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All Points Bulletin: What Went Wrong With APB

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Comments

  • SkuzSkuz Member UncommonPosts: 1,018

    For me APB's real achilles heel was ot's shallow & unrewarding gameplay, for the pricing model the gameplay just simply does not offer the amount of entertainment you can get in any other online game, the developers didn't put enough game in there to hold anyone's interest for long enough to warrant them spending money on it.

     

    Verdict: Not cheap enough short-lived thrills.

  • risenbonesrisenbones Member Posts: 194

    Didn't the game have a way to earn the special currency that you could use to buy subscription time in the social district?

     

    From alot of reports it wasn't that hard to do and within a couple of weeks people had enough to buy 2 months worth of subscription without paying a dime.  If you want the most obvious reason the company went bankrupt look no further.  They got box sales and then got very little money from subs or time purchases because people could earn it playing the free part.

    The lesser of two evils is still evil.

    There is nothing more dangerous than a true believer.

  • sadeyxsadeyx Member UncommonPosts: 1,555

    Originally posted by risenbones

    Didn't the game have a way to earn the special currency that you could use to buy subscription time in the social district?

    Yes.

    Anyone who has played for any length of time by now has several months of unlimted gameplay available to them.

     

    It IS pretty much Free to play,  if they would have advertised this more then maybe more people would have bought it.  As I've always maintained, it was marketed to the wrong audience,  should have been marketed to GTA fans and FPS fans.  Not MMO fans..  there is NO pve in the game at all.  Its pure pvp.

  • GevaudenGevauden Member Posts: 21

    I'm sure APB would like you to die as well.  :)

     

    It's just sad this game was really fun to play with others, if only they added more content, stuff to do in San Pero instead of the same thing over and over they would have surely won...but now evil has won again.

     

    Such a great game with a great idea that failed but I like that they tried...at least they tried and I hope the best for them they rock.

  • Sluagh_LordSluagh_Lord Member Posts: 58

    For all their howling, the simple truth is that rabid PvP fanatics will not financially support a PvP-heavy game. They'd rather inject themselves into PvE games and demand that they be supported. Unfortunately, developers keep trying to placate them. The current state of WoW with Street's irrational class balancing geared toward driving players into Arenas is a good example of this.

  • ElykDrawElykDraw Member, Newbie CommonPosts: 20

    I don't think of myself as knowing whats up in the gaming scene, but even I could tell this game was going to be garbage.  This was posted by me after reading a pro-APB story on this site:


     


    "This was a developer telling us why we should choose APB?


    1. 244 words on Start->Accessories->Paint that you pay a monthly sub for.  125 words on combat.


    2. "Well, for starters, we're an action game, not an RPG"


    3. "it shares as much with experiences like Counter-strike"


    Remove from site?"


     


    The point is - EVERYTHING about APB led with "you can paint your car with decals and change your hair color and get tatoos!"  This is what they invested their time into.  I blame folks on this, and other, game forums constantly complaining about customization options.  These guys listened to idiots - and went bankrupt.


     


    A second cause – a lot of folks complain about non-mmorpgs being posted on this site and covered.  Perhaps people should start listening to them.  If you didn’t market your game on MMORPG, you wouldn’t be complaining about people misunderstanding what your game was…
  • BinkoBinko Member Posts: 267

    Sure the game eat a lot of computers and have some boring missions if you do them alone. But it sure is fun when you find good people to play with.

    In a good team is great. I don't care much about the missions or that we do same mission over and over again.

    But RTW need to add more candy to us players. They have fixed a lot of stuff with the two latest patches but we also whant more guns, cloths, hair etc.

    It would be great if they add new items every month. Something that makes us happy. Or more awards and better ones. NO need for more upgrades they just destroy the gameplay.

    And you forgot one thing that makes this game a little bit bad MATCHMAKING system. Thats the biggest problem. As a new player you end up against lvl +290 players... that kill the game for many players.

    If they fix that, the game will stay alive.

     

    Thats what I think. =)

    Played:
    From Earth & Beyond, Anarchy Online, Matrix Online, Star Wars Galaxies, World of Warcraft, Age of Conan, Tabula Rasa (Beta), EvE Online, City of Villians, Atlantica Online, Guild Wars, Lineage 2, Pirates of the Burning Sea, PlanetSide, RF Online, Second Life, Fallen Earth.

  • MordeathMordeath Member Posts: 131

    I can tell why I didnt buy it. I demoed (sp?) it at E3 and while cool, it wasnt better than Global Agenda, and I never paid the sub on that (but I did buy the game). I think their scope may have been a little to grand and development process too long. Big names and cool graphcis dont make up for gameplay and "feel". Many of the articles points are spot on.

  • TwwIXTwwIX Member Posts: 203

    What went wrong? Are you kidding me? Umm, let's see...

    -It was Overrated and Overhyped before it even went into beta

    -Over confidence

    -Greed (Micro transactions as well as subscription fee)

    -Labeling it as an MMO

    -Not listening to your beta testers

    -Rushed release

    On top of game design flawes.

    Games like Guild Wars and Global Agenda, who actually have PVE content,qualify more as MMO's than this piece of crap. Yet, i don't see them charging you any subscription fees for playing their games.

    I knew that this game was destined to fail the second they announced their business model.

    I am glad it did. Let this be a lesson to other developers out there who think they can nickle and dime us for every little thing.

  • jvxmtgjvxmtg Member Posts: 371

    One of the Guild Wars founder said something about this pitfall waaay back in 2007, yet they didn't listen.

     

    Talk about a short lived MMO, only a couple of months old. :/


    Ready for GW2!!!
    image
  • NovusodNovusod Member UncommonPosts: 912

     

     

     

     

    I can tell you what really went wrong with APB. I had a friend who was really into in APB and playing it very hard core and he was constantly saying this is the best game ever trying to get me to come over and play it. He bragged about how earned enough money to buy 6 months of free play time in just a couple weeks. I am like what how is that possible? Now it makes total sence that the company is going bankrupt. Believe it or not you actually do need pay walls at some point to keep a game profitable. RTW is not running a charity here so the pay system is going to need to be reworked entirely at some point.

  • tabarjacktabarjack Member UncommonPosts: 249

    EA : Explexio Avaricia (Satsify greed)

    The way most people have to work for the owners of the companies they work for.  Thats why you should not buy from EA, they release stuff too early so they can make as much money as possible in as little time as possible.

  • CrashrollCrashroll Member UncommonPosts: 60

    Originally posted by Novusod

     

     

     

     

    I can tell you what really went wrong with APB. I had a friend who was really into in APB and playing it very hard core and he was constantly saying this is the best game ever trying to get me to come over and play it. He bragged about how earned enough money to buy 6 months of free play time in just a couple weeks. I am like what how is that possible? Now it makes total sence that the company is going bankrupt. Believe it or not you actually do need pay walls at some point to keep a game profitable. RTW is not running a charity here so the pay system is going to need to be reworked entirely at some point.

    Umm...those RTW points, like in EVE come from the players. And players pay for them, RTW doesn't loose any money, when we get our "free" gametime. Only some other player does, who is willing to pay real money for some APB $. I don't get it, why people hate this system. I think it's great! If you're an active player or a creative one, and like to add to the content of the game, the game rewards you for it. Free gametime for those who want it...easy money for those who want that. Don't see the point of bashing this system.

    Not tonight dear...I have a haddock!

  • JetrpgJetrpg Member UncommonPosts: 2,347

    Originally posted by Techleo

     From my point of view, the game failed to be enough of a MMORPG to play any period of time. Without the mechanics of storylines and quests it just feel flat. Great combat though and it was fun and funny at times. Just a shame really.

    No it was becuase it wasn't F2P. Whhho another F2P plug.

    Im jokign of course, but the f2p shows up agian. In this casee they should have F2P as the game itself was not an mmorpg (or at least not complex enough and too little content to be P2P).

    "Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one ..." - Thomas Paine

  • robert4818robert4818 Member UncommonPosts: 661

    To add my 2c into the discussion, APB's failure to me centers around this:

    No meta-game depth, or to put it more succinctly, no goals.

     

    The game was all about the immediate action.  That doesn't mean bad game, many F2P games like halo are about that exact same thing.  The problem though is that when people think MMO, they think of something that has "more" to it.  This more generally has to do with goals of some sort.  The leveling system and money system didn't fit that need.  The game really needed something to enhance the feeling of "teams" in the long run.

    Area control, or something along those lines would have helped tremendously.  Something that would have made players feel like there was something more than the immediate combat of importance.  Without that, the combat would grow stale.

    So long, and thanks for all the fish!

  • sadeyxsadeyx Member UncommonPosts: 1,555

    REAL REASON

     

    The people who love this game and play it constantly arnt paying a penny for it.

     

    You sell your ingame cash for game time, most of us have like, 6 months - 2 years unlimited game time.

     

    Reasons above are bullshit.

  • norlinorli Member UncommonPosts: 13

    Been There, done That, ripped Off

  • Spiritof55Spiritof55 Member Posts: 405

    5.) Taxing System Requirements

    Whenever you’re releasing a game that needs to sell a lot of copies, not to mention run extremely smooth on one’s system for gameplay reasons, it’s probably in your best interest to keep your requirements down. But RTW decided to shirk that creed, and aim for what I like to expertly call the “super-shiny” looks. This creates the opposite effect, and raised the minimum system requirements for their game. Sure a player can run APB on modest settings and keep the action fluid, but then it winds up looking like dog poo, and all the time and effort you spent on creating your avatar’s appearance is then flushed down the drain. APB looks good (minus some fairly stiff animations), but at the cost of performance. That’s a no-no when it comes to capturing a large user-base for your MMO, as past entries into the genre have proven. But therein lays another potential misstep… APB’s not easily categorized.

     

    THIS!  THIS!  THIS!  THIS! THIS!

    Eye candy whores read the above paragraph. 

  • corpusccorpusc Member UncommonPosts: 1,341

    Originally posted by sprigganny

    Originally posted by sprigganny



    This list is not correct at all. I have been playing this game since beta and here are the top reasons why it is not doing well.

    1. No anti cheat program- How in the hell did he miss this. This is the #1 issue

    2. No new content to keep the players playing.

    3. Terrible reviews kept players away. This really hurt the sales of this game. It was much better than it reviewed.

    4.  Classified as a MMORPG. This lead the players down the wrong path. This is not a MMO at all.

    5. Poor beta process. Thye did nerfs to the weapons too soon after launch. This should have not happened.

     

    Again I have been playing this game everyday and these is the REAL reasons why this game isnt doing well. The editor has no clue. His list might be reasons 6-10, not 1-5.


     

     

    spriggany has it pretty much right here, altho i don't think #2 is really much of a factor.  most FPS gamers (unfortunately) are playing the same maps over and over again many years later. 

    #1 there is HUGE.  all alone, could bring down a game that was otherwise a perfect 10,..... perfect in every other way.

    this article, and ALL the articles/reviews i've read about APB were fairly clueless shams.

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    Corpus Callosum    

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  • VhalnVhaln Member Posts: 3,159

    Originally posted by Spiritof55

    5.) Taxing System Requirements

    Whenever you’re releasing a game that needs to sell a lot of copies, not to mention run extremely smooth on one’s system for gameplay reasons, it’s probably in your best interest to keep your requirements down. But RTW decided to shirk that creed, and aim for what I like to expertly call the “super-shiny” looks. This creates the opposite effect, and raised the minimum system requirements for their game. Sure a player can run APB on modest settings and keep the action fluid, but then it winds up looking like dog poo, and all the time and effort you spent on creating your avatar’s appearance is then flushed down the drain. APB looks good (minus some fairly stiff animations), but at the cost of performance. That’s a no-no when it comes to capturing a large user-base for your MMO, as past entries into the genre have proven. But therein lays another potential misstep… APB’s not easily categorized.

     

    THIS!  THIS!  THIS!  THIS! THIS!

    Eye candy whores read the above paragraph. 

     

    APB took high system reqs a step farther than any game I've ever played, including the worst culprits, like AoC when it was first released, and games like that.  They all but excluded anyone with a 32-bit system, by forcing horrible graphics on them, and the market just isn't ready for that.  32bit systems are still way too common.  

     

    In every other game, when my system wasn't up to par, I could choose what to sacrifice, be it frame rate, shadows, lighting, anti-aliasing, texture resolution, polygon LOD, etc, etc, but the RAM reqs in APB are so high, everything about the graphics gets forced to being very low, rather than just giving poor framerate and the like.  I have two comps I wanted to play it on (before realizing I hated it) and on one of them, which is only two years old, it looked so bad that I considered it to be unplayable.

     

    I don't think that's why the game failed, but it sure didn't help.  It cuts subs down by half or so, and for a crappy little niche game, that's twice as many nails in the coffin.

    When I want a single-player story, I'll play a single-player game. When I play an MMO, I want a massively multiplayer world.

  • corpusccorpusc Member UncommonPosts: 1,341

    Originally posted by risenbones

    Didn't the game have a way to earn the special currency that you could use to buy subscription time in the social district?

     

    From alot of reports it wasn't that hard to do and within a couple of weeks people had enough to buy 2 months worth of subscription without paying a dime.  If you want the most obvious reason the company went bankrupt look no further.  They got box sales and then got very little money from subs or time purchases because people could earn it playing the free part.

     

    this COULD also be a huge factor, at least in their longterm profits, if they miscalculated the percentage of players who were easily able to play for free just by using the game as intended.   if, considering the huge costs of the game, it was reliant on %xx people to being paying recurring fees, and only half actually were, for instance.

    with the alleged 80 million or whatever that it cost, they had virtually no wiggle room in how many paying subscribers they needed to make a profit.

    their cost of development was another huge factor.  plenty cheaper (to make) MMOs have been successful with far fewer buyers/subbers.

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    Corpus Callosum    

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  • corpusccorpusc Member UncommonPosts: 1,341

     

    skimmed the article again.  he wasn't being TOTALLY clueless.

    the part about system requirements was a huge factor (i was needing a motherboard/CPU/RAM upgrade in order to play it smoothly myself)

    and the part about confusion about what kind of game it is, altho he says it WAS marketed to the shooter crowd, but i didn't see that.  i just see the majority bitching about it are people that had no hope to every like that kind of game in the first place.  making it obvious they are coming from the RPG world, and are looking for "depth" and "goals" (wrong choice of words on their part, but i know what they REALLY mean) from a freakin' shooter.

    he mentioned both those things at the bottom of the list, and put fairly irrelevant things (IMO) at the top.

     

    making it so that while you see/hear alot of players you only can kill/die-to people in your group/mission is another factor that leads most detractors to claiming its not an MMO because of this.   thats another factor in the disappointment of many.

    its MMO'ness is constantly called into question because of that.

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    Corpus Callosum    

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  • VhalnVhaln Member Posts: 3,159

    Originally posted by corpusc

     

    skimmed the article again.  he wasn't being TOTALLY clueless.

    the part about system requirements was a huge factor (i was needing a motherboard/CPU/RAM upgrade in order to play it smoothly myself)

    and the part about confusion about what kind of game it is, altho he says it WAS marketed to the shooter crowd, but i didn't see that.  i just see the majority bitching about it are people that had no hope to every like that kind of game in the first place.  making it obvious they are coming from the RPG world, and are looking for "depth" and "goals" (wrong choice of words on their part, but i know what they REALLY mean) from a freakin' shooter.

    he mentioned both those things at the bottom of the list, and put fairly irrelevant things (IMO) at the top.

     

    making it so that while you see/hear alot of players you only can kill/die-to people in your group/mission is another factor that leads most detractors to claiming its not an MMO because of this.   thats another factor in the disappointment of many.

    its MMO'ness is constantly called into question because of that.

     

    Why assume that people mean WoW-like goals and depth?  Maybe its not the 'haters' that misunderstand the game, but the fans that don't understand the haters.  Every good shooter has goals and depth too, it's just a different sort than RPGs.  

     

    (edit) On a related note, why do people separate rpg and shooter players?  Am I in a minority for being a big fan of both genres?

    When I want a single-player story, I'll play a single-player game. When I play an MMO, I want a massively multiplayer world.

  • AmblinAmblin Member Posts: 52

    What went wrong with APB?

    Simple. Never develope a game twice. Never sink 2 x dev cycles into 1 game. That's what killed it, combined with poor implementation of core features.

    I feel sorry for the folks that worked there. Here's hoping they find some work soon.

  • corpusccorpusc Member UncommonPosts: 1,341

    Originally posted by Vhaln

    Originally posted by corpusc

     

    skimmed the article again.  he wasn't being TOTALLY clueless.

    the part about system requirements was a huge factor (i was needing a motherboard/CPU/RAM upgrade in order to play it smoothly myself)

    and the part about confusion about what kind of game it is, altho he says it WAS marketed to the shooter crowd, but i didn't see that.  i just see the majority bitching about it are people that had no hope to every like that kind of game in the first place.  making it obvious they are coming from the RPG world, and are looking for "depth" and "goals" (wrong choice of words on their part, but i know what they REALLY mean) from a freakin' shooter.

    he mentioned both those things at the bottom of the list, and put fairly irrelevant things (IMO) at the top.

     

    making it so that while you see/hear alot of players you only can kill/die-to people in your group/mission is another factor that leads most detractors to claiming its not an MMO because of this.   thats another factor in the disappointment of many.

    its MMO'ness is constantly called into question because of that.

     

    Why assume that people mean WoW-like goals and depth?  Maybe its not the 'haters' that misunderstand the game, but the fans that don't understand the haters.  Every good shooter has goals and depth too, it's just a different sort than RPGs.  

     

    (edit) On a related note, why do people separate rpg and shooter players?  Am I in a minority for being a big fan of both genres?

     why assume that i'm assuming WoW-like goals and depth?

    i love ice cream and i love onions. 

    it doesn't mean if somebody gives me onion ice cream with chopped onions in it that i'm gonna love that too.

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