Cops vs crooks MMO APB is officially closing, as reported by our occasional drinking buddy, EDGE and confirmed by APB’s official announcement. It’s garnished by a broad swathe of bittersweet quotes from the development team. Here’s the initial announcement:
“APB has been a fantastic journey, but unfortunately that journey has come to a premature end. Today we are sad to announce that despite everyone’s best efforts to keep the service running; APB is coming to a close. It’s been a pleasure working on APB and with all its players. Together we were building an absolutely amazing game, and for that, we thank you. You guys are awesome!
From all of the Realtime World staff we thank you for your continued support.
The servers are still up, so join the party and say goodbye!
- Ben ‘APBMonkey’ Bateman (Community Officer)”
APB: All Points Bulletin was released on June 29, 2010 and reports coming in say the game will be shut down between today and tomorrow. The game was up for around 8 weeks and received heavily critical negative reviews. It has been reported that the game cost $100mUSD after two years of delays. Former APB staff spoke to the press about the development process, including a lack of management focus and desire to ignore negative comments from beta-testers, and the substandard quality of gameplay including poor driving and shooting mechanics.
APB ran on a notably different subscription service than most other MMOs. Players were to buy hours of game time that would be spent in the game's "action zones" ("social zones" did not count towards your subscription time). For the anticipated heavy users, players could also buy unlimited month-long blocks. There has been no recall to pull physical copies of the game off shelves and it is expected that no players will receive refunds.
APB really pulled off a number of new features to MMOs (hourly subscription, music streaming/syncing, heavy customization), but the core mechanics of the game were just not well executed. Missions could only be taken one at a time and were given to the player nearly arbitrarily, there was absolutely no narrative, cars handled horribly, the cities were terribly empty, cars could be "owned" by players currently on missions, there was no out-of-mission PvP, customization tools required unlocking, roads and paths were not engineered with travel in mind, missions were abhorrently repetitive, handling factions was so obtuse, and mission execution was centered on waiting around at specific spots in the zone.
