This being the Game Developers Conference, Jones spent the first portion of his talk going through his design philosophy for APB. It begins with defining what the term MMO means. "When you say MMO now," Jones said, "immediately they think you've got to go up against World of Warcraft" The term has become almost synonymous with MMORPG and has become tainted with a stigma. Jones wants to make a multiplayer online game with dedicated servers, but wants it to be cool. As he noted, when your friends come over and you ask them to play Call of Duty or Halo, they think the idea is cool. If they come over and you start talking about your World of Warcraft character, they get turned off.
That may generalize things a bit but the point is clear: Things like AK-47s are instantly recognizable whereas their "geek" counterparts (a Braggarts Bow was cited as an example) are niche. Jones' advice is to, "Make games contemporary; make them cool, it lowers the barrier." This is why he wants to rephrase the question from, "What would you do with an MMO?" to "If you have dedicated servers behind a game, how would you embrace them?" APB is an attempt to take the games Jones likes to make and use dedicated servers to take them to the next level.
Jones began showing the game by giving us a peek at the character customization tools RealTime Worlds has made. "We will not create any of the players in the game. The players will create them," said Jones before following up with, "One of the problems with user created content is that 90% of it is crap. We've all seen Second Life." To solve this problem the team has put together a character tool that is above and beyond anything I've seen before.
It looks simple to use, but the depth of what we saw was astounding. The traditional things are all customizable like skin tone, height, build, eye color and hair style. This goes much farther though. You can grow hair out all together or in pieces, scars can be added and then aged, and you can even make veins more or less pronounced. The great part about everything we saw was the freedom given without the ability to push things too far. "We don't want really strange looking characters," says Jones and as all of the sliders were moved back and forth we never saw anything that did. All of this can be done with either a male or female character.
Since it is all driven by experience and skill, APB won't always match teams up with even numbers. We saw another example of four new criminals (in t-shirts and jeans) trying to steal a television. As soon as they smashed a car through the store window to get at it, an APB went out to a single enforcement agent. The new players feel like they have a chance since they have numbers while the experienced player can show his skills. This mission ended with the cop killing all four criminals with a rocket launcher.
