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

As a species, humans tend to congregate in groups together based on various commonalities, be it geography, economic status, favorite sports franchises, political affiliations or any other number of bonds that link us. Gamers typically are no different than any other group, and like most others, we have our own unique subsets to further categorize us. While many of us in the gamer clique tend to occupy more than one subset, most tend to gravitate more to one type of game more frequently and gain more enjoyment from that genre than the others. MMOG players may be the most devoted of all the gaming phylum due to the relative high amount of commitment required to play the games at a high level, but just below us in the order of “needed amount of psychosis” required to play probably lies the hardcore First Person Shooter players.

 In the past few years the vitriol that was once reserved for MMOGs from the press at large has been deflected away from them to a very specific inhabitant of the FPS realm, Grand Theft Auto.

Hardcore urban street violence,                         APB style.

A quick point of clarification here, to label GTA as merely an FPS is a bit of a misnomer (as well as a lot of acronyms for one sentence!) as it has many elements of several popular game types all rolled into one, but in the end it really is you playing by yourself and whacking people with various weapons.  Several other pretty blatant rip offs of this innovative game have popped up, but none has seriously threatened GTA for the title of Most Negative Press.  As with the aforementioned MMOGer, it takes a certain personality type to really immerse yourself into the GTA lifestyle and many who do so find themselves hooked, as demonstrated by the game’s huge popularity and seemingly endless sequels and spinoffs. So what happens when a game developer tries to merge these two distinct and fairly brash personality types? Do we achieve some sort of uber -gamer homogony, or is this the new clash of the titans?

Looming on the horizon are several new offerings that have a solid FPS feel to them. While this is certainly nothing new in the market, it does tend to signal more of a trend than did, say, Planetside or Anarchy Online when they were released. Another trend being brought to the forefront of massively multiplayer online role-playing games is a departure from the tired and overused fantasy setting by way of a shift to high tech and “real world” style games.  Of this new breed of MMOG, none combines all the elements quite the way All Points Bulletin (or APB you acronym fans) does. APB looks to be the epicenter of the impending collision between GTA and MMO gamers and the results look to be very interesting to say the least.