E3 2010: APB Hands-On
By:
Micah Seff
|
June 16, 2010, 1:04 am

I got the chance to sit down with APB for some extended hands-on time today after playing it only briefly at PAX and coming away pretty unimpressed. This time around, I got to sit and play the game for about an hour and a half, and get a significantly better feel for Realtime World's strange mixture of GTA and Second Life. I can honestly say that at least one half of the mixture was pure brilliance, I just wish that the other half matched up. Right now I'm sure you're wondering which side of the game I enjoyed. It's probably the one you're not suspecting. That's right, the social game components present in APB completely overshadow what I assume is the core of the experience, the shooting.

If you've been following APB since it was first announced at GDC many years ago, then you might be aware of the efforts Realtime Worlds has made to make a dynamic massively mulitplayer online shooter where gaming skill would overshadow time investment. This seemed to be the case at least to some extent, as I ran around the map with possibly the worst gun I could find, popping headshots and dispatching the other team with relative ease. Still, the initial feel of APBs being issued dynamically when players on the criminal side commit a crime, just didn't seem to be present. Sure, once a quest was initiated, players on my team would be notified and sometimes come to my aid, but it mostly just felt like a fairly pointless version of Grand Theft Auto IV's online mode.


There just wasn't enough depth to the core game for me to stay involved in the long run. I played a whole slew of missions, and these run the gamut from protect missions, to guard missions, to assassination missions, but everything always boiled down to shooting, and nothing really felt massive. The game world just felt so constrained, and lifeless. The only NPCs worth interacting with are there just to issue missions and sell you weapons, but again, the issue arose where even though there's a huge assortment of weapons, I just didn't find that I needed them. A simple pistol seemed to be good enough, at least in the several matches I played.


After about an hour of playing the Grand Theft Auto mode, I was ready to head out for my next appointment, but a Realtime Worlds rep managed to snag me first to show me some of the customization stuff. Man, was I glad he did, as like I said, the social aspect of this game rocks. The customization is not limited to simply swapping out palettes for your character. Rather, you can subtly tweak absolutely every aspect of your character's appearance, and the end result is a customization system that feels almost limitless. I could have literally spent hours working on the shape my character's lips if I had the time.


After sampling the simpler aspects of the customization features, the Realtime Worlds rep had me dive into some of the more complex features. Not only is there a ridiculously extensive assortment of clothes to work your way through, but you can create your own clothes if you feel like being industrious. On top of this, you can design your own tattoos, cars, and even music. Yeah, that's right. APB has a full MIDI sequencer built in with which you can craft your own music. You can create little theme songs that play after killing an enemy, which is cool enough, but you can also make full songs to listen to while you're driving around. The rep who was walking me through had made some particularly insane clown music, which he said was for the evil clown car that he intended to make to terrorize people online.


So that's great, there's lots of awesome customization available, but what do they add to the experience? Well, I was hard pressed to really tell during my time with the game, but the rep assured me that the whole goal of the game is to try to make as much of a name for yourself as possible, and having an awesomely tricked out car and some killer tats goes a long way to making that happen. On top of all this, the promise for in-game micro-economies that actually earn you game time seems like it could make everything even more thrilling.


I'm interested to try out more of the core game, but if the end product is anything like what I played today, I'm pretty sure I will spend most of my time tweaking my character's jawline rather than driving around shooting fools in the head (as fun as that might be).
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