5 Reasons Why APB Failed On An Epic Scale

posted by: Ron Keith Sun 5th Sep 2010

5 Reasons Why APB Failed On An Epic Scale

by Ron Keith

There are so many ways to define failure. Doesn't it sometimes seem that each new MMO tries to come up with its own innovative formula, some new and novel way to drive their game headlong into the abyss?

Star Wars Galaxies was a great game until Sony Online Entertainment got WoW envy, dumbed down the game, and lost their subscribers. Warhammer rushed their game to market, delivering a horrendously buggy and unbalanced MMO (The PvP was great, though.). Dungeons and Dragons Online (DDO) had fabulous PvE instances, but not much else to keep you busy. Champions Online was fun until you got to the end and didn't have much to do. And Star Trek Online was rolled out only half-finished, ignoring the fact that Star Trek fans wanted to play Klingons.

In an alternate universe, all of these MMOs might have been great. Each of them had hordes of excited fans and MMO gamers anxious to play their game, and yet each managed to fail in its own way.

But none of them can compare to the blinding flash of failure known as All Points Bulletin (APB). Like a dying star going supernova, APB flashed out there in MMO space for a few brief moments and now it has collapsed in on itself, creating a black, swirling hole of fail unlike anything the MMO world has ever seen before or is likely to see, again.

A hearty congratulations must be sent out to RealTime Worlds for redefining MMO failure. All those other MMOs might have “failed” but they also managed to putter along and sometimes even reinvent themselves (e.g. DDO is now a successful free-to-play game.). APB stands about as much of a chance of surviving as bag of Doritos at BlizzCon.

Have you been on APB, recently? If you bought the game, you can still log into the social district any time you want. The social district is free. Only fighting in the action districts costs money. Go ahead. Log in. Then do this: In the chat window type /pop.

This is quite possibly the most misguided command ever given to players in an MMO. That command tells you how many players are in the game on your server. In the last few weeks, even during peak gaming hours on weekends, APB's population is in the hundreds, usually around 500. And APB only has two servers!
Let's see 2 servers. Pop is 500. Times 2 equals... Wow, that sucks.

Keep in mind that population total also includes the people in the social district where you can log in for free. If you go to the action districts, which cost money, the numbers are around 20 and often less than that. That not only sucks, that sucks on a cosmic scale.

What happened here? There are some good things about this game. It's a decent shooter and it had the best character designer in MMOs. Its Grand Theft Auto (GTA) roots should have brought in a loyal following and yet APB is imploding. How did this MMO crash and burn so fast?

1. It gets boring fast.
The first few hours of APB are usually spent designing your character. There are so many options and character looks the designer will capture your imagination and attention for hours; it's quite simply the sweetest, sickest character designer in all MMOs. Then, your next few hours are spent shooting other players. It's the Crims versus the Enforcers. Gangs versus vigilante law. Lots and lots of intense PvP action.

It's a blast... For a few days.

Then the missions get repetitive. You've done them before and you keep doing them. You probably stop doing the chase missions, because they're long and tedious. The settings for the action doesn't change much, either. There are two action districts and they turn out to be a lot smaller than you thought when you started playing. You've been there, before, and you'll be there, again.

Do you want to do something else besides PvP, something to keep you interested? There's nothing else. You're done. In just a few days, you find you've pretty much done all there is to do and there ain't no more.

Yawn. Bored now.

2. It's barely an MMO.
Do you want to do something else besides PvP, something to add a little variety to the game? There's nothing else. There's no PvE. No questing. No large explorable world.

APB bills itself as an MMO, but it barely qualifies. Sure there's an explorable world, but it's small and confined. No open world in this game. Sorry.

APB has this great storyline about a city descending into out-of-control violence as street gangs take over. It would have been fun to have a PvE storyline to follow, one that tells players the backstory, how things got to this point, but it's not there.

There's no economy to speak of. There's no crafting, so no gathering of materials. There is designing, though, where you can endlessly tweak the look of the gear you're wearing. Unfortunately, if you're not much of a designer, you find yourself making some pretty ugly looking stuff, and let's be honest, most people aren't designers. As a result, the auction house is pretty dead. Sure, you can put the stuff you design on the auction house, but no one wants to buy your ugly stuff. (And you thought it looked so awesome, right?)

Guilds are mostly an afterthought. You barely need a guild. APB's only activities are the PvP fights and designing outfits for your character. There aren't any tough PvE dungeons to run to get better gear, so you don't need a guild to get you through those. There aren't any guild perks, so there's no motivation for people to start guilds. About the only thing guilds are nice for is finding people to team up for the missions. Other than that, guilds are pointless.

3. Aren't we suppose to be fighting for control of the city??
The key plot point of the game's story is that the criminal gangs are taking over the city, crime is out of control and the vigilante groups, the Enforcers, have to step in and fight for control of the city, again.

What a great story, right? What a cool setting for MMO conflict. You know you want to fight and see which side wins.

But guess what. None of those PvP fights mean squat. Win or lose, you just go out and fight the same matches, again and again. They don't count towards control of the city or districts or a single city block. You're just fighting for the sake of fighting.

Wasn't this game suppose to be about fighting for control of the city? It's not. The Crims or Enforcers can win every single mission and nothing changes. Talk about your glaring oversights. APB would be a thousand times more fun if the fights just meant something.

And imagine how much more fun it would be if there was realm-versus-realm action, where dozens of Crims could fight dozens of Enforcers. Sigh. But it's not possible. Go grind another mission. Again.



4. Mad Mouse Skillz or Aim-bot required
Are your hands a little shaky? Is your mouse DPI down around 800? Do you even know how to set your DPI? Do you like to take your time and aim?

APB is not the game for you.

Perhaps no other game puts such a heavy emphasis on your mouse skills. Sure, it's important to have a good gun, probably too important, but even more important is being able to snap your mouse around, aim fast, and keep it aimed at a moving opponent while you fire away. If you stay on target you win.

But that's not any different than any other shooter, you say? Not true. Aiming in APB is almost a precision skill: You have to be aiming right at the target not in the general vicinity. Other games tend to give you a little leeway if your aiming is a tad off, but APB pretty much requires you to be dead on. Plus, other games also have other ways, such as AoE abilities, of helping out people who might not be as fast or precise on the mouse. APB has very few AoE weapons and the ones that are available aren't going to help you compensate for below average or even average mouse skills.

In APB the player with the better mouse skills wins. The unfortunate consequence of this is that aimbots – hacks that auto-aim – have been available and freely discussed in the forums almost since the day the game was released. The guy who's dancing around and constantly shooting you with his submachine gun... Well, chances are good he's read the forums. (By the way, guns didn't have recoil until recently. So a submachine gun was just as easy to keep aimed at a target as a sniper rifle. What shooter game forgets to add recoil to its weapons? Answer: One that sucks.)

If you didn't have leet mouse skills and you didn't cheat, you probably stopped playing APB.

5. Oh, and then there's that whole bankruptcy thing.
Let's face it, none of these problems individually or as a whole would probably kill off APB. MMO gamers can be a pretty loyal bunch. Once they find something they like they tend to stick with it. No matter what the problems might be there will always be a hardcore group of people who can keep an MMO alive. Good grief, there are still people playing Everquest and Ultima Online.

APB appeals to the GTA crowd and there are more than a few loyal fans in that group. There should be enough of them to keep the game alive.

So why is this game likely to be gone faster than that proverbial bag of Doritos?

Because RealTime Worlds, the game's designer and original owner, is in bankruptcy! Less than 2 months after APB was released, it went into bankruptcy. And not the General Motors type of bankruptcy where they're protected from debt collectors while they get their house in order. In this case, the bankruptcy is so bad the company is now under direction of the court. Almost everyone at RealTime Worlds was laid off. They are keeping around a skeleton staff to keep APB afloat, though, while the bankruptcy court searches around for a buyer.

Hardcore fanbois and fangoils will faithfully defend a game to their last breath. But it's hard to stay loyal to a game if you don't know who's going to be running the game, tomorrow, or if the game is even going to be up and running, tomorrow. After all, if they don't find a buyer for APB, they might just decide to shut it down, and the longer they're looking for a buyer the more players they'll lose and the less attractive the APB property becomes and the less likely it is someone will rescue it.

The future looks pretty bleak for APB.

All indications are the management team* of RealTime Worlds foisted the half-finished APB on the gaming public when they knew their company was in financial ruin and they wouldn't be able to support it after release.

So congratulations has to go out to RealTime Worlds. Let's all give them a hearty round of applause: Congratulations to RealTime Worlds for redefining just how epic failure can be. The next time you look up epic fail in your urban gaming dictionary there's sure to be a picture of APB there.


*Don't blame the developers. You know they were probably kept in the dark and fed fertilizer. You can almost hear management saying, “Everything's fine. Just keep working nights and days and weekends, and finish APB. Management has to gild their golden parachutes. Work harder, you fools.”

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