All points bulletin, a third person MMO for the pc has just dethroned SEED
as the shortest lived MMO to date.
Lasting only 79 days, this game (in my opinion) had great potential.
It sported one of the most extensive character creators to date as well as
the ability to customize your vehicle and the articles of clothing.
Before this, the game SEED lasted nearly twice as long, putting in a day count of
149.
So what went wrong with APB?
Well coming from someone who was in the beta tests, I can tell you there were a number of factors.
The missions were mostly similar. There was little consideration for those who like to play alone.
The clothes system for unlocking items was too confusing. The overall UI was not too friendly.
Moreover, the advertised product and expectations were completely different from the actual game.
As a person who enjoyed the experiment, I can only hope that the character creator system surfaces
somewhere in a future game.
Source of new record:
http://www.mmorpg.com/showFeature.cfm/feature/4549/page/2
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counter-productive marketing
broke-ass beta (from what i've heard)
To be fair, so did Realtime Worlds.
APB was/is fun it just didn't work right 99% of the time and they never made the effort to fix it.
I never asked for this!
Constant, 20-30 second long hitches, massive pop in and it wasn't even that great looking.
Steam | Live
I feel terrible for the poor guys who spent their time making this.Not so much for the players that spent their money. The information, players experiences and problems were out there for anyone to read but as people are apt to do, they only see what they want to.
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2010/06/17/apb-review-embargo-set-week-after-release/
They knew their game was horrid and were trying to trick people into buying it with their flashy trailers and screenshots before any informed them of the aforementioned garbage.
Also this:
WHOOPSIE
That's one major design fault that they failed to see in beta due to developer blindness.
So much fail in this article. What a downer.
$100 million budget, Jesus jumped-up Christ. Where'd that money go?!
Bet he's regretting those tattoo's now.
That one article went into it. They hired several hundred people and managers for them and managers for the managers and so on. I'm not surprised they burned through a hundred million with a corporate atmosphere like that.
I never asked for this!
Wowzers.
$100 million of dusty shelf material, forgotten artwork and deleted, forgotten about customization.
Poof.
Oh man that has to suck. So much unused art that was meant to be rolled out in future content updates, never gonna see the light of day, and you can't use it elsewhere because it is under this IP's ownership and you got laid the fuck off.
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
Ooops.
Hell, I never thought the game looked very good or interesting and once it was released and people started talking about it all I could think was, "Uh-oh, those poor bastards spent money on this game and it's nearly DOA."
Rigorous Scholarship
Was it Daikatana or DNF that spent the budget on super nice office supplies?
Turns out like this.
It's a damn shame too, I loved the character creator, ended up making some really cool looking characters in the beta and while it clearly wasn't a good game, it was a lot of fun cruising around in my customized car with three other people arresting fools during the play sessions they had.
Of course, once it was announced it was not receiving a retail release in Australia i lost interest. Good thing too apparently.
Anyways here's to APB, which if anything else will hopefully stand as a cautionary tale to other developers that bells and whistles do not a popular game make, fun and balanced gameplay does.
Daikatana. They got a big ass office with some sort movie theater in it.
One of the first things that struck me when I got into beta was how little content there was - just 2.5 zones and missions that started repeating within a few hours. But I could deal with that when I thought the game was free. I could've dealt with a lot for a game that was f2p.
But when they announced that it would cost almost as much as a standard MMO - for a game with as much total content as, like, the first five hours in any of the other MMOs I've played like CoX, LotRO or WoW, that was it for me. It was barely worth the box price as it was.
Yep, loved how we were given the job of moderating the forums etc then told off when we actually did it, that was the point when I knew they'd lost the plot...I stopped posting around that time when that happened and when another was given a bollocking for trying to cut down on the amount of flaming and crap that was going on in the forum community, we were the only ones active on the forums and trying to help but we were given zero support at best.
I'm not gonna really go onto the subject much as obviously many others already have and the general feelings of mismanagement are known. What I will say is that nothing in any of the reviews should have came as a surprise to all but the most blinded of them, QA fed back on it constantly, lots of the people internally did so as well and lets not forget the beta players providing tons of feedback as well...instead of actioning changes they simply ploughed on ahead regardless. If I blame anyone for this mess its the Designers and management that had locked in their overall structure years ago and refused to change the game until it was far too late.
The Ion Storm studio was legendary. I think I still have an old issue of Next Generation that describes it. It was on the top floor of the JPMorgan Chase Tower. It had a movie theatre. I think a sauna. An exercise room or two. Showers. A fucking dojo, for like, actually practicing judo and karate.
RTW may have choked to death on their own bureaucracy, but Ion Storm just burned piles of money for heat.
Picture Me Rollin'