5 Reasons Why APB Failed On An Epic Scale
by Ron Keith
There are so many ways to define failure. Doesn't it sometimes seem that each new
MMO tries to come up with its own innovative formula, some new and novel way to drive their game headlong into the abyss?
Star Wars Galaxies was a great game until Sony Online Entertainment got WoW envy, dumbed down the game, and lost their subscribers. Warhammer rushed their game to market, delivering a horrendously buggy and unbalanced
MMO (The PvP was great, though.). Dungeons and Dragons Online (DDO) had fabulous PvE instances, but not much else to keep you busy. Champions Online was fun until you got to the end and didn't have much to do. And Star Trek Online was rolled out only half-finished, ignoring the fact that Star Trek fans wanted to play Klingons.
In an alternate universe, all of these
MMOs might have been great. Each of them had hordes of excited fans and MMO gamers anxious to play their game, and yet each managed to fail in its own way.
But none of them can compare to the blinding flash of failure known as All Points Bulletin (APB). Like a dying star going supernova, APB flashed out there in
MMO space for a few brief moments and now it has collapsed in on itself, creating a black, swirling hole of fail unlike anything the MMO world has ever seen before or is likely to see, again.
A hearty congratulations must be sent out to RealTime Worlds for redefining MMO failure. All those other MMOs might have “failed” but they also managed to putter along and sometimes even reinvent themselves (e.g. DDO is now a successful free-to-play game.). APB stands about as much of a chance of surviving as bag of Doritos at BlizzCon.
Have you been on APB, recently? If you bought the game, you can still log into the social district any time you want. The social district is free. Only fighting in the action districts costs money. Go ahead. Log in. Then do this: In the chat window type /pop.
This is quite possibly the most misguided command ever given to players in an
MMO. That command tells you how many players are in the game on your server. In the last few weeks, even during peak gaming hours on weekends, APB's population is in the hundreds, usually around 500. And APB only has two servers!
Let's see 2 servers. Pop is 500. Times 2 equals... Wow, that sucks.
Keep in mind that population total also includes the people in the social district where you can log in for free. If you go to the action districts, which cost money, the numbers are around 20 and often less than that. That not only sucks, that sucks on a cosmic scale.
What happened here? There are some good things about this game. It's a decent shooter and it had the best character designer in MMOs. Its Grand Theft Auto (GTA) roots should have brought in a loyal following and yet APB is imploding. How did this MMO crash and burn so fast?
1.
It gets boring fast.
The first few hours of APB are usually spent designing your character. There are so many options and character looks the designer will capture your imagination and attention for hours; it's quite simply the sweetest, sickest character designer in all
MMOs. Then, your next few hours are spent shooting other players. It's the Crims versus the Enforcers. Gangs versus vigilante law. Lots and lots of intense PvP action.
It's a blast... For a few days.
Then the missions get repetitive. You've done them before and you keep doing them. You probably stop doing the chase missions, because they're long and tedious. The settings for the action doesn't change much, either. There are two action districts and they turn out to be a lot smaller than you thought when you started playing. You've been there, before, and you'll be there, again.
Do you want to do something else besides PvP, something to keep you interested? There's nothing else. You're done. In just a few days, you find you've pretty much done all there is to do and there ain't no more.
Yawn. Bored now.
2.
It's barely an MMO.
Do you want to do something else besides PvP, something to add a little variety to the game? There's nothing else. There's no PvE. No questing. No large explorable world.
APB bills itself as an MMO, but it barely qualifies. Sure there's an explorable world, but it's small and confined. No open world in this game. Sorry.
APB has this great storyline about a city descending into out-of-control violence as street gangs take over. It would have been fun to have a PvE storyline to follow, one that tells players the backstory, how things got to this point, but it's not there.
There's no economy to speak of. There's no crafting, so no gathering of materials. There is designing, though, where you can endlessly tweak the look of the gear you're wearing. Unfortunately, if you're not much of a designer, you find yourself making some pretty ugly looking stuff, and let's be honest, most people aren't designers. As a result, the auction house is pretty dead. Sure, you can put the stuff you design on the auction house, but no one wants to buy your ugly stuff. (And you thought it looked so awesome, right?)
Guilds are mostly an afterthought. You barely need a guild. APB's only activities are the PvP fights and designing outfits for your character. There aren't any tough PvE dungeons to run to get better gear, so you don't need a guild to get you through those. There aren't any guild perks, so there's no motivation for people to start guilds. About the only thing guilds are nice for is finding people to team up for the missions. Other than that, guilds are pointless.
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