Rock, Paper, Shotgun

The first not-filmed-by-wobblecam game footage trailer of urban crime no-subscription fee MMO-shooter APB turned up on Gamespot this morning, and I’ve posted it below. It’s got cars crashing and smashing, dudes getting shot, doors getting, er, opened, and a funny joke about dancing in MMOs at the end. Well, it’s kind of a joke, I suppose.
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Good news everyone! All Points Bulletin, the upcoming cops’n'robbers MMO from Dave Jones, he of GTA and Crackdown fame, will not have a subscription fee. That’s right – it’s doing the Guild Wars thing, or at least something like it.
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Internet info-king Pat Garratt of VG247 has bagged an interview with APB mastermind – the man who created the GTA series – Dave Jones. The Realtime Worlds bossman talked at length about the mechanics of the game, and even has a few words about the GTA series. You can watch it below.

APB, in case you weren’t paying attention, is a forthcoming 100-man online gang combat game set in a contemporary city, and one of the most intriguing developments in the MMO space for several years. It was also, if our own John Walker’s account is to be believed, the most exciting game shown at E3. You probably want to watch this one, eh? (In other Develop news, Kieron says: “The Unreal Flesh Engine sex stuff is the best stuff of the show. I couldn’t believe it. Bosoms will never be the same again.”)
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Of everything I saw at E3, APB stood out as the project with the greatest concentration of inspiration. Ignore the surprisingly crappy images that have been released so far – this one deserves your attention. During the presentation a colleague sat next to me leant in and said, “Bloody hell.” A minute or so later I replied, “This is the first original idea I’ve seen all week.” It’s very easy to think of APB as an online GTA. It certainly is a game focused around either committing or preventing crimes in an open city. But what makes APB stand out is just how damned smart it is.

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EA have announced that they’ll be publishing Realtime Worlds’ gang-war MMO, All Points Bulletin. Creator Dave Jones is keen to compare the game to GTA or Call Of Duty. “WoW’s great, and it’s attracting huge numbers, but let’s face it there’s probably still more players on GTA and Call of Duty in terms of online,” Jones told Gamasutra. It’s looking pretty slick, and it’s hard to see it not being awesome. (Jones is, after all, a key brain behind the original GTA concept, and a pretty distinguished designer in the subsequent years.) The game is due “early 2010″ – and is PC-only, apparently. Woo!
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Realtime Worlds boss Colin Macdonald told VG247 that their upcoming MMO, APB, is “the bastard child of everything we’ve been striving towards over the 15-20 years”, but also “where we want to go in terms of sandbox gameplay and everything that started with Grand Theft Auto and was evolving through Crackdown.” It was, he said, the culmination of what Realtime’s David Jones has been working towards since the late ’90s. Macdonald claims that APB will contain “what Dave’s always wanted to do from GTA and before Crackdown and APB.”

The other big surprise is that the game might not be that far off, with news on a beta “before too long“. This year? No word on that yet, but here’s hoping. More on APB here.