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How APB's Persistent World Will Work

Posted by Soulskill on from the very-carefully-and-with-guns dept.

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."

2 of 33 comments (clear)

  1. Community driven moments... by RuBLed · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  2. Re:If we've learned nothing else form EVE online by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I see this going two ways. The way I think it's going to go is there simply won't be a good enough reason for people to stop whatever they are grinding and go after this character. There won't be a reward that will motivate people. The other way it could go is that they make a great reward worth bothering for, in which case the biggest guilds will find a way to exploit or camp around the game mechanics to get it, reliably, every time, locking out everyone else. It will be on lockdown, just like, say, the outdoor dragons were in vanilla WoW.