extremely fast rapper spouting what I could only describe as gibberish in my car, got out, into another car, and there was a Dimmu Borgir [foreign death metal band] playing. I actually really like Dimmu Borgir and it was cool jamming out to their song as I shot a few people to help get my prestige down.
Thats the only thing I dislike about this game so far.. Notoriety/Prestige. You load up a new session, and you’re at 0. But, if you do the tiniest amount of stuff, [1 or 2 missions, or stealing/taking back cars] you automatically hit 3. It’s fairly ridiculous to hit 3 so fast when hitting 3 can make you fight players 20 levels above you with guns like the N-TEC 5 which has the range of a god damn sniper rifle, even though it fires like an AK47. As criminal, when you get prestige 3, you start getting APBS out on you. You have to escape a timer, kill cops, or keep a certain person in your party alive. However, the APBs last 10-20 minutes, and as soon as its over, another one will be on you in under 5 minutes. Its absolutely ridiculous and has forced me to play Enforcers instead.
Meh. I’d give this game a 7/10 if you have someone to play it with, and realize its not meant for PvE, ever.
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That N-Tec-5 was bullshit, and everyone seemed to have it by the time I was playing the beta. Also, it isn’t just criminals, hits can be put out on enforcers too, but it works the same either way, with the one person being the VIP, and the rest of the crew having to defend him. It usually shakes down to who has the fastest car.
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I blogged about the Key to the City closed beta/demo type thing over here, in summary: great customisation, and rather enjoying it in a drop-in shoot stuff drop-out type way. Playing solo is a bit rubbish unless you like hide and seek, but getting a group of four and pelting around the city with three people hanging out of car windows while blazing away is much better.
Clan-wise, as it’s so desperately American-ly cool (one of the “Enforcer” NPC groups are altogether too keen on leisure wear) I thought it’d be quite fun to set up a British TV police guild going from Dixon of Dock Green via The Professionals to Bergerac and beyond (possibly expanding the range slightly to include Cadfael and Captain Zep Space Detective). “We’re the Sweeney, son, and we haven’t had our dinner…”
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Well it’s a game set in America, that probably effects things a bit.
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I don’t believe someone else remembers Captain Zep, Space Detective. I thought that was just a dream
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Ah, I have the Captain Zep theme tune imprinted on my brain. The only other person I know who remembered it thought it was a dream as well, maybe it was some sort of weird collective hallucination…
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The Team Killer medal has a negative impact instead of a positive impact on the player who ‘wins’ it. It’s actually a penalty. If you receive the team killer medal, your rewards from that match will be diminished. Receiving the Team Killer medal also serves as a sort of name and shame device.
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For a game that’s all about driving and shooting, it is suprisingly bad in both departments. Perhaps it’s true that the bad starting weapons and cars give that impression. The shooting especially feels ancient, and could have been handled way better. It’s just not good enough these days.
I still like the idea of playing cops & robbers, and the matchmaking seemed to work for me. I also liked how you could call for backup with just one key stroke. Most likely I’ll give it another go in 6 months or so, but at it’s current state, it just doesn’t seem worth it, especially with the subscription model they’re using.
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The one thing I couldn’t quite see past is the immediate gameplay. There doesn’t seem to be anything to it other than 4v4 and occasionally 8v8 missions that are barked at you. Where’s the overall progression you get in other games, where are the big 50v50 gun fights, I mean if there’s 100 people in the zone, I want to at some point have a big war.
The gameplay was great fun for the first 5 hours, but after I got used to the missions I was just longing for something a bit more to come along and something to work for other than clothes and weapon slots.
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I quite enjoyed crashing into people. Occasionally I’d find someone who enjoyed it as much as I did, and we’d spend a few minutes crashing into each other until both our cars exploded.
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I hate you and all your kind.
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Let me steer vehicles with my mouse like in Unreal Tournament 2004 and add a cover system like in Rainbow Six Vegas 2 and I would recommend APB to both casual and hardcore players.
As of now, all it’s got going for itself is that you can play dress-up.
Vehicles are horribly frustrating to drive. Missions are dull. Combat is uninteresting. Weapons feel like water guns. NPC pedestrians act like lemmings. Maps lack personality.
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I don’t get this newspost. The game has already been discussed to length in previous posts about it, what does this add?
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It’s released, there’s a press embargo, ergo they can’t do a “Wot I think” – but we can.
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Oh right, the embargo.
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Yep, that’d sell it!
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Aargh reply fail! That was to LewieP’s rather succinct dismissal of the game near top
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Wot I think about APB is that it’s kind of a large download. I got my Key to the City two days after the even started, and the launcher finished downloading it ten minutes before it ended. So I didn’t get very far.
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Probably long enouh to see everything the game has to offer :p
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“The Bad:
-The shooting and the driving.”
Isn’t that most of the game? Unless you are a super pro and want to spend APB walking & talking.
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There’s the meat of the trouble right there: the core gameplay mechanic of APB is unplayably broken. I could get used to the driving, but the shooting is irredeemable, and in all conflict in the game you will be attempting to shoot things.
If one thinks about the high points of recent Grand Theft Auto games, it is always about the sandbox world and epic story… in which the rather cumbersome shooting mechanic usually gets in the way. Completing a mission in GTA4 can often be a frustrating experience because of this, the main saving grace being that it’s not like the NPCs are smart enough to try to dodge.
APB takes this poor shooting mechanic and makes it the most vital part of the game by turning GTA into a PvP quasi-MMORPG. Now, what you’re shooting at will try to dodge… and chances are their doing so will render your aiming completely null and void, little more than complete guesswork. Battle seems to be a combination of rushing into close range (where aiming is most difficult) spraying bullets, and praying.
What’s more, they’re charging way too much for it. Sure, it’s a pretty, pretty game, but when all you do is hack off the PvP part of GTA 4, throwing out the best parts of it in the process, then buff it till it shines and add a nice dynamic matching and grinding mechanism, in the end you’re left with something worth maybe $30 and unlimited play. Charging $55 plus a monthly subscription or hourly fee is a bit much.
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I like this game, sure it’s not the most complex shooter on the market but it has its merits. I suggest, to really enjoy the experience, that you gather 2 or 3 friends to try out the game. There’s really more to it then a lot of the people are giving credit for, and the character customization is pretty in depth.
What it really comes down to is “do you have fun playing the game”, and I’ve always felt this is a message a lot of RPSers miss. Does it make me less of a gamer because i enjoy mindless, mass media games? I don’t think so, and i think it’s pretentious to think otherwise. Just because it’s not “indi” changing the world doesn’t necessarily make it a bad game.
TLDR I like the game, it’s fun, give it a try if you like running around and killing people quasi-GTA style.
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Yeah that def sums it up for me, I would prefer better hitboxes and cover system like R6V too.This isn’t the magical game that i anticipated since right after the 360 came out.
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I quit when I realised I wasn’t having any fun. I had just thrown a couple of grenades at my feet to kill myself, in order to escape a mission that was forced on me, and I thought that any game where I found myself not only doing that, but doing that frequently, wasn’t a game worth my time. And I wanted to love this game. For a week I did.
I played for two weeks in the beta. It’s customisation tools are astounding and fun to use and are easily the best part of the game. Where it falls down, for me, is the rest of the game. Now I don’t mean the third person combat or the driving. I have had problems with those (and others bring them up a lot) but they weren’t insurmountable. No, the biggest problem I had was the disappointment I felt from expectations I should not of had.
I dislike having to unlock things that should have been unlocked from the beginning, but having to do so by just completing the same mechanical tasks over and over was typical of MMO’s and I had been hoping it was different. People said it was different. So it disappointed me because I believed the hype. My bad. But it throws in joyless mission after joyless mission and, as a criminal, it forces you on these missions whether you want them or not. It became a grind and I found myself committing grenade suicide a lot. Not fun.
When I did have fun was when I teamed up. It’s tremendous fun to with others who are casually plugging along with you, but it’s rare unless you’re willing to commit (and I mean seriously commit, joining clans and organising your friends and community) and, frankly, I wanted to solo in an MMO environment. One that didn’t feel like a timesink. So it’s my own fault for thinking it would be a game that would encourage that. I had not been told it would, rather I had hoped. Like a dumbass.
So it’s a typical MMO. And I feel cheated by that, which is ridiculous. I should have expected an MMO, it says so everywhere it‘s advertised. But I was dumb enough to believe when I was told it was different. It’s not. It’s just a timesink with an excellent customisation tool. And I should have expected that going in.
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You realize you didn’t HAVE to run from the cops to fight those missions, right? You can also just stand your ground and kill them enough times. It’s much harder to win, but it’s also much faster.
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Yes, I realise that. It was just I often didn’t want the missions at all. You can say however much you want about it being punishment for the ‘crimes’ you commit but I saw it as being punished for having fun in the game.
And ,if I want to, I can play games where I get rewarded for having fun, and they don’t charge £7.99 a month. So I’m playing ‘Saints Row 2′ which full on celebrates and rewards you for enjoying your freedom and fucking about in the game. Fuck the enforcer versus criminal bullshit. Fuck the idea of enforced missions in an MMO. Fuck APB. I wanna have fun.
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It’s 2010 how can you NOT implement zero ping lag compensation into your online shooter???
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I wrote this game off when I saw Paul Barnett raving about it.
Kiss of death. They might as well have just run ads saying “This game will suck a fat one”.
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I could be playing this RIGHT NOW !
But I’m not.
Enough said.
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Yep, I agree. I’ll try back later. After playing the beta, it seems to be a 3rd person shooter with a really dull story, where cops and robbers are pretty much the same thing.
I was really hoping for something like Where the good guys and bad guys had entirely different game mechanics and communities could be formed becuase of the teamwork needed keep territory. APB is just a confused mess and I have no hope for the a community that is created by stat padding, grief killing, point farmers who APB is currently catering to.
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Bad core gameplay, bad ergonomy, not fun, release review delay bullshit, audio ads + subs.
2/10, for the customization.
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It’s unfair to release a full, official review an MMO until a few weeks afters it’s been out, because it takes that long to experience all the content. Any review written before it comes out, based on the beta, is obviously unfair, because, well, it’s based on the beta, not the released game. Many of the reviews I see here, from people who played the beta and then dropped it, underscore how much the game has changed in just the last couple months of development, and that’s pretty typical of other MMO betas I’ve seen.
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I find the game extremely fun.
Contrary to what many people are saying, I find the controls, be they driving, running or shooting, are almost as smooth and polished as any multiplayer FPS I’ve played (and yes, I play TF2 and L4D/L4D2). I was actually impressed with how easy to drive the cars are, even the starting cars. I don’t know what people are comparing it to when they say it’s hard to drive. It’s easier than a lot of GTA. At a guess, this is a computer performance issue. My computer isn’t quite top of the line anymore, but it’s no slouch (3 GHz Core 2 Duo, 4 gig RAM, GeForce 8800 GT).
The only thing keeping the controls, in general, from being as smooth as some other games is that the lag tends to be a little worse, which is an inevitable result of the game residing on centralized MMO servers, rather than being hosted on a plethora of small, distributed servers. Even so, the additional lag isn’t usually all that bad. Plus, MMOs almost always have much worse lag during the open beta and the first month than they do during the rest of their lifetime. If this is their period of worst lag ever, then it’s actually stunningly good.
What really stands out about the game, though, is the extent to which it rewards tactical gameplay. If I just charge into every situation guns blazing, I’ll usually lose. But if I carefully consider my approach, try to figure out where the enemy is and what directions they’re watching, and consider the appropriate weapon choice for the situation, I tend to do pretty well.
The mission system is also quite good. It flows very smoothly, and keeps you constantly involved. As you’re running around, the missions just pop up unobtrusively in the corner, and you can hit Y or N to enter them or not. If you don’t respond in 10 seconds, they go away. It’s rarely more than 10 seconds between completing a mission, and having another one pop up. These mission offers can be starting a new mission (you’ll be playing by yourself, or just with your group, at least initially), being dispatched against somebody else’s mission (you join as the opposition to their mission in progress), or joining a mission in progress as back-up (there are already people on your side of the mission, but they are outnumbered or outgunned, so the game let them call for back-up). The missions could be more varied, but when compared to the range of objectives in most FPSes, it’s really not bad. The variety of opposition and terrain keeps it interesting.
The way it balances the teams isn’t always perfect, but I haven’t usually had a big problem with it. It seems to count players at a higher rank and notoriety as “more powerful”, and thus count for more on the team. Neither higher rank nor more notoriety, though, really equate to being more powerful. The guns are remarkably well balanced against each other, such that very few guns are definitively “better” than other guns. They all excel in different situations. The main advantage of being at a higher rank is being able to pick from a wider range of guns to better fit your skills and play style, not actually having BETTER guns.
(Note that this balance might change once people start getting the advanced versions of the guns, which have mod slots. In KttC and so far in the game’s release, almost nobody has been playing long enough to unlock and afford those. I don’t know how powerful the mods will be, but that does worry me a bit.)
If it seems like somebody has a ridiculous, unbalanced gun, it’s typically because it’s a highly specialized gun, and you’re fighting them in the circumstance it’s specialized for. If they have a long range rifle, for instance, don’t face them in the open. Even the best sniper rifles take 3 or 4 hits to kill you (note the lack of locational damage is actually a positive balancing mechanism here), so as long as you keep moving and make yourself a hard target, you should be able to pick out where they’re shooting you from without dying. Then get behind cover, and try to work your way over to their position. Virtually every sniper position in the game has multiple paths to it, with sharp corners and whatnot, so you can get pretty close before they get the chance to see you coming. Pro Tip: Never, EVER try to out-snipe a sniper with an Uzi (or Uzi-equivalent). I see a lot of players attempting this, and it’s kind of sad.
So, the main imbalance isn’t going up against people who have better guns than you, but going up against larger groups, or going up against coordinated groups with your unorganized pick-up group (or both, which is really frustrating). I have not often had situations so unbalanced that I didn’t feel like I at least had a chance, but it has come up a couple times.
A lot of people call the maps bland, but this isn’t my experience. I’ve been fighting primarily in the Financial district thus far. While every aspect of it is completely urban, it covers a wide range of urban environments. There are, of course, lots of streets lined with tall buildings, as you’d expect. There are also a couple small malls, some parks, an under construction freeway, a small marina/lake with an interesting network of bridges over it, parking garages, etc., and virtually every block has an internal maze of alleys and corridors. Further, they’ve done a very good job of strategically balancing these urban spaces without making them seem particularly improbable. Every time I’m shown a point to attack or defend, I can see numerous potential tactics for doing so, and every point is a bit different.
Now, on to the customization. The game really shines here, though having played a lot with Champions Online, I also see a number of shortcomings. The ability to basically build a custom texture, from the ground up, for your car or any article of clothing you wear, gives you immense flexibility. It also takes a lot of skill. Making a good costume is now a lot more than just selecting your parts and giving them colors. You need to build your entire design, from primitive shapes and letters. The editors for doing so are decent, though they leave a lot of room for improvement. The way decals are projected on 3D surfaces can be particularly finicky.
The biggest drawback, though, is the limited selection of clothing items, and the means by which you unlock more. The game has a pathetically slim selection of hats, for instance (something any TF2 fan will appreciate). As an Enforcer, I can choose from a baseball cap, a backwards baseball cap, a beanie, headband, a police cap or a military cap. As a criminal, you don’t get the police hat. That’s it, and most of those have to be unlocked. The selection of shirts, coats and pants is a bit better, but still not that awesome. The selection of jewelery is quite extensive, but most of that is so small and subtle that people won’t really be able to see it unless they’re standing right next to you in the social zone. I haven’t looked at the options for women.
The unlocking for clothing is, honestly, just dumb. You have to spend time in the clothing editor to get at more options in the clothing editor, and from what I can tell, the amount of time required for the highest levels is completely ridiculous. The real trouble with this is that until I have no reason to spend that much time in the tailor until AFTER I’ve unlocked the fancier clothing items and emblems. Fortunately, you can do an end-run around the system, because you don’t have to be DOING anything in the editor for it to count. Leave it open when you go to the store, do your laundry, or whatever, and you’ll be unlocking stuff left and right. So the broken system is “fixed” by being so broken that it can be circumvented. Sigh.
For all my complaints about the customization, though, that’s a side element of the game. The main element is the mission play in the action zones, and that’s really top notch. I would highly recommend APB to anybody who likes tactical FPSes.
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Pros: The character customization
Cons:Everything else
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Got my KthC the when they came out. The game is still loading. Ill you know what I think soon hopefully.
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On a positive note, I got to hear the guy I’d killed six times in a row rage on his voice chat about how he was canceling his preorder. The way that voice chat was utilized, along with death themes and the like, was pretty cool, manipulating your players into hating each other is an underused and surprisingly effective tactic.
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After having any and all excitement for APB fizzle out with every new tidbit of pre-release, beta and release news… I’m strangely reminded of Auto Assault.
Yea – I was one of ‘those’ people who bought AA, expecting it to be the next coming of roboMMOjesus. Now – I really did enjoy AA, and was let down when the game crashed and burned, although I entirely understand why things turned out that way. Maybe someday we’ll have another crack at an MMO where vehicular combat plays a large role, though APB doesn’t seem to have succeeded in that regard. Argue over AA as you may, but they absolutely -nailed- one crucial aspect of the MMO in making it enjoyable: travel. Traveling from point to point in Auto Assault was a joy unto itself, and considering that about 80% of most games is spent traveling (more, if you look at say WoW), making that aspect enjoyable is something of a key to retaining interest.
That being said, given the feedback on APB’s driving mechanics (consensus of ‘crappy’) we seem to have been faced with yet another dissapointment – another game that could’ve used more love and attention than it deserved or can afford – but the publisher push is best left for another volume.
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Theorem: Placing a post-release embargo stops The Internet from slagging off your shitty game.
Counterexample: This thread.
THEOREM NOT PROVEN.
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i shit you not
crimecraft > apb
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The customization is awesome but the gameplay includes some annoying overhangs from the fact its an mmofps and not a straight fps, i.e. weapon upgrades that give longer playing subscribers a clear advantage and at the same time no location based damage!
This meant that often in the beta id lose to a man just because he had a far better gun, and consequentially led me to give the actual game a miss. >.<
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They’ve actually reduced the margins on upgraded weapons quite considerably since the beta. Certainly upgraded weapons are still quite desirable and confer some advantage, but they are nowhere near as OP as they it used to be. Success in the game is much more about achieving tactical advantage over pure firepower.
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I semi-interestedly got a key, let it oh-so-slowly download over a couple nights, and finally got around to trying it out. I even took the time to play with the character editor, which is rather non-typical for me, was pleasantly drawn into the fiction they created, then I connected (enforcer), tooled around a bit, to be greeted by a “Thanks for participating, we will be ending the Keys to the City event in 15 minutes.”
So my impression of the game is mostly of a bunch of ostensibly law-abiding and enforcing agents, who magically can’t shoot each other, jacking vehicles to crash into each other, and generally causing mayhem, with several civilians dying in the process… (Interesting social study there, I reckon.)
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It is excellent, but if you aren’t capable of outsmarting your opponents and working as a team you’re not going to have any fun and I have to say that this just isn’t the game for you.
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In all fairness I won most of my fights and still had no fun. Winning isn’t everything if the game is bad. Some people clearly are having fun and are enjoying the game, but I think those that aren’t should not just be labeled sore losers. It’s not as if the only reason they are not enjoying it is because they don’t win.
Some of us expected more. Too much probably. I just think there’s better games out there. If I want to shoot other people online I can play ‘BF2:BC’ and if I want to team up and wreck a sandbox environment then I’ll play co-op on ‘Saints Row’. The biggest issue I have with APB is that it has competitors that do a better job. If you want to keep people playing then you need to be the better game.
I should probably stop reading this thread. My dislike for APB is becoming like an evangelical zeal.
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HOLY CRAP the interface sucked. bugs aside, (and you’re right, plenty of those) I can imagine the computer scientist at RTW working on the front end. Sure, you can do everything you want to do, but it is soooo counter intuitive.
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What stage of the beta did you play? Cause the interface now is fine.
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My principal unique thought is that where a lot of people found the driving and shooting mushy or imprecise, I found that a) the imprecise shooting encouraged basic strategy use (i.e. it’s a crapshoot if you come at someone head-on, so always go for some sort of tactical advantage) and b) the slow, slidey vehicles meant careful control could win or lose a race, rather than the car with the best top speed.
Overall WOT: good with good teams and some thought. Will play. Pricing system encourages me to do so as I will be playing little bits between the rest of my life activities.
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ugh, I knew when I wrote “unique” that it would not be. I am principally agreeing with HeruFeanor.
Again, I have to say that one thing that will make me play is the pricing model. I don’t want to pay a monthly fee, as I don’t have that much time for games, so paying for what I use (which will be certainly less that 30 hours a month) is a rare fit for me.
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The game is mad fun if you play with a full group. But im guessing most of you have no friends and are trying to play a MMO solo’ing, no wonder you dont like it.
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Yes, everyone who doesn’t like APD does so because they have no friends and live in their mom’s basement. Not because the game isn’t very good or anything.
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Played the closed beta as an enforcer quite a bit, had mixed impressions. Initially it was fun, got a lot of fun missions with good competition and I gave as good as I got. But towards the end of the beta period, I started finding what other people reported: that I would line up a perfect shot on someone, shot, and then they’d turn around, apparently unhurt, and 1-shot me. I don’t know if it was some patch or merely that people had bought better weapons than me, but it stopped being as much fun. Also, while group missions were lots of fun, there were loads of 1v1 missions as well – and what would happen frequently is that the game wouldn’t assign someone from the opposite faction, or that person would give up and go do something else, so I’d end up just scrubbing graffiti off walls on my own for 5 minutes. I suppose if I’d joined a clan things would’ve been different, as you’d have a regular team and be able to avoid those solo missions, and if you’re playing with friends it could be a lot of fun. But I still think the gameplay is too shallow to merit a subscription.
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I loved it. When I could play. After KttC I haven’t been able to get the damn thing to install. For whatever reason it doesn’t like to unzip it’s files correctly. Prick.
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I pretty much agree with the majority of people here – I want to like it. The customization tools are brilliant and running about with a group of friends is awesome. But with the broken game mechanics, dodgy vehicle handling and lack of variation drives it down for me. I had more fun looking for the giant spray points than I did playing the game itself because it’s so infuriating.
That said they’ve talked about adding PvE first gang members or zombies and if I’m honest, if they added a half decent zombie mode I’d buy it immediately. That game is designed for the zombie apocalypse I swear.
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The customization is obviously the game’s biggest draw, and it is definitely, by far, the best feature of the game. Unmatched by anything else currently in existence in PC gaming (aside from the body customization being annoyingly limited, oddly enough). It’s so powerful that it alone is enough to draw me to the game again and again, just to shoot people so they’re forced to hear my little jingle over and over again.
It’s really, bizarrely addictive when you’ve created a heavily customized personal avatar. It’s like I just have to go out there and shoot people just so they can admire her awesome physique and badass embroidery.
The game definitely has some really glaring flaws, though. The matchmaking works only if there’s people answering the calls for backup. There are some really stupid missions that are heavily biased towards one side or the other (delivery missions, I’m looking at you!). Solo missions are incredibly dull and a waste of time. There are definite balance issues with some of the guns (re: The SMG and assault rifle). And yeah, sometimes the hit detection seems really wonky.
Yet despite all this, I find myself drawn to it. For me, it is something of a breath of fresh air. Just the fact that I’m shooting people with an avatar that I can truly call my own is something of a saving grace for the game, and that keeps me coming back for more.
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I’m sorry, but you cannot compare APB with GTA4. Hell you can’t even compare it to GTA1 for comic value and fun times. It was frighteningly dull. It was laborious. It has an awful control system and it just isn’t worth buying…If I was given it as a present I would slap the gifter and demand compensation for the insult…
Okay, thats a bit much, but I was really disappointed by APB. I had been looking forward to it for so long, and what happens? This pile of shite, that’s what. As has been said, it’ll be free to play (in a guild wars stylee) within the year.
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I was in the closed beta for a good bit, playing on and off for a while. Not entirely sure why, as I don’t have the reactions needed for anything PvPlike, meaning that whenever I got someone sent after me on a mission, I’d die horribly..
Anyway, things I enjoyed:
- Running around all over the place, hopping over fences, kicking through doors, suchlike.
- Character customising, though the way other character models were slow to load made it feel like I was the only interesting form in a world of identical behoodied kids.
Not much to add about what I didn’t like, though driving did improve over the period I played, changing from a time when there was about a mile between the steering wheel and the wheels, and only about a hundred yards. As a game, it felt small, repetitive and, beyond the PvP, overly simple.
In short: play Lego Universe.
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Like many I got a key for the KttC event from here, and like many I loved the customization and hated the shooting, its controls, and overall lack of feedback. I think this event did them a big disservice. I would have pre-ordered the game otherwise. I could not believe that a game claiming to be a something-FPS in 2010 could have such a poor shooting system.
Anyway, I know it’s still the early access days, but how many people, eager MMO-ers, don’t pre-order the game they’ve been waiting for for months or years, at least for the early start? An early start in a PvP MMO, come on, what’s not to like.
Steam’s stats at http://store.steampowered.com/stats/ are interesting. There are two lines for APB, one around position 30 and the other around 80. But even the sum of these seems rather low. Granted, all the MP shooters above it are f2p though, but I blame the thousands of keys they’ve been giving away with blind optimism. Must not forget to check this stats page again on July 2nd.
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I have burned out on MMO’s. I have done my time in WoW, until I couldn’t stand it anymore. I have tried most of the other MMO’s and none have lived up to their hype. In fact, in grand MMO-tradition, they ship broken and the polish rarely extends beyond the first few racial zones (yeah, that means you, Warhammer). I have played LotRO and that was nice, a bit fiddly and unfocused, but nice. Not nice enough to warrant a monthly fee, but I might well dip back in when it goes free.
APB, then. I was actually quite excited about this, back when it was announced. A new type of setting! Extensive customization! Guns and cars! Spiffy art! Free to play! Since then, the fluff has been picked off, piece by piece and what remains is essentially just another MMO. Broken, monthly fee, grinding (to unlock stuff), etc. The art is still nice, though.
This crap wont cut it anymore, and APB has “FxCKED” written all over it. If it was free to play, then maybe it could have gone somewhere.
Roll on, free LotRO and Guild wars 2…
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I made a huge mistake…..
of pre-ordering it. Thoroughly regret my decision now. First of all, what would justify a monthly fee in this? There is NO content in this game. It’s just a shooter – that is it. The “missions” are laughable. Go from point A to point B to …. G and repeat endlessly. Every now and again drive awkwardly around with no clear goal other than not to crash into random corners in your wobbly tank. Oh, and after a day, half your enemies are already kitted out in far superior gear to make the experience a truely aweseome *spawn* *walk* *death* rinse repeat.
Also: half the outfits people think up give my monitor cancer of the pixel.
No wonder they don’t want to see reviews.
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Group up.
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Had I not been part of the beta I suspect that I’d have bought this close to release as I was really quite excited about this (I live not far from the RTW offices in Dundee too so I have some geographical loyalty in there too). I am certain though that I’d not have got past the 30 days that will (presumably) be included with the boxed game.
Conceptually I think it’s great but basically every mechanic in the game is jankety and feels slightly ‘off’ and while the character customisation tool is nothing short of amazing (far better than the now ubiquitous cryptic one) I couldn’t get a real sense of progressing my character during play.
Combine that with a potentially wonky payment structure AND IN GAME ADVERTS despite the subscription model (this makes me quite angry indeed!) and the only untarnished edge of a real prospect has been knocked off.
My 2 cents: Avoid. The time for an MMO (although this isn’t really an MMO in the sense we’ve come to understant) not set in some kind of fantasy land is not here yet.
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Was pretty much a disaster for me when I played it. Realtime Worlds have poured an immense amount of time into their customization engine and the result is truly one of the best character creator toolsets you’ll ever find in any game. The problem then however, is that they’ve forgot all about the rest of the game, or have perhaps ran out of time or budget. The result is that the game is extremely poor and needs a massive overhaul if it ever wants to achieve success.
So it’s a disaster really. I would give it a year or two to see if Realtime Worlds improve it, but I would definitely not recommend buying it when it’s released.
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I… have been having a lot of fun with this. I dont think the driving is nearly as bad as people are giving ti stick for. Collision with walls are certainly weird, but the drifting through traffic is fun as hell once you deal with the fact theres a brief handling delay down to it being serverside. It kind of puts me in mind of Driver1, with it’s enormously exagerated drifting. Weird at first, once you nail it, really satisfying.
Combat is weird. It’s kind of janky, in that hitboxes are clearly just that. Boxes, as opposed to rewarding careful aim and headshots, its center of mass all the way. Didnt think I was gonna like it at all.
Then I came to realise that this just turns the game into one of position and teamwork over snap aim. This is not a bad thing, since I find myself zooming around and making bold manouvers to get into a position that benefits my weapon loadout. Again, took me a while to get into it, but I had fun all through beta. Weapons sound punchy and it’s very fast paced. I like.
So.. yeah. It’s kind of janky in a lot of ways but for me, far greater than the sum of it’s parts.
Will I play it forever? probably not. But I’m having fun while I am. I’ve gotten enough play out of the beta to warrant a purchase, and since I dont have epic amounts of time since I work, 50 hours out of the box is probably a better deal for me than the month most games have. If I work through them? Well, thats more than I played GTA4 or Saints Row or RDR or a dozen other games. So I can’t really complain about the value for money when I payed less for APB than I did for dozens of other games that I’ve gotten less out of.
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Oh yes, just worth pointing out that OH GOD DONT SOLO THIS GAME. It’s prretty much worthless if you dont have people you know to team up with
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Good points: customisation of literally everything, player music, looks decent enough graphically, interesting design.
Bad points: Terrible, wobbly shooting mechanics, crappy driving (which to be fair, improved greatly during the beta), laughable balance between weapons, and it gets pretty repetitive after your first few hours.
Optimisation isnt bad, but its not good either. If it were b2p and then free after, it may be *ok*, but to ask for box sale plus monthly fees plus audio ads on the VOIP is a joke for a game of this quality. I also wonder if EA will try to shoehorn a cash shop onto it at some point?
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Weapon balance is far, far improved now, basically since they made the slotted and unique weapons far less powerful compared to low end variants.
The big thing is that now the weapon ranges are what rule the roost. The balancing isnt really off any more, but it is extreme. SMGs and Shotguns arent just prefered up close, they are absolutely crushing. Of course the NTEC is popular because its mid range goodness can stop people actually closing the distance.
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I always hear the same three complaints about it: “It’s not as shooty as MW2; it’s not as atmospheric as GTA4; it’s not as large as WoW.”
I don’t care. It’s fun. That’s all that matters. (Consequently, denigrating an MMO for only being fun when you’re in a group is rather silly. If I wanted to solo, I’d play GTA4.)
The shooting is functional, each weapon type favors a different tactical situation, and groups with a variety of weapons tend to win. The driving is loose, but that’s because it’s handled server-side so there’s no lag, and you get used to it after a couple minutes of driving. Driving ends up being quite fun.
“It’s the same missions over and over.” CS lived for years on two tiny maps: DE_Dust and CS_Office. TF2 has two basic game types – three, if you count DM. Either way they’re basically just excuses to go kill the other guy, which APB gives in spades. Hell, this is the only MMO I can think of where drive-bys and car chases are an integral part of the gameplay.
The matchmaking mechanism is wonky if you’re soloing, as most people aren’t, but about as fair-handed as you can get in instances of a maximum of 100 (tho usually after 80 they start cycling new folks elsewhere). It’s based on your mission win/loss ratio, but even the best player will be brought down by a string of bad PuGs who don’t partake in the game’s VoIP system. (Consequently, with area VoIP, you can hear people who are near you, friend or foe. Hearing someone cry out “Faaaawk!” when you gun them down is nothing less than awesome.)
Right now, for me, it’s fun. I dunno how long it will continue to be fun, but when that time comes I’ll stop paying for it. Until then, I’ll be hamming it up on VoIP.
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Such an amazing game, I really love it and can’t wait to start playing more of it. The combat is so much fun and the game runs so smooth for me, how much more would you want? Then you have all of that customisation, which I’m not creative for so I can just go hire someone to do it for me, and then I was invited to a clan and that made it even more fun and challenging, as we try everyday to get on the league ladders for the clan and get some awsome rewards.
Not only that but it’s so cheap to play per month and even then they’ve already confirmed some of the new content they’ll be adding, like the pro districts. They’re even talking about adding more than just that, such as racing districts, more weapons, vehicles, clothing, the APB system is so dynamic there’s no limit to what they can add (Personally I want to play some Texas Hold Em’). The fact that you can even earn your monthly play by just killing people and doing missions, winning leagues or creating things in the social district also makes it a lot more appealing.
All in all this game has got everything I want right now (Except for casinos, go RTW GO!). I find it unfortunate that there’s so many people who’ve had a bad experience with the game unlike the consistantly good experience that I’ve had with it, and will continue to have with it. It’s exactly the game I was expecting, not some sort of GTA:IV clone with 100 players, but a fast paced action game with some cool new features that few games have ventured into before. I’m sure that they’ll continue pushing this game with more and more content, and optimising it more and more for the people that have had slow gameplay. They also have shown that they listen to the community with some of the changes they’ve made since the beta, which is a another plus plus.
The only thing I think Realtime Worlds did wrong was be so vague about certain things in the game, mainly the payments. I was always aware of the fact that it would have a payment of some sort, and therefore was expecting it, however since the start they were very vague about it and never really told anyone what they were going for, because they didn’t know. It would’ve been nice if they had said straight up that it would require monthly payments to play parts of the game though, then a lot of people wouldn’t have been so confused. Not that big of a deal for me anyway, I can afford $10 a month for such fun, and probably will earn at least half of that if me and my clan are any bit decent.
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Ok so a lot of people on here are suggesting that the game is dull, clunky etc, but that just is not true. After playing in KttC and spending horrific amounts of time playing the game (yes already), I can confidently say that this is a fantastic game and worth every penny I have spent buying it and will be spending subbing it. I get the feeling that a lot of the people on here have not spent enough time playing and have simply found some flaws, called it and day and that’s it. As the early access was released, it was apparent that changes had been made, and the game now runs even more smoothly and various tweaks have been added or fixed.
To all those naysayers, I suggest you go back and try again, because I am certain you will feel differently about it. As far as game releases go, this has been one of the easiest (apart from Steam but that’s Steams’ fault) and most enjoyable, with no noticable glitches or bugs that I have yet come across. Overall fantastic game and cannot wait till it’s all released and running.
My 2 cents.
Kable – Obeya – Unleashed
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Main experience was a driving and shooting game with bad driving and shooting, as many have said. The only thing that comes to mind when people claim it’s not that bad is that they’re either playing a different game or they have rather low expectations of what these two things should be like. The customization might be extensive and all but they also managed to make the interface for that confusing as heck.
It feels like another attempt at grafting a non-RPG genre onto an MMO, that creates a game that’s both a bad example of that genre and a bad MMO. Individual people who liked or didn’t like it commenting on gaming sites is one thing, but I can’t see a game with this kind of flaws holding more than a few dozen subscribers when you throw the greater market at it.
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Uh, “less than a hundred thousand” is what I was aiming for there. Not as hopeless as that, but not that great.
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If that reply was satire, it would’ve been genius.
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Weird. I swear I pressed reply… oh well.
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I can’t stop playing because I have some sort of condition where I just want to unlock the stupid shapes to make better decals and tattoos.
Even when I keep getting raped by people with worse/better weapons than me. I always thought I was good at games, but this one makes me question my abilities. :( I suppose that makes every kill that much better though.
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“Dude, you just ran over that woman I was trying to mug!”
“Oh. Sorry.”
After I logged out that overheard exchange stuck in my head as a metaphor, somehow, for the game experience.
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Why would anyone in their right mind have a 64 bit system with less than 4 gigs of RAM? so yes 3 would be less than expected, in the eyes of logic.
As for the “quad core gaming”, maybe people should stick to console gaming if they want systems / games that don’t advance within a year. I’m personally sick of the weak and cheap preventing advancement. DirectX 9 cough cough.
APB – 80% character design – 15% Gun unlock – 5% skill. Replay value is slim unless you have a solid “gang” likely pulled from some other game you’ve played. Im used to dropping 50bucks on games i complete within the weekend, so i was happy with the purchase.
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There is a huge amount of skill involved. It’s just that the skill is less twitch-shooter skill, and more careful tactics (though there’s a decent amount of twitch-shooter skill as well).
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A common sentiment I’m seeing here is that it’s fun in groups, but crap solo. This is another point where I’m going to disagree with most people, mostly on the basis that the game is virtually never truly “solo”, even when you aren’t playing with a group.
Most of my play so far has not been with a group (simply because I only have a few friends in the game, and they aren’t usually playing at the same time I am), and I’ve had a blast. I’ve done a LOT of 1v1 missions, and yes, they are interesting. It’s kind of like a hunt, maneuvering carefully around the objective, trying to stay hidden and catch sight of the enemy, figure out where they are, and take them by surprise, while they’re trying to do the same to you. It rarely takes long before you find each other, because there’s always some kind of objective you’re working towards on the map, so both players stay fairly close to that.
Even when playing “solo”, though, you frequently end up working with other players. You get called in for back-up, or call for back-up, or you join a mission against a group, so it automatically invites multiple people to it. These might not be your friends that you have carefully coordinate strategies with, but the pervasive, open world voice chat makes it easy to coordinate, at least a little, once you find each other.
A lot of people are also comparing it to GTA4, WoW, Battlefield, etc. I don’t think any of these comparisons are really fair. It has aspects that compare to all of those, but the total package is completely different from any of them. GTA4 is a purely solo game. WoW isn’t a shooter. Battlefield envelops the entire map in one big, two-sided battle. Nowhere else can I play in a huge environment with 80 players, who are fighting tons of different, small, highly tactical, yet fast paced battles, which are constantly criss-crossing each other. If you think of the multiplayer aspect of this game to just be the people immediately involved in your current mission, then you’re missing a big part of what makes APB so much fun.
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I managed to get a fairly nice gun by selling a homemade Doctor Who theme tune. This is presumably something unique to this game, and hopefully other games will take it on board.
Having said that, though, they’ve got to put in a mechanic for selling clothes other than duplicating items and auctioning them one by one.
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@Schmung
It’s not perfect, but it’s far from the train wreck most of the ‘I played 2 hours during the beta 4 months ago’ posters here seem to be pushing as ‘reviews’. Fact of the matter is those are opinions based on old builds of the game. Since then performance had improved, the GUI has been revamped, there’s been a high degree of weapon balancing.
If you are a fan of tactical team based shooters (say for example clan match level CS, rather than pub CS) where the play is all about working in tandem with team mates to achieve your objective, then APB is probably the sort of game you’d enjoy, because it’s all about that. If you are more into solo play, then it’s probably not going to be your thing.
The only thing I would say is that much like GTA IV it has some beefy system requirements.
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No, most of the people here are talking about the KttC event. And short of a miracle patch (that only exists in fanbois’ dreams, but in *every* game), the state of affairs people are complaining about couldn’t have changed much. And IF shooting was even remotely like in the “tactical shooters” you are referring to, be it CS, or the OFP/Arma’s, WW2OL, or even an MMORPG like Fallen Earth, in terms of controls, precision, feedback, effect and console-y 3rd-person view, people wouldn’t complain about it.
And if the shooting part sucks, it doesn’t matter whether you are shooting alone or in a group.
As it is, the game is a waste of a great graphics engine AFAIC. I wish they sold it to the Borderlands guys, I just can’t wrap my head around the comic book look of the latter :).
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@Neofit
Given the vast majority have said nothing to that effect I’ll take your ‘actually’ with a large pinch of scepticism.
With respect to the combat, it works perfectly well. As I said in my earlier post, APB is a very demanding game. If you aren’t running an i5/i7 and a reasonable graphics card don’t expect optimal performance. There’s a big difference in playing the game at 20 fps Vs 60 fps.
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With a decent computer this is how APB plays: -
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wWBF9aUrwSk
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Extended play just continues to show this as one of my favourite games. It’s just so unpredictable and freewheeling at times and theres a real wonderful trend towards on the fly strategising with your buddies.
They really need to tweak mission design to encourage people to stay mobile though. The game is far, far more fun when combat moves from street to street.
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My rig is like DR Gonzo’s, except a GF7950GT rather than the Radeon. The beta ran fine if a little choppy in busy areas. But the cars handled like boats, the shooty-shooty was limp and hard to do right and the missions were repetitive and repetitive.
Mayhap if enough punters buy in at the start RTW’ll be able to boot-strap and patch it into something worth dropping regular money on.
Failing that I smell YAMDMMORPGTOWFOGAG(TAFPYK) coming over the hill.
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@Neofit
Given the vast majority have said nothing to that effect I’ll take your ‘actually’ with a large pinch of scepticism.
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Great game if you’re playing with a buddy or buddies. Terminally dull if playing alone.
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