All Points Bulletin

[LordBhorak]

Ok, so I bought the APB and made my Enforcer character on the Obeya server. At the first glance the game seems very fun as all the missions are in fact small matches against the criminals. The game might get repetitive, but we will see about that. All FPS games in fact are repetitive...

About the controls and the looks. Well it feels mostly like GTA: San Andreas with slightly better graphics ofc. The driving feel is much different than in GTA, but the reason here is, that it's more suited for playing with a keyboard (yeah, finally a PC exclusive game). Overall feel of the controls is above average. The guy handles nicely and it's pretty easy to drive.

So what have I done in the game?
First I made my character... a chubby cop... an ordinary looking fella with a gun. Then it was time to go through the boring tutorial and after that time to customize the clothing, the car and I also made my small theme song. It's the first few notes of Finlandia Hymn with a drumroll (Badabish) in the end. My enemies will allways hear that tune when I kill them. :D And when you are the MVP of a "match", your theme will be played at the end of the match.

Now as I have only been playing an enforcer (police), I can only talk about their side. When in an action district (the area where you need to have action district time, that must be bought for real money or with RTW points, that can be acquired in game, too), you drive around in your patrol car and wait... you will ocassionally get some missions to do, in which you have to investigate "that" and do "this"... soon enough you'll get the APB notification, that some gang members are there to stop you. Ok, so that's the flow of a basic mission. Then there are 3 other types to get missions: First, you'll get the APB notice, that there's an ongoing crime. Second, you'll get a request for backup from others that are on a mission. And third, if you witness a crime, you can apprehend the perp by yourself. You first need to make the crime into a mission by "witnessing" it with Alt button.

And ofc, sometimes some criminals get way too "badass" and they have to be stopped. In that case you'll notice a message that someone has a bounty on his/her head. Then just check your map to see the perpetrators location and go for it. The first enforcer to kill that dude will collect the bounty. I think that the bounty is bigger if you stun the dude and arrest him/her.

I'll be reporting more on the game after I have extensively tested it out.

PS. The game crashes quite much with me, but that's the normal hickups with new MMO's.

[LordBhorak]

After some "extensive" testing (means 50-60hours played), I can still safely say, that this game is pretty fun game and has a lot of potential. It still has some balance issues and crashing issues, but those things are bound to be fixed sooner or later. And for the record, the game is best played with a group of 2-4 players.

Some of the nuisances in the game are as follows:
- Matchmaking is not working 100%. This means that you can be matched with much higher ranked players (kinda like levels, but the only perk for this is that you get upgrades, that make you just a tad bit tougher to kill and a tad bit better killer etc). And the other annoyance in the matchmaking is that when you are being matchmade with 3 against 2 players and they call for backup, the game can suddenly turn into you 3 against their 5 with no possibility to call for backup.

- Roof camping. This thing is going to be fixed soon according to the RTW staff. But at this moment, this is quite annoying. People find some good locations on roofs, where they can climb using air conditioners, trashcans etc. And then they just camp on the roof with someone covering the climb route, so no-one else can get up there. The way worse technique is roof camping with destroyable path. Meaning that there might be some barrels that you have to use to climb to the roof, but the barrels can be destroyed. Now the target, who should be killed, goes on the roof and his mates, that are not teamed with him stay down and keep destroying the barrels... and ofc you can't attack them, because they're not your targets.

- Car spawn blocking. This is 100% griefing by other idiotic players. So basically what you do, is take the armored car and park it sideways to the car spawn parking spaces, so when other players come to the car park and try to spawn their car, the armored car is there to block it. And when the driver is sitting in the car, you cannot drive it away and you cannot destroy player owned/driven vehicles, unless the driver of the said vehicle is on your opposing team in a match. The only possibility here is to try and ram the car away with equally heavy (or in some cases heavier) car and let your mate spawn a new car. This unfortunately doesn't work when the parking spaces are in a corner and the car is backed up to it.

- Goldsellers... you know them, you hate them.

- Crashing. It still happens about 2 times a day when gaming. Usually after 2h of playing.

- Some balance issues. Some of the balance issues are probably just bugs like f.ex. Bors's car should be able to ram stuff a lot and take punishment like hell, but it seems that the decimal point was put into the wrong space as the car seems very light when ramming other cars. This is going to be fixed tho.

But those things aside, the game is pretty solid fun with friends and you have the nice feeling of winning after beating a tough opponent and you have a big laugh when some noob tries to shoot your friend and you run him over with a trash truck, which makes him fly like a space shuttle. And ofc the instant classic: Jumping off from a highway, down to a pedestrian lane and crushing your enemy (+some civilians) with your car... "DEATH FROM ABOVE!!"

If you have any questions about the game, feel free to ask and I'll be more than happy to answer your questions.

[darker]

Darker's personal list of grieves about APB


I've used up my 50 hours of action district time now, and so far I gotta say I'm neither impressed nor repulsed by this game.

Content wise, APB is defnitely lacking, like most of the fresh MMO's usually do. As far as I know, the world has 3 districts which are instanced for 80 or ~200 players (action vs. social). Only 2 different action district maps so far, so that means there are only 2 playzones at the moment, and the functional difference between these 2 is, in my honest opinion, nonexistent.

Social district gameplay consists of people idling in the area, chatting about stuff, or spending time using big colorful editor consoles (which btw shoot the immersion in kneecap with a cannon) editing their characters, vehicles or tunes. The creative part is actually kinda funny and gives some extra value for those that are willing to waste time creating accurate re-compositions of old 8-bit gaming tune classics or drawing custom logos for their clothes. Too bad most of the editors lack depth and features, fex. the tune editor is almost as horrible to use as Guitar Hero's horrid editor.

Action district gameplay is the heart and soul of APB. This consists of doing various generic missions for mission agents around the map. In reality, each mission offer is just a call for the matchmaking to pimp you for some enemy opposition team as a shooting practice target, as you get 1/10th of the rewards if no opposition shows up during your generated mission. After the opposition inevitably does join the mission, each side is assigned with victory goals for the mission, and the winner gets the bulk of the rewards while the loser is left with runner-up price.

There are days when the matchmaking service almost works, and then there are days when it matches 5 guys of rank 200 against a team of 3 guys on rank 50. Participants can use "call backup"-option to even the odds, which also bugs half of the time, matching uneven numbers and uneven ranks.

Gameplay in combat and in freeroam is GTA, with balance and engine issues. Weapons make the main difference. Long range weapons beat short range ones on long range and vice versa. Upgraded and ranked people tend to wipe the floor with low ranks. People with low-latency connections tend to wipe the floor with everyone, unless they really suck or have no weapon upgrades. I apparently either suck in general in this game or fall into the high-latency group, but I have real trouble killing people in close combat even with better weapons because of stutter and general lag.

The whole point of combat is to accumulate one's rank, among with weapon and equipment upgrades that open up with mission agent / faction reputation levels. I'm bit less than half way through the faction reputations after few weeks, so it's safe to say that even with my un-impressive playing hours of 50h, the game is kinda grind heavy, and the rep "leveling" gets repeatitive quite fast.


Short recap :

Annoying, unbalanced and highly buggy game that is in desperate need of a big patch + some variety and content. I still keep getting back to it since, well, if you want to play GTA style game online, this is your only and best option by far, despite all the general crappiness.

[LordBhorak]

Short recap :

Annoying, unbalanced and highly buggy game that is in desperate need of a big patch + some variety and content. I still keep getting back to it since, well, if you want to play GTA style game online, this is your only and best option by far, despite all the general crappiness.

Well, in the days when everything works nicely playing with 1 friend the game is in my opinion super awesome. And that is when we do bounties etc and drive around in my fast car just killing folks or defending spots. The game really has potential if it gets some "greater" missions, like drug trade missions (where 2 criminal groups are meant to trade some items and 1 enforcer group is there to make those plans go down the drain) and so on. With the current missions it hasn't grown boring yet at least.

Btw... I have only once had latency problems and haven't had any problems in killing people, even if they have upgraded weapons. Ofc with my weapon I can't win 1vs1 battle on an open field against an upgraded weapon/player, but with some cunning etc I can beat them 30-40% of times.

PS. Darker... in reality you have only spent around 35hours in action district, because of your afking for 15 hours...
PPS. You are very much correct with the need of a big patch, but that should be coming according to RTW staff. And the game has been out only for few weeks, so it would be a small miracle if it would work flawlessly. Given that it is first MMO game in that genre. I do still have pretty high hopes for the game... in the following 6 months.
PPPS. And as my first thought of the game was that "If this game gives good fun for 1-2months, it has been worth the money". It really seems that it will deliver for that part. With no additional content etc, the game will eventually get very boring grind and that's it for me.

[darker]

At some point MMO developers need to ditch the protective cloak of "hey, no 0-day patches are needed, it's fine to be buggy on launch", and start fixing things right after they get past the release day hangover. Just like with Age of Conan, if they lose the "Alpha nerds", those that bring the herd in, they will end up in the same category with all the other failures running with 50k subscriptions and diminishing community.