Realtime Worlds on â??modifyingâ?? APB for consoles

The upcoming PC-only title All Points Bulletin would need to undergo surgery before being released for the PS3 and Xbox 360, a lead designer at Realtime Worlds has said.

EJ Moreland told Develop it is “clear that Realtime Worlds wants a console version of APB”, but said the Dundee studio would want to revise the game to better suit the experience for PS3 and Xbox 360 owners.

“Console and PC development teams usually have different philosophies on approaching a project, and so they should,” he said.

“Usually when you play a console-to-PC port, or vice-versa, it’s usual that the game won’t work as well as it did on its original platform. So for us, what we see for APB on consoles – and we’ve had discussions about this – is to make a different game that fits better for the system.”

APB was initially set to be released on Xbox 360 and PS3 as well as PC, yet work on console editions of the game was suspended.

Moreland said that, throughout the five years that APB has been in development, there was no ‘definitive decision’ made to scrap home console versions of the title.

“Development started as PC-oriented and, at a point where we had enough resources to compile our own console team, we decided to dedicate our talent on the PC game to make it that much better,” he said.

“Honestly from my experience, as someone who plays PC and console games, I had strong concerns that the game we were making for PC wasn’t going to be viable on console. We would want to do some things to make the game much more console-centric.”

Yet Moreland insisted that such a revised game would “not be radically different” from the PC version.

“It will still have the basic core principals of content creation, online celebrity and deep match-making, but this will be an experience specifically for consoles and console players.”

Realtime Worlds “believes in consoles as much as it does in PCs”, he added, before mentioning that there was no definitive timeline in place to begin developing console versions of the game.

Part one of Develop’s interview with Moreland will be released later today