APB has two main features. Firstly customisation; of your character, the way they look, they way they dress, the car they drive, their theme tune. Secondly fast-paced cops n’ robbers driving and shooting action in third-person, haring around after escaping criminals, shootouts over key objectives, a bit like a bunch of dynamic mini Counterstrike matches happening on the same map. Customisation was a big focus of pre-launch publicity like the 2008 E3 presentation, and has generally lived up to the hype; players have come up with some impressive efforts themselves including a Star Trek Squad and a Metropolitan Police clan. The action side of things wasn’t so well received, so it’s not a huge surprise that the developers have announced they’re looking at improving driving, combat and matchmaking.
One of APB’s problems is that the two halves don’t always complement each other. A good example of the inherent conflict is location-based damage; it’s pretty much taken for granted in modern shooters that a headshot will do more damage. Then again in most shooters the player models are the same size, but APB gives you sliders to adjust height and weight, so if the hit box was exactly mapped to your character there’d be a competitive advantage in making the character as small as possible and top clans would be exclusively populated by emaciated midgets. And in the game, ah! (No, not ‘ah’). Instead all APB characters have the same hit box, so a ‘head’ shot would be anywhere from the top of a chest to thin air, depending on the actual character size. There have been some interesting suggestions, such as having the hit box the same size as the character, but making shorter characters move more slowly so there would be drawbacks as well as advantages, but that would just give another avenue of min-maxing, and generally be opposed to the central idea of giving players maximum creative freedom in how they look.
If the customisation was lacklustre but the action gameplay worked really well APB might be able to find a more comfortable niche, though it would be in more direct competition with any number of online shooters without monthly or per-hour costs. As it is, after perfecting your hairstyle, outfit and car paint job, you’ve got one thing to do: go head-to-head against other players. On the Venn diagram of “people who like small group deathmatch shooters” and “people who like composing theme tunes and spending ages making sure their shirt looks right”, APB is great for those in the intersection between the sets, but my suspicion is that’s not a very large segment and many people attracted by the freedom in the character creation would prefer some slightly more relaxed gameplay options. There is the Social district, though that’s something of a misnomer as most people there are clustered around auction or design terminals using the full screen editing options, and apart from the terminals it’s a useful space if you want an in-game guild meeting or something, but there’s nothing to actually do there.
Out on patrol in the action district you hit the problems every PvP game has. Some players want a balanced fight, some just want to win; the latter try to skew things in their favour as much as they can, especially in a persistent game in which unlocks and upgrades provide an incentive to keep playing. With a large enough pool of players and a robust matchmaking system those looking for a balanced fight should be able to find one, but RTW have acknowledged that things aren’t really working out as they hoped in that area. I’m increasingly finding as I potter about the place that more and more opponents have triple character and weapon upgrades, and though an individual 5% boost here and there doesn’t make a vast amount of difference in the grand scheme of things compared to player skill, if they’re a much better player to start out with my chances are somewhere between slim and none, and the upgrades mean slim gets taken out by a rocket launcher before the mission starts. I’m not sure if it’s the cherry picking and other matchmaking problems described by the devs, a lot of really good players on the criminal side, or just my bad luck with district selection, but when you keep coming up against opponents with a 15% health boost who take less damage from each shot things shift from “generally putting up a decent fight and winning a few missions” to “standing less chance than the peace-loving pygmies of the Upper Volta charging machine guns at Mboto Gorge armed only with fruit”. Still, when the matchmaking system does produce fairer fights it’s still fun, so fingers crossed their overhaul does the trick.
It might be that an improvement in the action side of the game is enough to keep APB compelling, but given more time or perhaps focus in development I wonder if it could have taken a different path. I blogged about Grand Theft Auto IV and Saints Row 2 a while back, concluding that one of the main strengths of GTAIV is its atmosphere, setting and attention to detail, whereas SR2 offers comic-book excesses and a wide variety of non-stop action, and I think either could have translated to an MMO.
The Saints Row 2 option of crazy blockbuster action would be, conceptually, pretty straightforward: throw in everything and the kitchen sink. It wouldn’t be so worried about a meaningful game world as setting players loose in a metaphorical theme park; hell, let the players loose in an actual theme park, gunfights on a roller-coaster and candy floss everywhere… Take a leaf from some SR2 activities like races on flaming quad bikes causing explosions around the place, or making players temporarily invulnerable to be hit by as many cars as possible as an insurance scam (that would work particularly well if happening at the same time as other players chasing each other on assassination missions or just in races). Add hot dog costumes and gimp masks to the clothing options, ramp everything up to 11.
A more Grand Theft Auto IV path would be quite the opposite; try and give the world more coherence and reality. The cities of GTA aren’t exactly *the* real world (police generally don’t tend to forget you’re a wanted felon if you hide around a corner for 30 seconds), but they’re *a* real world with people going about their business, news and adverts on the radio, things happening in the city. It’s difficult to take that living city into an MMO; throw in 100 maniacs with assault weapons and it’s not really so coherent and believable, the more real people you add, the less real it is. APB has an interesting enough back story, but it reads like it was dashed off as a quick excuse for criminals to be fighting a bunch of mercenary-like cops, it’s hardly reflected in the game itself when you drop into a district of this supposedly crime-ravaged anarchic lawless city. Have the population barricaded themselves in their homes, or buggered off to the country where there’s significantly less chance of being mown down in a random firefight? No, everyone is wandering about doing a bit of shopping, casually strolling across the road demonstrating a lack of awareness of the Green Cross Code that would be dangerous in a normal city let alone one where high speed pursuit is the hobby of choice, and slowly driving expensive sports cars around that might as well have “STEAL (or commandeer) ME!” emblazoned on the roof. Oh, and there’s the social district, where criminals and enforcers “decided not to fight”. As criminals and enforcers so often do.
It might go slightly against the real-world cops n’ robbers grain, but I think the only way you could really pull off an immersive city setting would be to make it near-future, after some not-apocalyptic-but-quite-major event, something like a cross between Mad Max (the first one) and Brian Wood’s DMZ comic series. Same clothes, cars and guns, but a more dishevelled city; maybe even expand things in a slightly EVE-like way with high-security areas patrolled by powerful (but not omniscient) NPCs giving way to more anarchic zones.
This is a well-considered post, I’d say. I only played a little of the beta, but I would think one of two directions would most closely fit the current setup:
1) the high-sec, low-sec possibility. Done right, this could really have some potential. For criminals, running high-sec where they have lots of bots as well as players to contend with could make a challenge. And actually, a high-sec area could still be useful for newbie enforcers. It’s a lot easier to survive and produce some effect against a higher level opponent if you’re just one of a dozen attackers they have to worry about.
2) More believable civilian behavior. In a more realistic scenario, those who stayed in the city would be more likely to hurry along from place to place, quite possibly carry weapons for self-defense, and demonstrate a tendency to scatter from any indication of gunfire unless defending their property/family. One real challenge, on that score, would be tying civilian response into visible weaponry and reputation. People would react differently to a man walking down a street with a rocket launcher on his shoulder vs one with a concealed pistol inside his coat. Tying it into dress would be nearly impossible with the customization options, but at least letting people cheer a little for the noted enforcer with a low collateral damage history, and scurry out of the path of the noted criminal murderer (perhaps even triggering calls for help), would add an interesting sense of realism.
Actually, that last thought could tie into the high-sec, low-sec idea as well. A criminal with a big rep could find it difficult to move through the more secure areas without civilians beginning to tip off the enforcers to his location, while the bad part of town could follow more of a “see no evil” approach, and even perhaps pass on alerts about enforcers on the prowl.
The caveat, of course, is that the more alive they make the NPC world, the more the PCs become just a part of the story of the city rather than a focus of the story. But it still could work very well if they pulled it off. One of the reasons I used to adore just starting a multiplayer server in Freelancer and wandering about was the feel of moving about a breathing universe. I have been known (when in an area where I was at least neutral to all the locals) to just join formation on a passing patrol or trade convoy, and take my hands off the controls and let my spacecraft follow them around the universe. Or just parking in space to watch a battle between groups that had no beef with me.
Civilian reaction based on player reputation (and, where possible, weapon loadout) would be really interesting; it could perhaps even help out as a little bit of a handicapping system, if one or other side is really dominating a mission, perhaps they’d find citizens a little less willing to just hand over their cars when threatened/asked nicely, and more likely to drive off as fast as they can, or even fight back a bit. Not ideal for realism as it ought to be the reverse really, that the more fearsome the reputation of the cop/criminal, the more likely they’d hand over the vehicle without a struggle, but could be interesting…
As always, you’ve hit this one out of the park, and with your normal pezaz, too. Great thoughts organized and expressed extremely well.
Great ideas here. Having NPCs guarding certain mission objectives would be a fantastic first addition to the game. And as crazy as the customization options are, I think you are spot on with the Saints Row 2 idea.