The first time I played the original Realtime Worlds beta of All Points Bulletin I never really got past the first few tutorial missions due to a faulty graphics card. After spending some time with the free-to-play revival of this game, I’m starting to think I may have missed out on a fun experience.

Taking place in the fictional city of San Paro, APB pits criminals vs enforcers in a virtual game of cops & robbers. Featuring no classes, levels or stats, your skill with a gun will largely dictate your success, or failure in this game.

I say there are no classes but that’s not entirely true. Players can purchase equipment and character modifications that grant various buffs in the form of extra health, quicker health regen, ammo regeneration for team mates, and various other goodies I’ve not yet had the chance to play with. This enables players to specialise in various areas, perhaps equipping modifications beneficial to a sniper, or a close quarter shotgun wielder in effect creating your own custom class similar to the perks/specialisation features of modern FPS shooter titles.

Character customisation features some of the most varied options and choices you will likely ever see in an MMO, and will probably suck up a large amount of time when creating your first character. I was able to knock up a hockey masked enforcer tribute to Casey Jones fairly easily. Another childhood fantasy achieved if only in video game form.

Continued…

The All Points Bulletin team is cracking down on cheaters in a big way stating they have “basically KILLED almost every cheater” on their servers, but are holding out one last olive branch to give cheaters another chance at coming clean.

The team is allowing all banned cheaters one last chance to come back and play nice, stating,

make a new account – and then play nice in the community for the next few weeks while we roll out the next several changes, and then pray we MAY let you continue on the new account before we launch the next anti-cheat patch

APB did not say how they were able to catch the cheaters only that they can no longer hide, stating, “we are ratcheting up the cheat hunting in such a manner that you cannot return. Ever.”

Along with this stern warning to cheaters, some stats were released about the type of accounts that were recently banned. It seems 50% of the cheaters were also paying customers, some spending quite a bit of money in the game, while others had over 1500+ hours of gameplay.

So not only were these players cheating, they were cocky about it thinking thet’d never get caught. I can’t stand cheaters in any game, so I don’t feel the slightest bit of pity for them, I’m glad they lost their accounts, time and money, they deserve it for ruining the game for everyone else.

I’m also glad to hear APB is so confident about their new anti-cheating system and I wish them the best of luck against these cheating bastards

You have ONE LAST CHANCE to stay with this game before we go live. Don’t F-that last chance up.

A new All Points Bulletin: Reloaded developers blog post was released today talking about the recent patch that was released today and what improvements it brought to the game.  In short the new patch has solved the server side lag issue that has plague gamers since APB: Reloaded went into open beta. The update also mentioned that Nvidia has released new drivers for their graphics cards so they are optimized for APB.

The post when on to acknowledge the fact that the Thread Level matchmaking system was indeed not working as expected and matching players that were no where near the same skill levels.  The new update has reworked the matchmaking system so this issue should now also be resolved.

The post went on to say that ABP plans to release many more changes in the future which address the issues of players cheating and using game exploits.  They also mentioned that the Clan Warfare, Racing and Asylum features are still being worked and once they are ready, APB: Reloaded will officially launch.

Finally the new features (ClanWarfare, Racing and Asylum) all are progressing, though with a relatively small team progress is taking a little bit of time. Once these features are close to release, we will share that here and then we will start preparing for the final ‘formal’ (non-beta) release of the entire APB Reloaded game.

Originally planned for June 30th, version 1.5.2 or Open Beta 2 was delayed due to lag and memory issues, but has now gone live on server this morning. Open beta 2 contains major changes and adjustments to many of All Points Bulletin systems including missions, matchmaking, skill rating and district recommendations.

Due to these major changes, GamersFirst also stated that over the next week they expect many small patches will be required so testers should expect random downtime.

it’s very difficult to simulate some of the effects of these changes in QA or even in the smaller “Test World” – so for the next week we will be watching all the data coming in from these changes very closely, so everyone should expect there to be rather frequent patches over the next week.

In other words – YES – between now and next Friday I expected daily occurrences of “15 minute warnings” to take districts down for patching. If you see one of those, then please just log in after the patch and continue testing.

Also announced was that support for Nvidia SLI graphics cards is on its way in the form of a driver update, which is expected in about 2 weeks.

Rumors from early today began about the possibility that All Points Bulletin: Reload would not be a free download and instead would be sold at retail stores.  GamersFirst Senior Vice President of Marketing, Rahul Sandil, issued the following statement this afternoon:

Given that APB Reloaded has been the most talked about online game this summer and its unprecedented growth in open beta players, it has become very attractive to large institutions in the game distribution business. In just 6 weeks of open beta the game has attracted over 600,000 users and over a quarter million fans on the game’s fan page on Facebook. As a result of this success, we’ve been approached by retail partners to launch the title on retail shelves. Although we are evaluating our options, we have not picked a potential partner as of now. GamersFirst is also committed to the Free2Play model and any retail strategy will be guided by those principles.

So it appears that they are contemplating the idea, but have made no deals yet. One thing can be certain, players are going to be pissed if they have to shell out $50 for a  free to play MMORPG.

Last month All Points Bulletin relaunched back into open beta with GamersFirst, who had revived the once dead MMORPG that closed shortly after launching last year.  The latest update, version 1.5.2, which was set to go live today has now been pushed back to an unknown date.

Version 1.5.2 will introduce district recommendations and skill-rating based match-making as well as a lot of items that have not yet been talked about such as, “meta-grouping for better PuG-ing, action grouping relaxation (fancy way of saying you will be able to shoot right as you stop sprinting instead of being blocked from shooting), 70+ different mission fixes, new clothing, new items and a boat-load of various bug fixes and improvements based on much of the forum and tester feedback we have had.”

The reason for the push back seems to be that there are too many issues and not enough programmers, so Gamersfirst announced they are looking for C++ programers to add to the development team in Edinburgh, UK.

Along with the new features planned for patch 1.5.2, two major bug issues were also acknowledged, latency spike problems and 32-bit memory issue.  Many players have been reporting frequent and random latency spikes reaching 800ms, which seem to not be a direct networking, datacenter or server issue.

The 32-bit memory issue comes from the fact that currently APB requires 2GB of member to run, however “32-bit WinVista and Win7 by default only addresses 2GB of RAM”. Which isn’t true as far as I know. I run a 32-bit installation of Win7 and I have 3.25 GB usable by default, so I’m not sure where they’re getting that 2GB figure from.

It’s looking to be a bumpy road for APB early on, but that’s what beta is all about and we look forward to see how it progresses.

It seems like just last year we were announcing the open beta for APB, well APB is back in open beta, this time with GamersFirst and re-branded as All Points Bulletin: Reloaded.  The APB: Reloaded open beta was originally supposed to launch last week, but due to a major bug, the open beta had to be delayed.

In addition to the improvement from closed beta, open beta features a brand new skill rating system, redesigned “witnessing” game mechanics, new items and weapons in the Armas Marketplace, as well as an additional East Coast datacenter to host the game.

Bjorn Book-Larsson, the Chief Operating Officer for GamersFirst and CEO of Reloaded Productions had this to say about All Points Bulletin: Reloaded open beta.

“From the start of the development of APB Reloaded last fall our focus has been to remove obstacles preventing players from having fun. While our development and design teams have done an amazing job improving driving, shooting, skill ratings, witnessing and other key elements of the game, I am also thrilled with the changes slated to be released during the latter part of open beta,” “We expect APB Reloaded to set a new bar for what is possible to achieve in a free to play MMO game, and the open beta represents another big step in that direction.”

 

With great surprise but very gladly, we bring to you this announcement: APB (All Points Bulletin) seems to be returning since Reloaded Productions Inc. (a subsidiary of GamesFirst) has acquired the Intellectual Property Rights for this MMO that previously was owned by Dundee-based Realtime Worlds Ltd.

Soon the city of San Paro will see the actual curfew lifted and all the citizens will be able to resume their fights across the urban landscape. Within the first half of 2011 we’ll see the return of one of the most acclaimed F2P (free to play) games. Prepare your ammunition and train your aim, for soon the battle will start again.

I was filled with hope when I heard the recent news about the closure of the barely 3 month old All Points Bulletin. Now before I am accused of kicking a game while it’s down, let me explain. I did not buy the game. I barely followed the game as it developed. I cared very little when it was released.  Most importantly, this article isn’t about APB. No, this article is about the many sub-par games being released in rapid succession due to a seemly popular developer slogan of “If you build it, they will come.”

Continued…

Sadly, we’ve just known that APB is shutting down. This is so premature, as the game shipped last June 2010. Such a young game, should always have the opportunity to grow and develop properly. This way, all fans of APB face a hard hit in their morale. As a gamer and  MMO enthusiast player, i must say i’m sorry about this. MMO business needs many different games and APB was to cover a very specific gaming area. Apparently the servers are still up, where you can join some kind of a party and wave goodbye.

Read what a representative for the game has posted in a forum:

APB has been a fantastic journey, but unfortunately that journey has come to a premature end. Today we are sad to announce that despite everyone’s best efforts to keep the service running; APB is coming to a close. It’s been a pleasure working on APB and with all its players. Together we were building an absolutely amazing game, and for that, we thank you. You guys are awesome!
From all of the Realtime World staff we thank you for your continued support.
The servers are still up, so join the party and say goodbye!

Sorry to see you go, All Points Bulletin. Farewell.