Comments on: Caveat Emptor and the (un)timely demise of APB

By: spinks

spinks — Mon, 20 Sep 2010 08:30:44 +0000

That is an interesting thought about the beta. We’re used to single player games not having open beta (probably for exactly this reason) but a PvP game needs some balance testing. And yet, like you say, maybe people feel that they’ve played enough when the beta ends.

By: ep

ep — Mon, 20 Sep 2010 07:44:39 +0000

I played apb for 1 month of beta and paid for my 2nd month of retail before i went back to WAR. It was quite good and it was strange to see so many complain about it as i generally feel the same as most reviewers and blogs. For APB though i felt like some weird dirty outcast

I think it was fun because we had guild groups running every night and we were all on voice comms. Everyone was designing new cars and gear to show off. It was a very social experience and more so than heroic runs in wow etc. 4 mates in your truck gunning down crims is a lot more relaxing than “its a wipe!” (its been a while since wow )

A lot of the big complaints were due to game mechanics but they were also parts of the game that needed practise so it was always easy to put that down to people prefering to quit than to learn the game.

In the end we all still left for warhammer(which we played for 6 months on release) but i guess we had no real attachment to our characters in APB and due to the really long beta phases we had pretty much seen and done everything in game.

I personally feel the Beta was the big problem. It was a great beta but people got way to much time to play the game. I know many people who didnt bother buying retail because they had done everything and not because they didnt like the game.

big long sorry

By: expostninja

expostninja — Sun, 19 Sep 2010 03:34:14 +0000

I’ve been thinking a lot on APB’s failure recently, and I realized that the reason it made me nervous the whole time is the same reason that DCUO makes me nervous right now – the team never wanted to talk about what you can do in the game.

A good game can have every element of setting stripped out and still remain pretty darn fun. Take out every part of WoW’s setting and replace it with a science fiction environment, with every game mechanic identical? Remove character creation altogether? The actual game itself is fun to play.

APB’s pre-release talk was always about the customization engine. It was never about what the actual game was going to play like. That says something.

By: Simon Jones who is blogless

Simon Jones who is blogless — Sun, 19 Sep 2010 01:22:48 +0000

APB really had one core issue.

It was a really awful game.

Every other angle you can look at it’s failure from is irrelevant to this one.

By: Tesh

Tesh — Sat, 18 Sep 2010 18:55:09 +0000

I’m still waiting for the MMO that’s both a product and a service. As in, if the servers ever do get shut down, you can still play a standalone version or even peer-to-peer. That might just justify the box price, especially in a case like this.