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Is All Points Bulletin gonna rise from it’s 100th million dollar grave?

The word is out, and speculations has begun to sound positive.

I was starting to give up on this game, I really felt that the grave was too deep for other developers to rob the jewel, this game was. Now it seems that the game has a buyer, but not much information has been given. I had the opportunity to review this game for another website, and truth to be told, I have never been a fan of big MMO’s, and even less RPG and RTS games (you’re right, no WoW, Aion or StarCraft for me, never appealed to me much), but this game, APB, got to me pretty good.

Though, I think the game caught me as I was playing with my boyfriend in the same room, and we were playing together. Playing together was actually APB’s biggest force, and the “few” people who actually gave the game the chance in it’s short lifespan, seemed to be as hooked as I was. Playing the game, I often recognized the other gamertags and remembered back if they were good or not. The biggest problem I had was that people cheated in the game, exploiting different bugs and holes in the code, but this will forever be a problem in online games.

Back to the real news. As we all know, the APB website was taken down and so on, but the patch notes is still online, and was updated a few days ago with an intriguing oneliner;

It’s looking like there might be light at the end of the tunnel for APB. The end of the administration process is apparently close and there appears to be a buyer for the game.

Also, Ben Bateman, one of the former community managers for APB has been spreading the word about the patch note address via his twitter profile. Also, in this writing moment (or 40 minutes ago), Chris Collins, also a former community manager for APB, has tweeted that as of monday works for Lithium, though it’s hard to tell if this has anything to do with APB in the works (like if Codemasters plans to use Lithium to help out making the fanbase for APB? this is MY speculation, and my speculation only).

When all comes to all, and reading Ben Batemans latest tweets, he isn’t the one who updated the patch notes as he doesn’t have the access anymore. And this is how and why I was mentioning Codemasters before. Other gaming news sites has been speculating if Codemasters is the buyer of APB, because of Ben’s position at Codemasters.
- According to Gamerzines.com, Codemasters has confirmed that these rumours are untrue. So the speculations on who’s the lucky buyer are still in the dark.

Reading the news on Massively that made me sit down and write these news, and the comments to it, it seems that APB has so much more potential – just as the loyal gamers felt. I sure felt it. This is actually confirmed by an anonymous former employee at Realtime Worlds in the comments on Massively. I quote;

I worked with the company in the early stages of development, and I can honestly tell you that there was a great deal more to the game than you ever saw. Truth be known, we needed another good six months to a year to release the product, but the companies backing it didn’t want to spend the cash. They’d already pushed the game back once, from what I recall, and feared that pushing it back a second time would kill it.

Let me give you some examples here. For one, there was a casual system developed where a player could interact on a total PvE system. Meaning that though it was still Enforcers versus Crim, it wasn’t always Player Versus Player. We had a whole storyline developed with this, as well as a much larger city planned. As first designed, the city was expected to be ten times the size it was in game, and would support players across a broad spectrum of levels and skills. Lastly, in the design plans, we had the system set up to match players based on level; not just at random as the game often did.

What you ended up seeing in game, was a beta version which we had been using through testing to further hone some of the points of the game. In particular, the driving needed a good bit of work; but it was sidelined when the company figured that it was “good enough” to continue with as it was. There were a ton of features that got dropped from the game also. I think the one that bothered me the most, was a feature which would have prevented the cheating. One of the biggest problems was higher level players stomping all over low level ones. It’s complicated to explain here, but the system would penalize higher level players who attacked lower level ones in combat or while on missions. The penalty was a sliding scale, but it worked out that anyone 4 levels or more below you, would return less reputation and XP. Anyone ten levels or more below you, would LOWER your reputation and Xp. So killing newbies would end up hurting you more than helping.

After an accusation from a commenter, another (sounds like it) former employee decided to tell a fact, I did not know. My thought; “Damn the sponsors and money speculators..” I quote;

APB did not fail. Up until they announced the shutdown they were making money. The administrators stated that the money was being produced was more than enough to make the game self sufficient but not enough to keep RTW running. Lets be very honest here, no MMO released in the past 5 years short of WoW could of pulled enough money to save RTW.

A QUICK UPDATE: Seems like they are planning on opening the game for private server settings. Read more.

So here goes. Comment below on your thoughts of this news and the game. If you know anything, that I didn’t include, please don’t hesitate to comment and make me aware, and I’ll update the news as fast as I can!

Posted by Twinkling82 in PC News. This post has No Comments.

Tags: all, apb, bulletin, chase, cops, drive, driving, mmo, mob, points, police, re-release, release, rise, robbers, shoot

Written by Twinkling82

I do not have any preferences in games, and I do not oppose to what others are playing. But it baffles me every damn time someone says; "I do not like playing video games" . People be crazy sometimes I guess...