EDIT: The game is under a new free-to-play company called G1. It doesn't cost money to play anymore. Less qq. Learn to read the posts in the topic. That last one should be common sense. *cough* UU *cough*

So, the makers of Crackdown have decided to try their hand at a Massively Multiplayer Online game that derives from the Sandbox style of Grand Theft Auto (GTA). They came up with All Points Bulletin. After having played this game for 160+ hours already, I absolutely love it and cannot get enough. Being able to fully customize your character, vehicle, weapons... And then take them out to blow shit up? Who wouldn't want that. If you would rather prevent me from doing so, this is also the game for you.

There are two sides in this Cops-and-Robbers-esque game, the Enforcers (Cops) and the Criminals (Robbers). You can choose to make a character on either and start playing. Now, the Criminals are your basic "DO WHATEVER THE FUCK I WANT" that GTA is known for. You can raid shops by ramming a vehicle against them to steal the items dropped, take civilian money by mugging them or their vehicles to chop shops and in general, create mass chaos but this increase your Notoriety level or in GTA, this is known as your Wanted level. Now, the Enforcers job is come stop you once you do enough of these crimes for them to either watch you do it and call it in so they can began chasing your OR be dispatched against you if your Notoriety is high enough. Now, to give the game some story-line, they added Factions and contacts. For each side, there are two different Factions, but they are mirrored in terms of rewards for each side. You level a Faction's contacts to unlock more contacts to unlock more missions, items, vehicles, weapons and customization options.

Now, there are a few bugs with the immense amount of options. Go figure, right?

They do offer a built in Voice over IP system, but it is very buggy at the moment. Some people have trouble getting it to properly register a microphone, it sometimes fails in game and will suddenly fix itself, or work in some ways and not others at the same time. If they were to fix the bugs in this, the system would be amazing. When it does work, the quality of the game increases drastically since you don't have to give out server info... then passwords... etc.

It demands a lot from video cards for no apparent reason. In a 32 bit OS, the game is blurry as fuck and you might as well forget the customization features of the game, but the whole game runs perfectly graphically on a 32 bit. Now, on a 64, issues arise all the damn time, but the game and it's content are beautiful. The problems known are: Crashes, Memory Leaks, Improper Loading, Failing Code, etc. The game has a lot to work on here, but the errors are existant at times and nowhere to be found at others. I don't know much in this area, but a lot of reviews and users claim the coding is to blame here. That the developers missed something from the start and worked on faulty code from the get go. I wouldn't let this discourage you, as the community manager says they are working to fix it and claim none of these problems existed in the beta. I am here as a beta player, to support that statement and my errors were non-existent in the beta stage of the game.

Cheaters. There are a lot of them as the game runs off the Unreal Engine that the hackers are more than familiar with. People using Aim hacks are the biggest problem right now, as about one out of ten people, have one. You can instantly identify who when they are able to hit you while looking in a different direction or running around you sporadically with no real precise actions and kill you. There are also a lot of exploits available to us at the moment, one has been patched so far, but many still exist. These are not external, but rather internal imbalances that are available for abuse.

I would suggest this game for anyone, even with said statements.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Jun 17 2011, 2:27 am by LoveLess.

I would if it wasn't pay-to-play.

This game has been in development since the launch of the 360. I thought it died already.

Quote from name:Azrael.Wrath

I would if it wasn't pay-to-play.

Upon purchase, you get 50 hours of game time. In the Social District, which is where you can customize shit and communicate with any players in your world/server, not limited to instances or districts, you do not lose time. I have several friends and I myself, are all guilty of using the ability to sell in-game affects, such as custom clothes, cars, music, images, weapons, equipment or in-game money, for Real Time World Points in the Marketplace (Auction House). RTW points are what is used to purchase game time and as a result, you can actually do what several people have done: Use your 50 hours or create something in the Social District and sell it for RTW points to purchase more game time without spending another dime. I highly suggest this for people who are creative and don't want to spend the money to buy more time. Currently, I have purchased 180 days of game time, which is unlimited hours, by using this ability.

And CAFG, I was surprised it took so long to develop, but it was in closed beta for quite some time. The game was perfect then, but upon launch, a lot of things broke with the swarm of players and hackers.

Quote from LoveLess

Being able to fully customize your character, vehicle, weapons... And then take them out to blow shit u

Read this line (stopped literally right there), then clicked link. Found:

Quote

APB is $49.99.

Immediately lost interest. I'd think that they would at least offer a demo of sorts, especially with all the kinks you mentioned.

Sometimes not reading it all is a bad thing

You still have to pay $49.99 to purchase the game and there is no trial of any kind.

I think the problem is that I don't know what APB is. From your responses I assume it's the price you have to pay before you can play at all and not the game time you can buy which was what Loveless was talking about.

So is this correct? You have to pay before you can play, and then you also have to acquire game time?

Buddy of mine plays this on PC, he doesn't mind it. But I watched the reviews on various different sites and they don't look to promising. Crackdown 2 scored better and that wasn't pleasing to me

Quote from Joshgt2

Buddy of mine plays this on PC, he doesn't mind it. But I watched the reviews on various different sites and they don't look to promising. Crackdown 2 scored better and that wasn't pleasing to me

Crackdown 2 is just it's prequel, but more. Nothing new to it.

Quote from NudeRaider

So is this correct? You have to pay before you can play, and then you also have to acquire game time?

That's my understanding, although from what lovel said, the game time can be acquired without paying.

Alright, so this topic deserves a reboot. GamersFirst, the makers of many free-to-play games have taken up All Points Bulletin and attached Reloaded to the end, but are now working out the hundreds of bugs that existed before, plus... Making it free-to-play. Of course, there will be a way to buy a premium account and other chances to spend money so the company can have some sort of profit, but they promise it wont affect the balance between free and paid users.

For more information, visit http://www.gamersfirst.com/apb/ and get all the information you need. The chance to enter closed beta is gone, but you can still get constant updates on the game and surprisingly, their Facebook page has regular updates that are quite informative. Hopefully I get into the closed beta and I will be more than happy to answer questions regarding the game. Nothing to break their T&A though

APB is in open Beta. If you don't like griefers, hackers, or ex-PWI players, DO NOT play this game.

Outside of that faggotry and the faggotry that is their method of making matches for missions, it is as enjoyable as any other GTA clone.

I guess I shoulda re-posted here:

So basically the game is in open beta and is indeed, free to play. The only things that require you to pay in this game is...

• 'gold guns' have very slight advantages over their vanilla counterparts and some kind of feature on top of that. They can make things a little difficult at times, but after a while they just feel like any other weapon.
  
• Premium account status, which gives you more character slots, it removes the strict customization limitation (which isn't TOO restricting, but you can't say cover your body in tattoos or make REALLY custom clothes.) It also increases how much money and standing you get per mission by a decent amount.

But I would suggest this game, it's quite a lot of fun. Even though the entire community has admitted they have never played a game where they want to destroy their hardware every 5 minutes, until All Points Bulletin, we still love the game and have been loyal to it for over a year.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Jun 16 2011, 11:51 pm by LoveLess.

You lost me at
because crackdown 2 sucked a ton of shit... X.X

But Okay, I'll give it a try

Also.. the duality of Cops and Robbers is an interesting one..
Altho everyone's gonna be filthy theives.. unless cops are of the "Bad Cops" variety, and can make the law their bitch..

---

Oh wait.. it's not free?
Well fuck..
Nvm. It's free now.
Downloading.. it's taking it's sweet time

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Jun 17 2011, 2:34 am by UnholyUrine.

It's free to play now.

I seriously doubt people read every thread in its entirety before posting every single time

And the amount of aim botters is still as high as when they shut it down.

Incorrect 90% of the time. People are just better at the game, actually know what recoil, tactics, communication are and understand it's concepts better. The guys I play with, and even myself occasionally, get called hackers when we beat down guys worse than us.

It's just a skill difference. If you want to see proof of hackers, I can show them to you one of these days.

That's how not only people can exit a car, do a 180-degree turn, and instantly shoot with perfect (allowing for 2-3 weapon random misses) shots on you about 20 meters away with an mp5, but do it faster than you can use your sniper rifle to kill them in what would've been two shots.

No, I'm done with the game. Off-mission stuff like driving the grief truck is fun, but to get any decent gun in the game you have to complete missions. Missions are impossible to stand more than 2 or 3, MAYBE 4 because of the severe lack of balancing in APB matching. Seriously, I've been paired up with two 195-rating people, one of which was a general and the other something just below that. 2v1 when it's nowhere near being fair is NOT fun.

Also, funny you mention this:

Quote from LoveLess

• 'gold guns' have very slight advantages over their vanilla counterparts and some kind of feature on top of that. They can make things a little difficult at times, but after a while they just feel like any other weapon.

That brings me to another point: for all that we were bitching about cashop bullshit, there's only one person who I played with that had cashop stuff, and the bastard was even worse than me. So I take my spoken, but never typed, statement of this being an even worse cashop game than RoM.

Which leads to yet another point (though somewhat off-topic): For all of its other shortcomings, League of Legends did FTP right. You don't make a cashop for people to get better gear in a FREE TO PLAY game. The whole point of FTP is so that the player can enjoy a game, and pay for it if they like it. Riot made it so that the only real difference between people that had paid money and those that had not was purely cosmetic. The gold guns aren't a terrible amount stronger than their regular counterparts, but that's not the point.


TL;DR: I uninstalled this game because I can't handle the shitty way G1 or whatever company still thinks PunkBuster can block anything runs this game. And with that, I bid this thread adieu.