March 13, 2010 –
David Jones of Grand Theft Auto, Lemmings, and Crackdown fame was at GDC this year, and we got the rare opportunity to talk to him about APB – the upcoming massively-multiplayer online (MMO) action game from Realtime Worlds. APB, if it has slipped under your radar, is a gigantic version of cops and robbers, where players take on the role of a thieving, murdering, terrorizing Criminal, or an Enforcer in charge of keeping the law breakers in line. Rather than a World of Warcraft-styled MMO, APB is more akin to a run-and-gun action game, and has drawn parallels to the most recent GTA games for reasons that become apparent when you watch the game in motion.

A couple years ago, Jones gave a talk in which he blasted WoW, saying that grinding was a mechanic and needed to be done away with. This year, during a presentation, he mention that should players want to do something “grindy” in APB, they would have the opportunity to, in the form of missions. I asked him how he planned to avoid the pitfalls of normal grinding.

“The analogy I used was, take players as content, and any opportunity where you’re doing the same things again and again and again, make sure you involve players in it, because they’re human, they’re emotional, you don’t know how they’re going to react…” Jones believes that, even if you’re doing the same mission, the fact that you’re facing human opponents will keep it fresh and appealing far, far longer than your typical repetitive MMO quest. “You may be on a mission that lasts ten minutes, and the mission might have five or six sub-missions, and at each stage of the mission, you’re opposing players.” In fact, he wants to completely avoid any non-player interaction, stating “We’re still in the stone age when it comes to AI in my opinion. We don’t have many plans for PvE. It would kind of move against the philosophy of what we’ve set.”

So where is APB set? Most people will tell you that it’s in a giant city, and David Jones is no different, though he explained to us that, at least at launch, only a portion of the city will actually be available to players. “There are different districts of one big city, and a district that you play in is about two kilometers by two kilometers. We have three districts at launch. When we open up another district, I want to think carefully about what the unique gameplay features we can add to that district are as well.”

Even though only a portion of the city is accessible, it’s still a sizable landmass, and that poses the risk of diluting the action. Jones is adamant that won’t happen, however. When players pick up a mission, the game dynamically sets a destination. It checks whether an area has already been assigned to another group for a mission, and ensures that it isn’t too far away, preventing players from mindlessly driving through city streets. “We never send you two kilometers away – that’s a bit boring – but we do send you a few hundred meters, half a kilometer away.” In this way, although the missions might be semi-local, the game gradually moves players through the city, and will hopefully force them into new locations and potentially volatile situations.

While this might make it seem like the action could get overly chaotic, in reality, Jones says that there are limitations to keep that in check. “Can you interfere with other people’s missions? In a limited way, you can. You can’t shoot and kill people you’re not directly opposed to.” You can, he told me, crash into another player’s car as they race off to their destination, and you race off to yours. Do these limitations – the inability for players not set in the same scenario to truly harm each other – prevent players from enjoying themselves as much as they otherwise would? Or does it make for a more playable and entertaining experience? The answer will certainly emerge over time.

APB, like several other MMOs in the last few years, was originally announced as both a PC and an Xbox 360 title. Over the course of its 5 year development, however, the emphasis on a console version gradually dropped, and as it stands now, looks unlikely to ever see the light of day. “So basically, about a year ago we said we’d finish the PC one first… If we’re going to go on console, we’d have to spend a lot of time educating Microsoft on the game, figure out how we would operate the game outside of our network…” The focus at Realtime Worlds shifted, from getting it out on multiple platforms to simply getting it out in a highly-polished state. “Let’s make a great game, finish it off as a big success, and because it’s a console style of game, then at least Microsoft can get a good look at it and say ’this would be great to have on our platform’. They can look at it, and they can touch it…” Jones has faith that once it’s out there, the quality of APB will make Microsoft actively work with Realtime Worlds in order to get a slice of the action on their console.

But as I mentioned, this isn’t the first game to seemingly drop off the console scene. I asked Jones just why it was apparently so hard to get an MMO onto consoles. “The original 360s had no hard drive, and that’s something Microsoft still has to address.” At this stage in the console’s lifetime, Microsoft still has restrictions on games with mandatory hard drive requirements. “Microsoft also likes to have control of their servers, whereas Sony is a little more open about that stuff. There’s lots and lots of small issues [keeping MMOs off consoles], to be honest.”

Why are so many developers slowly edging towards the MMO genre – pushing player limits higher and higher, or having other players alter, if only loosely, your experience a la Demon’s Souls ? “For me as a games player, you could take some simple rubbish single player games and make them multiplayer and they’re ten times as much fun.”

Keeping players invested in an open game like this is always a challenge, but Jones believes the key is in the social aspect. “Although we are an action based game, we’ve looked very, very carefully at what the RPG games have done extremely well – making sure there’s a great social network built into the game. We have amazing clan systems in the game, in terms of forming them, setting hierarchies…” It seems to already be producing some entertaining results. “Right now we have clans running around, completely synchronized in their clothing, in their vehicles, driving four-abreast, playing the same kind of music…”

But despite the inspiration taken from RPGs on the social-front, APB is trying to steer very clear of some of the other traditional RPG elements. “Gear” upgrades (new weapons, armor etc…) being one of the major ones. “As soon as people find out what the best thing was, that forces them down the path to equip that. You can upgrade your character, we’ve come up with upgrade slots, but nothing ever that you have to physically equip. Otherwise it would be like the RPGs where it’s like ’you know, I love the look of this sword, but I can’t use it because it’s got two less strength than this other one that I don’t like the look of’.”

They’re also avoiding the traditional payment models, shrugging off both the monthly-subscription and the microtransaction systems. “We are not a recurring subscription-based game. We haven’t said what our business model is, but we have said that you will not have to pay a fixed amount every month to play this game. All I can say is that it is extremely good value for the player, and it’s very unique.” In our opinion, some alternative include either a larger-than-average one-time payment when you purchase the game, or a time-based model, similar to a prepaid phone-plan, where you pay for a certain number of hours, and once those hours are up, you either buy more or are locked out.

I asked him what he thought of the latest trends in gaming, starting with motion controls: “To be honest, until I can sit down and play one for many, many hours, it’s hard to say. These new controllers seem to be more about broadening the audience, rather than fixing what we have now. I’m like anyone else – I say ’I don’t know if I want to sit on my couch and wave my arms.’” He was pretty nonplussed. “Until someone makes something really compelling and I really ’get it’, I just don’t know. Give me a game that it works so much better for than a physical controller.”

I also asked about (what I think) is one of the sillier “innovations”, 3D: “Pretty gimmicky as well. I sat and played a few games, and it was like ’it’s kinda cool’, but it wasn’t like every time I play a game I have to put these glasses on. It’s an interesting technology, but until someone does something with it that is so much better than anything we have right now, it’s just an interesting technology.”

On the subject of the developer switch for Crackdown 2, Jones was surprisingly candid. “I was a bit miffed when it happened, just because of how it was communicated to us, but, you know, at the end of the day, any game that I’ve worked on that continues to be something that players want to keep playing, I’m really happy with that. I’m the kind of guy that likes to create new [franchises] so I probably would have been happy to work on, say, Crackdown 2. Would I have done a third? Probably not.” I noted that he worked on the first sequels for both GTA and Lemmings, but none afterwards.

Getting back to APB, it’s been half a decade since development on it started, so how close is today’s APB to the original concept? “It’s pretty damn close – that’s why it’s taken five years. The only thing we never got in, that will go in, because once it goes live we’ll be working on the game and doing things, is the notion of turf war, of clans actually being able to own big parts of the city. That’s probably the one big feature that we never managed to get in.” He assured me that this aspect was on the horizon. “We’ve got all the systems to do it, but I’ve got to think about the game design, about what is it that lets a bunch of players have the power to control a portion of the entire city, and what does that give them?” He also expressed that, in some ways, it was a good thing that the turf-war feature wouldn’t be ready for launch, as it would give players time to become accustomed to the game, to get to know the city. Having a clan rapidly dominate the available territories immediately after launch could be incredibly discouraging for the other players.

The talks of a launch naturally brought up the question of when it might happen? “We still hope to launch during the second quarter of this year,” Jones said. “We haven’t named a date yet because it’s an online game, and betas are very important to learn from. We’re not going to stick our neck out.”

And, with the mention that the turf war would be added post-launch, I had to wonder what else… “We’ll probably look at doing something like new features every three months, and then annually a big, seismic event – a game changer. We have three years of plans,” he said. Although he didn’t get into the specifics of features, he believes that even now we are being hampered by technology.

“When we launched GTA, it was when Ridge Racer was glorifying 3D. We came out and we said ’We want to do this other game. We want to have loads of these little characters, and loads of vehicles, we want it to be a living city.’ There’s no way with we could have done that in 3D. So we did what we call 2.5D, which is top-down with perspective. People looked at it and the initial reaction was ’Well, Ridge Racer looks much cooler.’ But when you play the game, there was much more depth, and players kind of saw over the limitations because of how much fun the game was, and I believe that’s what APB will be.

“Just now, we can’t recreate 100 players with immense physics, you know, with 50 millisecond latencies… We can’t quite create that level of dynamics, of immediacy just now. But technology is getting better month by month.

“In three years time I believe we can offer, you know, 250 players in an amazing virtual city, with thousands of vehicles, and a tremendous amount of physics… As a player, that really excites me.”

I asked how he felt about the way Zipper Interactive’s MAG was received, given that there were several parallels between MAG and APB. “I definitely watched it very closely, for obvious reasons,” he said. He felt that a large part of the reason MAG was met with such mixed opinions was due in part to the small step towards the MMO genre it too. “You still enter a lobby, you still join a match, you still finish the match and leave. We are taking a much larger leap.” He also noted that people had very varied expectations from MAG, and that the same goes for APB. “You speak to five people in a room, and they all have completely different ideas about APB – it’s GTA Online, or it’s more like Counter Strike – the expectations are all over the place. I just say it’s a terrific multiplayer online experience, but one that is very persistent, and one that is very customizable.”

And what’s coming after APB for Realtime? “We are working on a second project.” When I asked whether it was another MMO, “It’s online…” he paused, as though he was going to say more, but decided against it. “That’s about it. Completely different to anything else that’s been done. We’ll probably start talking about it after the launch of APB.”

And that’s not very far away now, with only three or four months until Jones hopes to launch his MMO shooter. We’ll hopefully be getting more info soon.