E3 2009: APB impressions

by: John - posted: 6/5/2009 9:09:00 PM

Realtime Worlds’ APB has been in the works for a while now. The company that brought you Crackdown is looking to get into the action MMORPG realm. The demo that I was shown was, unfortunatly, all video and no live demo of the game in action. What I saw looked pretty interesting though.

Realtime Worlds is looking at crafting an MMORPG that emphasizes creation, conflict, and celebrity. The character customization options has such an enormous amount of items to manupulate that the team might achieve the goal of being able to create a unique enough character that it can stand out in a crowd of 1000 people. Hair styles, body build, skin pigment, eyes; you name it APB can adjust it in many different ways. It’s so deep that changing the eyes can alter the skull structure underneath.

Clothings do make the character an APB lets you have a vast array of clothing types. Not only can you specify a style but you can also change the type of fabric it’s made of. Mix and match various pieces to create a unique person through what he or she wears.

There’s a symbol editor that works with vector objects and layers to achieve some unique designs. Since the objects are vector based, they can stretch and scale and still be of high quality. You’ll be using the symbol editor for many things. One example are tatoos for your character. Pasting the symbol onto your character will automatically alter the symbol to take on the pigmentation of the character’s skin. It’s easy to apply tatoos to your character and it even automatically wraps around arms and legs if you decide to put large ones on there.

The symbol editor also works on clothing as well allowing you to decorate pieces with designs. You don’t have to be symmetrical with your designs as you can place them on the items however you wish. As with tatoos, the symbols you place on the clothing will take on the pigment and the texture of the clothes.

One more thing was shown with the symbol editor and that’s in customization of your vehicles. As mentioned earlier, the vector based nature of the symbols allow you to place them on vehicles in all sorts of places where it wraps around and changes size without losing the quality of the image. Spray paint your car to finish off a vehicle that other players will identify when you drive by them.

As far as the game itself, you can play as either an enforcer or a criminal. Criminals can fight other criminals but enforcers can never fight other enforcers. With that you get this sot of triangle of opposition. Since there’s no story, the actions of your characters create the story and also initiate the missions. You playing as a criminal can walk up to a car and steal it. The game will know this is happening and call out an APB and create a mission for the enforcers. It will then do some automatic matchmaking to get the right number of enforcers and skill level needed to generate an enjoyable match. The game will also take into account ping time as well in detemining a good opponent or opponents.

One of the unique things about APB is that all enoucnters will be against real people. There are no AI conflicts which is going to be interesting. You’re going to always need a nicely populated server for this to work. I don’t know if not having any AI conflicts will work but I’m going to be interested to see if APB can pull this off in the long run. There’s a cap of 100 people per city but there will be hundreds of city. New places will be introduced as time goes on.

New to the show was the music editor. While the interface shown was a beta, Realtime Worlds hopes that you can craft some unique kill music with it. Say you take down an enemy in a gun fight. The enemy willl hear your unique kill music. Good players will be feared and annoyed by the sounds of your theme music as they take their enemies down. There are other great audio options like a pairing with Last.fm to provide some music and each character will have a VOIP with 3d positioning. Far away you won’t hear anything but as you get closer the person talking will get louder and louder. It’s something I first heard about that the folks at iD were going to try with Quake but you have it here in APB.

I am a little concnered that much of the focus was on character and item customizations and not too much on the gameplay but this just might be Realtime Worlds showing how flexible and powerful their engine is. It’s certainly a different genre MMO from all the fantasy games out there and Realtime Worlds did great with Crackdown. Hopefully, their success will carry into APB as well as it certainly looks great visually. APB is only announced for the PC currently.