Quick Look At All Points Bulletin

Quick Look At All Points Bulletin
Blogpost by Tully Ackland, OnRPG Journalist
Originally posted on Tully’s blog XPedition

Nearly 9 years ago I was playing Grand Theft Auto III for the first time and pondering over what it would be like if the game was made into an MMO, most likely seeing me and my buddies cruising around looking for some trouble. Most people growing up may have moved on to more sophisticated dreams, not me!

Its a good thing Real Time Worlds the developer of Crackdown, decided to try and make that dream a virtual-reality. All Points Bulletin is a MMOG set in the city San Paro in which players have the option between taking a part in the ongoing street war by being an Enforcer or a Criminal.

APB’s Head-start went live on the 28th of June and I had my client all ready waiting for the opening, while I’m no where near ready to put a review together I do have some good and bad points to say.

Lets start off by saying that APB’s character creation and customization is some of the greatest ever available in an online game, you really have absolute creative control when putting your look together.

With hundreds of items to choose from, choice on how to position them, what colors they are, the choice to place custom words and logos and with much more to purchase with in-game currency you’ll always be able to upgrade your “pimpness”

Of course the majority of launch day players chose either hooded up, hot-pant wearing females with tatooes or cyber punk muscle bound dudes in shorts.

Attempting for the more stylish looking character I put together a first formal outfit for my Enforcer, Arkez.

Similar to the character creator, players can customize virtually every aspect of their own personal vehicle. Beginning with pain jobs and liveries, you are able to recreate any artwork and place it on your car, be it gang tags, badges or just a Personalized Licence plate. Tully 2010 was mine – Too vain?

Later on in character development you unlock the ability to change the body of the vehicle with spoilers, wheels and seats.

Three districts make up the world of APB, The Social District (F2P), Financial District and Waterfront District. The game ships with a unique subscription plan so you only spend game-time hours outside of the Social District.

Missions may be picked up from NPC contacts who as you work for and unlock more rewards from, if you choose not to work for an NPC there are often calls coming in over the radio to collect a bounty for an enemy player. Each mission pits you against  the opposing faction so its extremely wise to team up with others.

While initially unimpressed with the combat, after changing weapons and improving my ability to sprint out of the enemies line of sight I warmed to its charm, however it wasn’t until I started rolling with a party of 4 and became the wheel man did it strike me that this is exactly what I was after 9 years ago as a young lad.
 

My biggest gripe came with my initial moments of entering the Social District, being familiar with many MMO’s its second nature for me to believe that I can change clothes and weapons from my inventory. That’s not the case with APB and you’ll need to go to a number of different terminals spread over the social district to change: Clothing, Weapons, Vehicles and Theme songs.

I’m not against moving around, but after spending over 20 minutes wondering why I couldn’t change my appearance I learnt a valuable lesson: Don’t skip the tutorial thinking you know it all 🙂

 

An interesting part of game design is intergration around of music. While it certainly doesn’t rival a professional software package, APB contains a feature packed music studio that allows you to create, mix and edit their own signature themes to accompany them in-game. Once created, you are able to deploy themes so they can be heard during various parts of the PvP based mission structure (such as arresting other players, winning a mission, etc…). In addition to this, you can create songs, which are longer variants of themes that can be played from a players vehicle, or from the social district music performance points. I can only imagine what kind of mad annoyance this will end up expanding into once the community gets their hands on it for a while.

APB is a great looking and sounding game, the payment model of “pay for hours” is a new one for me and its a clever way playing on the fact I’ll never stop wanting to make my characters and cars look more and more slick.

Full review to come.