Two months ago the company known as Realtime Worlds announced that the First-Person-Shooter-MMO All Points Bulletin was shutting down, and being laid to rest. Many people fought to get their money back, and EA was pretty cool about the whole thing. Not knowing if it would ever be revived, rumors started flying that companies around the globe were looking at buying APB and its fate was held in the balance. Well it looks like the California based GamersFirst and its subsidiary company Reloaded will resurrect APB early next year. The question stands, will it have a better launch than it did its first time around? Also if it does, how many people are going to come around for another try?
APB is scheduled to re-launch sometime in the first half of 2011 as essentially the same game with a different pricing plan. Reloaded is re-launching the title APB: Reloaded and it will be free-to-play, utilizing micro-transactions to support itself. This is fantastic news for players of the original APB who saw much of its launch failure based off its horrible subscription model on top of the $50 you had to cough up just to buy it. Not only that, its lack of advertising.
The administrators of Realtime Worlds have been looking for a buyer for quite some time, but it seemed no one wanted to touch the cursed property. Then GamersFirst showed up and determined that there was enough usable data that would make the game salvageable and fit somewhere within their niche of games. Now GamersFirst is no stranger to the MMO party, they have brought us other free-to-play titles such as Sword2, 9Dragons and every variation of a MMO that you can imagine.
My curiosity will get the better of me I am sure because I will try the re-launched title next year (hell, it's free) but I will be wary. Game balance is really going to need an overhaul to be honest. Especially now that it is free-to-play the old design will just simply not work. If this game wants to be successful it's going to need better support and game play must become more balanced. You can't give the paying member the BFG 9000 and the non-paying member a stupid pistol and wish them on their merry way. Also they need to do something about the driving mechanic, click here to see my original review and the game play issues I ran into in 20 short hours of play.
I will definitely keep an eye on this one, because this may become the Phoenix that rises from the ashes... or it could totally fall flat again. So I want to hear from you. Will you give APB a shot now that it's free-to-play? Did you play it the first time? What would you like to see changed?
