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How APB's Persistent World Will Work
Edge Magazine recently sat down with David Jones, creative director for Realtime Worlds, the studio behind upcoming action MMO APB. He spends some time talking about their thinking behind the game, and he also gets into how their persistent online worlds will work. Quoting:
"... you absolutely want 'moments' in the game. Even if it's just for thirty minutes, you want people to become celebrities — OJ Simpson on TV with the police chasing after him: you want those kind of moments in the game. We can't create them, so it's about what mission can ultimately lead to those kinds of experiences. We have what we call heat mechanics in the game, so if a criminal has just been on a complete rampage, recklessly blowing stuff up and killing people, heat builds up until eventually we unlock him to every single enforcer on the server. It's not part of their missions, it's just that this guy has become number one wanted and everyone has the authority to take him down. That's a fun mechanic from both sides; everybody who's a criminal is going to want to reach that and if you're on a mission for the enforcers you'll see that guy and wonder whether you should break away to get him. You get a lot of compound stuff which we never planned for, because it's a hundred real players interacting in ways we don't expect."
I thought the whole concept of persistent world meant you could build up your characters (level, skills, possessions etc). If you keep swapping between good guys, bad guys and celebs, how is it persistent?
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It sounds interesting, but I have to wonder about the long-term viability of a game based on legitimizing trolls. As we've seen on many discussion boards, trolls can cause a huge disruption with their presence. They say outlandish things, or do things which irk the existing audience. This leads to retaliation and "troll hunting" which doesn't serve the purpose of discussion or anything else. In the end, the troll is as successful in proportion to the disruption he causes.
So what happens when the prime motivator is to be a troll? There were several pure troll sites a few years back. Adequacy.org, Kuro5hin, and GNAA were all sites dedicated specifically to trolling. It ended up being mostly a circlejerk and these sites are no longer around or are so diminished in audience as to be moot.
I have to wonder what the result will be in APB when everyone is seeking their 15 minutes of fame. It sounds like something that may be fun for a short while, but when everyone is out to whore attention, the players lose their personal connections to each other.
I'm under the impression that such things are created and made famous (or infamous) by the community itself. Much like the community discussions regarding WoW's Leeroy Jenkins and EVE's various treachery, corporate drama and ISK embezzlements that make it into mainstream gaming blog and news sites.
It's that when game designers come up with ideas like "And then we'll unlock him to everyone, and they'll all hunt him blah blah blah" (where designers try to intentionally create spontaneity) is that it USUALLY fails to take into account cycles of adaptation.
If someone has managed to become the number one bad-ass on the server, is it really worth going after them when they almost certainly did it specifically to attract people into a trap/gank?
i can't believe you admitted that, second cousin.
A good game is one that can make you stand up and scream victoriously when you pull off something amazing.
Taking out the fat man in Hunted a split second before he made it in the garage was such a moment for me many, many times.
...that the quote "that's a hundred players" sounds almost weak to me.
There are nights when you gather over a hundred people into a single gang, and it's still not enough to fight the bigger gang of opponents. 4-500 people per side in a fight is normal these days.
Still, APB sounds like fun.
Procedurally-generated, dynamic content in an upcoming MMO? Next you're going to tell me it's going to revolutionize gaming!
I grew up playing roleplaying games, and also playing computer games. I always enjoyed the simulator games and liked the idea of being able to explore different worlds. My friends and I always wanted games that were more interactive. We wanted 'real life' like environments to interact with. For me, Syndicate was a huge leap in the right direction. That was one of the first games I remember where you could destroy the environment. The zones themselves were limited size, but the game itself didn't limit your actions inside the zone.
APB looks like it could be the game changer in the MMO world. I've been looking forward to it ever since I first heard about it a couple of years ago. It promises to deliver a fully persistent world. When playing the GTA games, I always dread the end of the game because that means the game is over. Once the story ends, you're left with this great interactive game world but nothing to do. APB seems to be aiming to fix that. I hope that they succeed. There is so much potential. The article mentions that the players are the center of the game, and their interactions define the game. I'd hope that there are also NPC aspects of it. For example, a criminal might want a politican killed. In that case, when the criminal players take that mission, cop players could be notified that a contract has been placed on the politican. They could then decide whether or not to take up the task of protecting the politican. Like wise the opposite could happen, where an NPC criminal could have an arrest warrant put out for him and then criminals could decide whether or not to help him fend off the cop players that would be showing up.
People have mentioned griefing and trolls, but the article specifically mentions that on most servers people won't be able to engage each other in combat until some conditions are met. Criminals have to commit crimes before the cops can arrest them. The article wasn't too clear on criminal versus criminal action. From reading the responses to the questions posed by the interviewer, it seems like the devs are aware of the troll/griefer factor and have different game mechanics for different servers. There will be free for all, death match type servers for players who want that. And then there will also be servers focused toward the cops/criminal game play mechanics.
I wonder how the developers will balance the population between realms. The game seems to be focused around creating groups. Given the persistence of the world, it seems like people will want to log onto servers where their friends are and take part in established groups. With a limit of 100 people per server, it seems like if the game gets popular then players will be dealing with server full messages a lot. I wonder how the developers will encourage people to go play on another server, rather than repeatedly trying to get into the ones that all of their friends have been connected to for the last hour or two.
I'd like to see this game succeed. I'm not sure that there are enough players who are interested in the GTA / FPS style of game play. The demographic would seem to be the 12-25 male audience for the most part. That is a very fickle demographic and often inclined to move from one great new thing to the next. It will be interesting to see if the character customization and persistence aspects of the game can keep the players engaged. I hope that they have some mechanics like GTA San Andreas used for weapons. The more you used a weapon, the better your aim got. Little things like that could go a long way toward encouraging people to spend more time with the game. It would also be good to see some sort of low level trade skills, like weaponsmiths making more accurate weapons, or armorers making better body armor, or technical types making better car theft tools.