Morning Discussion
Former APB technical manager Luke Halliwell has been writing a fascinating series of blog posts explaining what he thinks, from his perspective, went wrong. Three parts--1, 2 and 3--are done so far, with a fourth to come. Jolly interesting.
Hey, if you want more to read, point your peepers at Spelunky developer Derek Yu talking about finishing a game. I'm honestly not attempting to link this with APB, they're simply two articles I've read this morning. Perhaps you might read them too.
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moshman
replybit of a shame for APB and more importantly the people that worked on it.
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depends on where you're working, if you're contracted for your overall position or just that project, and such.
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I think bad games, and more importantly bad game concepts, should die.
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Battlefield heros didn't cost as much as APB to make either and Dice has a bunch of other games bringing in money.
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This is what happens when you only tighten up the graphics.
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I just don't understand why they would take such a gamble after releasing a hit like Crackdown. You would think that the business people there would think "Hey, let's cash in on a huge sequel, so we can do our little art project, and if that fails, we'll still have enough to go back to doing other stuff"...
But that's not what happened. Maybe I'm ignorant on how Crackdown's sequel went down, but it sounds Realtime Worlds turned their noses up at the idea of making a second one. You reap what you sow?-
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Microsoft seems to have issues with first and 2nd party development that other hardware publishers don't seem to have. To many managers. I think thats why so many were let go in the entertainment division.
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Yes it was. They took a limited multiplayer experience that people were getting for free for years in other games and expected people to pay for it without giving them anything for that money. Oh and it wasn't as good as what you could get for free.
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You can not seperate gaming concepts from business models. You couldn't spend $20 million on a game like Braid, sell it for $60 and expect it to do well. You need to build a game, and select concepts, that fits your business model. If you don't have a business model (which they didn't untill recent) you shouldn't be making a game. See Hellgate London.
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Actually says in the article if you read it that they had the business model figured out early on in the development but choose not to speak about, he cites that as one of their big blunders.
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I've read comments from developers that worked there that conflict with that statement. Yeah they may of ended up with the business model they sketched out early on but they weren't sure about it until near launch.
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I'd recommend reading the article Alice suggested, its a pretty good break down of what went wrong.
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Sometimes I wonder if companies with doomed business plans truck on because there's nothing to lose by continuing. Let's say these guys figured out halfway through development that this could never work and the investors, for whatever reason, hadn't caught on. If they close up shop they're all out of jobs. If it fails they're all out of jobs, but they'll continue to make money and take home paychecks until it happens. If it succeeds then they're good to go.
I'm sure there's holes in my theory (like I said, it relies on the people with the money not shutting everything down) but it might explain why all these doomed-from-the-start MMO's get off the ground.
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It always baffles me how dev houses can be so clueless.
Stern-sounding codes of conduct were emailed around that, whatever their intent, in practice scared many developers away from interacting directly with our users. Not to worry, though, because our Community team was on the case! Except if a forum post was about a bug, because that wasn’t their area … bugs were for Customer Support. Who, naturally, didn’t read the forums … because that was Community’s job!
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After seeing the custom character creation I was pretty hyped, but after that It started looking kind of shaky. I'm surprised it wasn't passed over to one of those Eastern MMO companies.
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For me, it comes down to horrible execution. They had a better game in beta than when they did a few weeks after they went live.
I don't know where the lag came from, but that's what ultimately killed it for me. I'll never know now if they ever fixed it. Seriously, how do you have an MMO game that's live and let horrible lag plague it for weeks on end?!?
They also took away my favorite parts of playing the game which were the bounty missions, either eluding the cops or catching the criminals. Technically, they were still there, but once the missions were not auto-assigned any longer and the server population dropped they essentially ceased to exist because everyone you'd witness would be on a mission already. The normal missions were total shit. Seriously, how do you make a cops and robbers game with no banks for the criminals to rob and then curtail the open-game mechanics where criminals would rob stores/steal cars and enforcers would witness them and start a bounty/chase. WTF
The matchmaking was crap too, as the stacked teams that would result from one side calling for backup and getting a response, while the other side would call and get no response was just bad design. And the 'zones' were big but not big enough because you'd match up against the same opponents over and over again and they'd generally go to the same camping spot over and over again.
They just made horrible, horrible design decisions for a concept that had such huge potential. So I don't feel sad for them, they totally fucked themselves on this one. -
The Ads for APB came across to me like a rap gangsta - gta4 wannabe. I never gave that game a second thought. Probably because music right now is rap overload, which really isn't much like music to me (there's no beauty to it). So yeah, I had no interest in a game that looked like it would be pushing that crap down my throat.
Game Devs: Your target audience is no longer 14 year old males...
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