Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[inteuniso]

It is a pity, but not really surprising. They let that monstrosity leave beta way too early.

[janekk]

Article form ex dev. Apparently 300 people worked on this  .

EDIT: It's really good read.

"I’ve heard people complain that we should have considered the business model for APB much earlier on.  The truth is that we did – we had it figured out years before release – we just decided not to tell anyone, and inadvertently gave gamers the impression it was going to be free to play.  They weren’t too happy when they found out."

Also I loled at team of QA ninjas. It simply seems like that 300 people worked on completely unnecessary stuff forgetting to do the damned game.

EDIT2: lol second part is even better.

EDIT3: Oh the irony in part 3, Tin foil hats and reality distortion field, haha this is a must read.

[umiman]

Heh heh, reality distortion field.

Good post that. I thought they actually went overboard with the hype though, not what he said that they didn't do enough. He probably meant they produced too much bad hype.

Personally, I hate anything with a subscription for games so... I think this one would have done a lot better with a free-to-play model as it did look very interesting and the customization options was perfect for free-to-play (as much as I hate that system).

[Farce]

Goddammit.  I never could get this thing to work, and now it's dead.  All of my hate.

I at least wanted to try the character maker.  :<<

[Moogie]

A friend of mine worked as one of the lead artists on this game. I'm sad to hear about this, considering he's probably just lost his dream job. He hasn't been online today but I really want to hear his view of what went wrong with the project. He's a fantastic guy who used to be a developer for Planeshift, before getting into the industry proper with APB.

Can you imagine finally having your lifelong ambition fulfilled, only for it to fail spectacularly, on your first product, almost immediately? This is why I don't even try to succeed anymore. Goddamn, life is depressing.

Still, I kinda figured they'd be having problems when I couldn't even get the game to install (granted, that was in pre-alpha) because my meager 2GB of RAM was obviously so far out of their spec range that it couldn't even accomodate the Setup screen, let alone make any attempt at running the actual game.

Sad stuff. This gives me Persistent Worlds flashbacks. That's where I lost my dream job under exactly the same circumstances as this.

[janekk]

Then you can tell him he did a great job, there were two things done right in this game, art direction and customizer. What pulled this game down was place holder of combat system, place holder of mission system and bugs, bugs and some more bugs and memory leaks and poor netcode and after reading article I linked - braindead management.

[Sensei]

Heh, so a game CAN close faster than Auto Assault.

Liked AA a lot though. But from what I hear this was really unfinished. I wonder if they can't recycle all the art resources to make a game that's actually good on sunk costs.

[Soulwynd]

AA was extremely fun, but the grind really put me off. They should have gone a bit lighter on that, added more coop/pvp content and went with a DDO-like F2P model.

[nuker w]

This game honestly flunked already? Holy moly. This reminds me of FURY, to be honest. Brought it, said "Yay." and before I could even put it in the disk tray, they shut it down without giving the bloody server software out.

[Soulwynd]

Yeah, after a bit on beta, and say this not because of the bugs, but because of the visible changes and the forum behavior, it was bound to end up fast like this. It was extremely noticeable in beta that they were not worrying about the right things and that their reaction towards bugs and complains was that players computers sucked or that they didn't get online shooters. My computer runs crysis maxed with quite a lot of FPS, APB never ran over 30fps and normally chugged at 20 all while using the UT engine, which is stupid. Borderlands throws over 100fps at me and clearly had more polygons on the screen while most APB graphics are based on blocks, pretty much. The sound bug never got fixed, they were so proud about the sound and yet, it chugged horribly. It went on and on... After a few weeks noticing what was being done with the patching, it just screamed "this isn't going anywhere."

Anyway, recruiting at RTW:

"If you’re looking for your first job in games, it’s worth thinking very carefully about your future employer. Do you want to work on jaded, derivative titles that receive scathing reviews and go straight to the bargain bin? Do you want to work large amounts of unpaid overtime because your project is underfunded and poorly managed? Do you want to work on codebases that are messy and poorly-designed because there’s never time to do things properly? Do you want to live in fear of your company’s financial security?"

If so, then this is the place for you!