All Points Bulletin beta

[Laughing Mechanicus]

Has anyone been trying the beta of this? I gave it a go yesterday and so far am pretty impressed; it manages to be an MMO with decent action gameplay, which is rare (How I long for Planetside 2).

Anyway: the character customisation works well., you can make an avatar who looks generally human-like and non-hideous with a little effort. The tools that allow you to customise your characters clothes/vehicles/tattoos are a big part of the game, and they are both easy to use and powerful - I spent a somewhat embarrasing length of time creating my female enforcer character's outfits.

The game itself works really well. Tooling around the open world city while other players are having running battles is hugely entertaining, and the way the mission system creates this is beautiful; having actual players as your adversaries turns normally dull open world taks (fetch this, escape them etc...) into really unpredictable fun and keeps the pace changing. Some missions will be small scale and see you sneaking around an abandoned area to raid a drug cache while being hunted by a couple of enemies, but when you complete a few missions your notoriety will increase leading eventually to a bounty being placed on you which causes every enemy player in the area to be summoned to get you, while nearby allies are called in as backup; this led to some incredible car chases, with multiple vehicles from both factions plowing through the AI traffic while the passengers hung out of car windows exchanging gunfire.

Also, when you play as the enforcers you get a police car which has a siren; this is a simple guilty pleasure. One thing that, somewhat oddly, strikes me about this game is it is more like a Matrix games than the actual Matrix MMO; ridiculously dressed people kicking in doors, vaulting fences, fighting urban battles and driving recklessly in a consequence free urban playground; it just needs kung-fu.

My only concern so far is the variety of the gameplay areas. They are fairly large, but there is only two of them and they may become repetitive after a while; though I believe more are being added. One concern I had from the previews was the lack of positional damage (headshots etc...) but to be honest, when playing the game you are unlikely to notice this - most gun battles are storming rolling affairs where the main challenge is hitting your opponent at all. A cover system would also have been nice, but you can make do with crouching/leaning.

Anyone else have any thoughts? If you are looking for beta keys Rock Paper Shotgun still seems to have some left here.

[Ritterin Sophia]

Got my key, installing now. Gonna go to sleep and check it out when my antediluvian computer actually downloads it all.

[Norade]

Thanks, I grabbed my key and I'm DL'ing now. This game seems like it could replace WoW as a jump on and fuck around for a bit game.

[Andrew_Fireborn]

One of my vent folks was trying to get people to download it.

Though, they didn't quite have the descriptive punch of LM.

70 MB initial download.
7.32 GB downloaded through the patcher.

[Stark]

Ha.

It's worthless in AU, apparently. Shame.

[Norade]

Yeah, the patcher is slow as fuck too.

Also Stark, can you proxy spoof it?

[Stark]

It'll work fine, apparently, but there are no local servers and low latency is key to the style of play. I -could- play it but I'd get raped up and down the street, and the game itself will never be sold here.

Which is a shame because a lot of the ideas sound pretty cool from a casual 'pew pew' perspective.

[Norade]

Ah, that's really too bad, it sounds like a game you might actually like too. I guess hope it does well enough and they decide Australia is worth moving into, or another company makes a better version.

[Stark]

I think taking an APB holiday to LA is more likely.

[Norade]

Even better, a vacation and some gaming.

[Brother-Captain Gaius]

I've been playing around with it. A lot of things I like, some things I don't.

Now, I'm an absolute whore for customization, so APB wins big on that front. Really flexible clothing system, very editable in Rock Band style (complete with tattoo/logo creator). I fiddled around with some of the newbie options and made a little logo for an arm tat and on my car doors. Even with the bare bones basic newbie clothing options, with a few cheap purchases I was able to put together a starting outfit I liked. The progression to the customization also seems solid, something few games do well. In this, I genuinely feel like I'm starting out with very average-joe clothes that my character would actually wear on a daily basis, and then I can gradually unlock increasingly "special" items. I like it. Compared with Saints Row 2, for example, where I can hold up a jewelry stole, nab some cash, and then hop down to a luxury clothing store and boom, pimped-out clothes right off the bat -- much less satisfying, IMO.

Also, great hair selection/customization, oddly enough. Most games don't put nearly so much attention in their hairs.

Gameplay itself seems pretty cool. Far from perfect, though it is a beta, so it remains to be seen how this will all work out. Maybe it's just a function of my newbie-rifle, but it's taking me 5-6 hits (with the painfully tedious artificial semi-auto) to kill someone (and it's rather difficult to hit) whereas they either regularly 2-shot me with a shotgun or something or just spray'n'pray me to death with bunny-hopping circle-strafe SMG spam. Haven't given it a lot of playtime yet though, so I can't say for sure that's the norm.

Driving's pretty solid, pretty standard SR/GTA fare. Unfortunately the siren doesn't even have a token effect on the AI traffic like it does in SR or GTA, and the pedestrian AI is just as stupid. Unlike the other games, killing civvies really hurts your score, so it's real pain when you're blazing through the city with sirens blasting trying to catch the bad guys and some moron pedestrian decides to dive in front of your vehicle instead of away from it.

Drop-in, casual play is pretty good. I had no idea what the fuck I was doing when I got dumped into an action district (the tutorial is pretty poor), but it was easy enough to pick up on after a competitive mission or two. From there I just kinda found myself dropped into mission after mission at a good pace until a hard crash finally forced a system reboot. Of course, teammates are idiots, as usual -- the last mission I was on, me and a squaddie where plodding along in a van trying to catch the criminal car, squaddie shooting out of the side door. Bad guys do a 180 and we go screeching past each other... so what does our other squaddie following in the car behind us do? Turn and go after the bad guys while the lumbering van gets turned back around? Nah, much better to slam right into us, and then sit there while we try to turn around... I guess it was a classic move for the criminal players, I guess -- do a crazy turn and cause the cop cars to all slam into each other, bewildered and confounded.

The music editor was kind of fun, though as an amateur composer I wasn't expecting much. Still, to those unfamiliar with making music it's probably more than adequate and pretty easy to use as long as you know how what keys are what on a piano (and even then, not entirely required -- some of the sound-sets are, to my dismay, little more than "soundboards", where the piano keys don't correspond to any particular note). Most of the sound-banks are low-quality MIDI stuff, but with the "guitar riff" soundboard I was at least able to make a pretty simple, catchy theme riff for my character.

My biggest gripe with the game right now are its system requirements and performance. The game throws a real bitch-fit if you have less than 2.5 GB of RAM and/or a 32-bit system. I got a lot of hitching in combat, which naturally made it rather hard at times. The game is decidedly poorly optimized -- there is no way a 1 GB 9800GT, 2.4 GHz C2Duo, 2 GB RAM, XPPro system should struggle with the game. Those specs may be aging now, but they'll still run just about any game out there on high/medium-high settings flawlessly. I'm due in for a RAM/OS upgrade before too much longer, but APB's requirements are a bit over the top for what it actually offers -- the personal character graphics are generally fair to decent, but most of the rest of the game is typical MMO graphical fare and not much to look at.

[Laughing Mechanicus]

The performance can be problematic - I have a 64bit Win7 system with a 3 Ghz Core2Duo, SLI 8800 GTXs and 4GB RAM and it still stutters occasionally; it often doesn't seem to be related to the graphical complexity on screen though, so hopefully optimisations can improve it.

I played around with a criminal character last night for a few hours, they definitely feel sufficiently criminal. They seem to have more "distractions" than the enforcers; for example while doing a mission to defend an area you might find your team mates mugging passers-by or ram raiding nearby shops, with the inevitable hilarious results when the enforcers turn up and catch your team off-guard.

We also had a good "escalating" mission; during a normal missions of 2v2 where we had to defend a van for X minutes the enforcer team called in backup, and then we did, they did etc... (all automatically by the mission system) with the eventual result of a rather frantic 8v8 gun battle trying to keep control of this van. Apparently this can go as high as 20v20 players.

[Artemas]

My 5 hours are mostly up. Can people confirm how the backup system works? It seems like it just is a matchmaker for when you are outnumbered, or something. A few times I never got backup, and the other times it seemed both sides always had an equal amount of people.

Driving is pretty good, shooting is sort of simplistic (with bullets disappearing at certain ranges). I know that it wouldn't happen, but going from the GTA IV physics to this is sort of painful.

Never got the chance to get a shotgun or assault rifle. Customization is great, especially for cars. I have to echo gaius about the sirens. They really do have zero effect. Also, i saw a dev video wherein the enforcers were able to stalk a crim until he committed a crime, and they rolled in and took him out. I haven't been able to do that. And while crims can rob people and places without a mission, what can enforcers do?

[Brother-Captain Gaius]

Backup seems to be glorified matchmaking, yeah. Though it can indeed escalate (3v2, matchmaking grabs a 2-man group for 3v4, other team leader hits their backup, it grabs another lopsided team, and so on).

Most of my matches stayed small, 4 people or under. I think once I got a 6v6 situation.

Apparently, enforcers can perform "arrests", although how this works and what it does is beyond me.

New complaint: Cars are way too fragile sometimes. It seems to be a balance issue with SMGs and other rapid-fire weapons. Normally, they're nominally balanced in that the SMGs are short range, low damage, and the slower firing weapons are long range, high damage... but this breaks down with cars. SMGs will shred and insta-kill a car before you can even bail out, whereas you have to plink away for a much more reasonable amount of time with a rifle.

[Brother-Captain Gaius]

Update, it looks like they just added a bonus 5 hours of time to characters which were created before today.

[Laughing Mechanicus]

Arresting criminals as enforcers is a little obscure, it works thusly; if you see a criminal committing a crime (easy to tell as they have a handcuffs icon by their name) you simply aim at them (even while driving) and hit Alt, this "witnesses" the crime which gives you a cash reward plus increases your faction standing; additionally if you have no mission and the criminal currently has no opposition you will be assigned as their opponent.

Also yeah, SMGs are pretty powerful against generic vehicles - though I believe customised player vehicles can have their armour improved to counter this, everyone is just using the shit ones now because we haven't had time to earn better ones.

[Mr Bean]

Arresting criminals as enforcers is a little obscure, it works thusly; if you see a criminal committing a crime (easy to tell as they have a handcuffs icon by their name) you simply aim at them (even while driving) and hit Alt, this "witnesses" the crime which gives you a cash reward plus increases your faction standing; additionally if you have no mission and the criminal currently has no opposition you will be assigned as their opponent.

Also yeah, SMGs are pretty powerful against generic vehicles - though I believe customized player vehicles can have their armour improved to counter this, everyone is just using the shit ones now because we haven't had time to earn better ones.

This is not arresting people. Arresting people is when you stun/incap people with the various non-lethal weapons (It's even an option to just ram them with a car, hard enough to toss them to the pavement but not quite hard enough to turn them into paste). Once the person is incaped (There are a few various animations) you have 5-10 seconds to get on them, get behind them and hit "F" (Whatever your use key is) your player and they will go through a little animation and then they get arrested.

Bonuses for arresting rather than shooting
1. Arrests earn more money than murdering them
2. Respawning after getting arrested takes twice as long as killing them plus "arrested but can still escape" time
3. It's far easier to incap someone then it is to murder them. Most non-lethal weaponry (Beanbag shotgun, Teargas paintball gun) puts people down FAST. So as a side method you can incap them then execute them with a pistol while they moan on the ground.

Negatived
1. Other criminals can free them and quickly if they get to you within the ten seconds after you cuffed them
2. Arresting in the middle of a firefight considering the 5 second long animation when your helpless is hard.
3. Most non-lethal weaponry is very short range. The secondary non-lethal weaponry is terrible (Either you must be point blank IE stun-gun or you have to hit them twice with a taser and you must get two hits and you only have two shots) So while fighting people on the streets and in back alleys is fine. It's @#$@#$ pointless if the other guy is in a car.

*I can no stress this enough to arrest them you MUST be standing behind them, and just tap F, moving or holding it down cycles the animation and forces you to start over.

[Laughing Mechanicus]

Ah yes my mistake, what I was describing is the witness system. I will use some of that extra time on my enforcer character to try out arrests this evening.