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The new IP owner of Realtime Worlds’ APB has revealed the great scale of changes it will implement on the game in a bid to revive its reputation.
Bjorn Book-Larsson, of APB owners GamersFirst, told Develop that, “in order for the game to be a success, we need to make several core design changes”.
APB, which will launch early next year as a free-to-play game, will for a start be updated with Realtime Worlds’ final patch – 1.42 – that wasn’t quite finished by the time the Dundee studio went under.
“There was also a lot of content in the game that was either never quite finished or not released,” adds Book-Larsson, “and so we’re looking at – in the first phase of development – bringing that into the game.”
He made it clear that pay-to-play elements associated with APB will be stripped out and replaced by a free-to-play layer.
And, he said, the game may launch with a new name.
“For the time being we’re just calling it All Points Bulletin. However, we might very well officially release the game as All Points Bulletin: Reloaded, hence Reloaded Productions,” he said, referring to the new GamersFirst division that will be given over $1 million to rebuild the game.
“We have to address all the balancing issues,” Book-Larsson added in an interview with Develop.
“One of the biggest problems with APB was that newcomers would be destroyed upon entering a game for the first time, and were being killed with weapons that you couldn’t get yourself until you played for another ten hours. We’re going to change all that.
“We also see APB as a platform on which we launch new types of gameplay mode. At the moment APB has only one type of play mode, but we see there’s room for a number of different ways to play in this expansive open world”.
Book-Larsson also discussed how the game will work on the free-to-play model.
“We expect around 80-90 per cent of APB’s players won’t ever pay for anything, and 10-20 per cent of the user-base being more dedicated fans who will pay for additions,” he said, before outlining a range of monetisation options the group is considering.
