Ten Ton Hammer - Taking MMO Gamers to the Next Level!

Set for release in the first quarter of 2010, All Points Bulletin (APB) is a persistent world shooter that pits enforcers against criminals in a high octane urban playground. The game gained serious traction at E3 2009 last month thanks to an impressive demo featuring gorgeous graphics truly deserving of the HD distinction, novel gameplay, and a just-announced distribution deal with Electronic Arts. We sat down with Realtime Worlds’ Chris Dye to crack our enforcer knuckles for the first time, learning more about the unparalleled customization options and how the timeless battle between cops and robbers will play out in APB.

First and foremost, it’s hard to overstate the customization angle of APB. According to Chris, the only two decisions you’re stuck with are your choice of faction (criminal or enforcer) and gender. Everything else you can change “as your mood fits,” Chris noted. There's one caveat: enforcers must wear a badge somewhere on their person. But, according to Chris, criminals can and do try to disguise themselves as enforcers or civilians to make things interesting. The badge requirement keeps things from getting too interesting.

Extremely detailed character customization is a big part of APB, corset makes the game awesome.

Aside from body and facial appearance, clothing and vehicle styles, colors, and decals / tattoos are available to you. During the demo, vector graphics were stretched, layered, rotated, skewed, and otherwise positioned without a loss of graphic quality over clothing and vehicles, leading to some genuinely cool effects. Realtime Worlds decided against allowing players to upload their own graphics for copyright and other reasons, but Chris was quick to note that the game’s sizable library and toolset allows for some incredible design work. “The guys keep finding new ways of doing stuff. We had one guy a few weeks ago that came up with using a sunbird with effects to make a body tattoo. Another guy was using the tools for bruising, mustaches... we just don’t know what people are going to come up with.”

Fashion and music design will be a significant part of the gang experience, and these specialties will be their own niche. “Most gangs will have one guy that’s the tattoo guy, they’ll have a guy that designs the vehicle graphics. And if you design graphics that people like, you can sell them on the marketplace.” There’s no cost to the designer until you finalize your design for trade, Chris noted, so the only in-process cost is time to get the most out of APB’s impressive toolset and a player’s own artistic expertise. As of now, there’s no additional cost whether you customize one or one hundred shirts or cars.