Gamersfirst have taken it over and talk about mistakes made by the former developer. For one balance was all wrong, it was ”literally a slaughter-fest.”
APB is becoming a free-to-play MMOFPS under Gamersfirst who have now revealed just how troubled and fractured the Realtime Worlds APB teams were and question some of the rather bonkers decisions they made for gameplay.
”When they released it they didn’t have enough time to polish all the components and make it coherent,” said Bjorn Book-Larsson. ”Shooting and driving weren’t really feeling that great and they had made what we think were some silly business decisions.”
”The first gun you got only let you shoot 25 metres, while the people who had been in the game for a long time could shoot 100 metres. They could kill you at four times the range.” This was a huge design oversight claimed the studio boss.
”The first wave of players that went into the game would slaughter everyone else. No one else had a chance. It was no longer a shooter based on specialised skills. It was literally a slaughter-fest. If you look at the reviewers who didn’t like it, generally they were showing up and getting killed.” He admits the core code of the game was near-perfect.
”We have a little story where Scott Stevenson, who’s now our developer and producer, was saying how they had this problem where when you ran up to a car and clicked to get in, if nobody was in the car you’d often end up in the back seat,” adds Book-Larsson.
”That makes no sense. Like, how many times do you really want to get in the backseat? But for purity of design they had all these debates and essentially that issue remained in the game for 476 days.”
”Now that we’ve taken it over, the new team had a meeting and said ‘we need to fix it’ – and it was done in 30 minutes. That’s the essence of the difference. We were just like, ‘F***, that’s stupid, let’s fix it.’” Communication was sporadic within Realtime Worlds.
”There were teams who were supposedly sitting idle while they knew about the game’s problems but didn’t have the green light to fix the bugs. Nobody from the design team had told the other team that they could do it,” he continued.
”The US guys didn’t want to let the UK guys get involved with stuff,” he revealed.
”They had these weird breakdowns between their teams. It was operated out of the US but then it was built in the UK. They didn’t really focus on bridging those two cultures. One of the things we’ve done from the outset is create a single team mentality.”
Dave Jones created APB but Book-Larsson notes he can’t be blamed for everything that went wrong with the extremely costly project. ”I don’t think he was that interested in corporate management or politics or general corporate stuff. He’s just a game guy. He’s a really, really good guy by the way, but I think people around him created this very political, hard-to-work-with organisation,” he said.
”In some ways the organisation around him just ran away. They got a bunch of money and the whole thing exploded.” Last September Gamersfirst got a hold of APB and begun work on it and have spent months ironing out major issues. It’s in closed beta.
