MMO-APB Beta Applications being accepted

http://www.apb.com/age-verification-gateway/?bounce=http://www.apb.com/beta-application/

Head on over to the APB site and sign for their beta now. This one looks fun!

MMO- The Turtle is going on Vacation until July 1st!!

Well Turtle-Heads I wont be posting or updating until Weds July the 1st. The Turtle is going on a trip to the great state of Vermont so I will be out of my shell for a week. Take care and thank you guys for the visits and the support. I have receive an amazing amount of support for my blog and I will be putting my content onto my own website sooner rather than later because of the support and interest. So stay tuned for the big website announcement in the coming weeks. On my site I will be able to offer you guys full forum support so you turtle heads can talk about what every you wish and whatever games you want. Also I will be having featured materials and even contests for you guys to win Games, Hardware and even Beta Keys to the biggest games. Big Big things are coming for you loyal Blueturtlecafe readers and I will provide you all with V.I.P. cred on my new site. Thanks again and remember that the place to get all your daily MMO and RPG news is Blueturtlecafe!

MMO-Crimecraft Content to be free

Laying down real coin for MMO content updates is a bummer, regardless of what the extra stuff brings to the game. Most MMOs already have flat fees you pay for the pleasure of playing the game. Plus, there’s an opportunity you could be leaving a couple of your guild brethren behind as you move on to the new hotness with the swarm of content-hungry players. Vogster Entertainment is planning to curve the hurt a bit with the price of their content updates to Crimecraft.

“We have a pretty aggressive content update schedule with new abilities, instances, clothes, weapons, items, achievements, challenges and gameplay types being released monthly free of charge,” Mike Donatelli, Vogster’s senior game designer told us via e-mail.

“The plan is to do a split business model with a server maintenance fee [sub] being paid monthly to support our hosting of the servers, 24 hour customer service, live events and the monthly content updates,” he continued before stating that a premium items shop will be available for players looking to spice up their costumes.

As far as how much this server cost will be, Donatelli doesn’t know. “As far as a sub price,” he said, “I’ve been told it won’t be as hefty as your MMORPG, but I haven’t been given any particulars.”

It sounds like Crimecraft won’t have a mega expansion pack like World of Warcraft’s “Wrath of the Lich King,” however, the content that does come out of Vogster will be free. Well, provided you don’t count server costs as a cost on your end.

MMO- APB Impressions

Realtime Worlds has an extremely ambitious plan to bring an enormous sandbox world full of customization to the PC player at home, and creative director Dave Jones is calling APB “The game he wanted Grand Theft Auto to be.” Although we imagine those 1997-era graphics and the top-down view would have limited it somewhat. They’ve more than made up for that in this new game, which has some pretty slick built-in design tools .. but no cohesive story.

That’s one of the things that causes the hair on the back of our necks to rise, and probably those of the marketing team as well. When asked about the game, Jones said “Well, we don’t really have an overarching story.” In fact, their website’s FAQ will tell you, “What will the outcome be? The great thing is, we don’t know.” We don’t know either. But if you want to find out what we do know about the game, head beyond the break and give it a peep. Here’s a teaser: They could release this tomorrow as Back Alley Tattoo Artist and it would clean up.
We were only treated to an extended version of the APB trailer while we sat and spoke with Dave Jones and EJ Moreland from Realtime Worlds, but the video was pretty telling. The developers have poured a lot of time and energy into the design tools inside the game, but they haven’t constructed a story that really ties everything together, which can be dangerous in an industry that keeps hammering home how important the story is, even if your graphics aren’t astounding, i.e. Braid.

The tattoo and clothing editors are also extremely robust, and we could easily see spending hours creating custom designs just to see how they’ll look.

That’s where APB is trying to set itself apart. It does have amazing graphics in the “in-game customisation studio.” The player is given a huge level of control over the character they create, right down to the crow’s feet around their eyes. The tattoo and clothing editors are also extremely robust, and we could easily see spending hours creating custom designs just to see how they’ll look. They showed off a character in a black suit with a “Can We Build Him?” sign stuck to his back … and when he turned around it was an in-game Obama model, complete with a “Yes We Can” badge. Really impressive character modeling.

However, once you drop those characters into the game (which also features a similarly supercharged vehicle design editor), are players going to find enough material to keep them engaged? They can’t live by design alone, although the game includes an auction house trading depot for designs, where players can sell their creations to other players for a price. Beyond that, the game is pretty much an advanced version of cops & robbers, which the developers claim focuses on creativity (designing characters, clothes, cars, etc.), conflict (Criminals vs. Enforcers), and celebrity (or “status”).

Both cops and robbers can be tatted-up, leather-wearing, firearm-brandishing hardasses who blow people away on a daily basis.

Instead of a traditional MMO that has you questing across a mythic fantasy land, APB drops you inside a massive city and lets you choose whether or not you want to be a Criminal or an Enforcer, and the only thing that separates the two is that one wears a badge. Both cops and robbers can be tatted-up, leather-wearing, firearm-brandishing hardasses who blow people away on a daily basis. If you’re a Criminal, you try to commit dirty deeds like robbing banks and killing Enforcers, and Enforcers try to maintain the peace by stopping Criminals with extreme prejudice.

We weren’t shown anything live in-game, everything was running off a video, and the gameplay has a fairly traditional GTA open world feel to it. There’s a lot of gunplay and driving, and yes, you can run pedestrians or opponents down. We didn’t get to see the promised bank heists just yet, although crime will definitely be a part of the game. Criminals have the option of taking out other criminals, teaming up with them, or fighting the Enforcers, while Enforcers only face off against Criminals.

That’s pretty much it right now. There’s no massive boss you’re trying to slay, no raids to lead your party into. Just your highly customized avatar and you, cruising around and stirring up a lot of trouble that involves firearms. From what we were shown, the Criminals have a lot of different activities they can choose from, and Jones said that they were inspired by Michael Chiklis in The Shield for the Enforcer’s role in the city. Phone book beatdown minigames, perhaps?

You can also compose “death tunes” that other users will hear after you annihilate them.

The game runs on the Unreal 3 Engine, and features things like last.fm integration: if a player drives near you and they’re playing a tune you have via last.fm, it’ll start playing on your in-game radio. If you don’t have the same song, they’ll use the last.fm music servers to identify something close to it. You can also compose “death tunes” that other users will hear after you annihilate them. They game will be out in 2010 and they said they’re pursuing a “non-traditional subscription model,” and we aren’t quite sure what that means just yet. They’re also “considering” console options, which we imagine to mean “We’ll see how this does on the PC first.”

APB still hasn’t given us any real gameplay that we can wrap our heads (or fingers) around just yet, so we’ll be eager to find out more in the coming months.

Stay tuned for more details as they come in! Or follow me on alphainventions.com and condron.us 😉

MMO- CrimeCraft E3 interview not just another MMO

E3 2009: CrimeCraft producer says game is the next step for Call of Duty, Halo players

All Points Bulletin wasn’t the only crime-themed MMO I saw at E3 last week. I also got to check out Vogster Entertainment‘s CrimeCraft. Just before the conference, the developer announced an August 25 release date, a monthly subscription as their business model and an exclusive deal with Best Buy.

On the floor, associate producer Aaron Krasnov laid down what’s new in the game, how it’s different from APB, the help he got from former Warhammer Online developers and how CrimeCraft is a natural progression for players of Halo and Call of Duty.
Since we last saw CrimeCraft at GDC in March, the developers at Vogster Entertainment have added a slew of things to the game. First, they’ve built out their customization options. Krasnov said that they’ve added more clothing choices as well as more options in the game’s gun customization, which now allows for pattern-texture, various colors and up to five weapon attachments, like barrels and scopes.

He also told me that they’ve added new environments, including two new lobbies based on downtown Brooklyn, New York. “We want each of our lobbies to have a different feel, and we want players to be able feel at home,” Krasnov explained. “If they don’t like night-time neon, they can run around in the sun where everything is happy. There are just more places for players to live and breathe.”

In addition to environments, the developer has fleshed out new new matches and instances. There’s also a new system that allows players to seamlessly jump from the city and straight into battle. “We’ve built out our levels now so you can play almost any game type on any map,” Krasnov added. “We want players to be able to play what map they want with what game type they want. So it’s just more maps, more content and getting ready for launch.”

“This is a game about skill. This isn’t a game about leveling up.“

Another part of CrimeCraft that’s received some tweaking is the story. Senior content producer Mike Donatelli, the former content design lead for Warhammer Online, has been helping to build out the content for CrimeCraft. “On the story end and on the itemization end, he’s been really key in getting all of our loot tables done and itemization in place,” Krasnov said, “as well as bringing those kind of persistent story elements and world-building stuff right into our game — which is awesome because we didn’t have that previously.”

He continued, “We’ve now built an over-arcing story structure about the gangs and the players and how that’s going to work out. We know how it’s going to start and how it’s going to progress. We want us to help gangs grow and brand those gangs within our world to give player identity a big push in our story.”

With all the emphasis on character customization and player identity within the game, I couldn’t help but think of two of the “three C’s” that competing crime MMO All Points Bulletin is focusing on — “creativity” and “celebrity.” I asked Krasnov what he thought about Realtime Worlds‘ title and its similar themes.

“APB, from what I understand, is more of a full-featured MMO than we are, and we’re not trying to be full-featured MMO,” he said. “We just really want to be a solid shooter with good character customization and building tools with solid social community aspects. APB only has 100 people per server. We have 1500. To be fair, I haven’t seen anything besides the trailer. Their character customization is amazing, and outside of that, I just think that we’re a very, very different game.”

But it’s not only APB that the makers of CrimeCraft have to worry about. On the show floor at E3, there were a handful of other games — Global Agenda, The Agency, Fallen Earth — all trying to convince me that their MMO shooter was the right one for me.

“We’ve kind of our own little place in that we’re more of a shooter than those games,” Krasnov contended. “What we’re doing right now is making sure we have the community tools and the content ready and we’re making a push to get this into the competitive shooter space.”

In fact, Krasnov explained that CrimeCraft is, first and foremost, a shooter. “We take our shooter above everything else and built some other elements into it,” he said. “As we made the game, we wanted complete parity between a level one player and level 15 in the actual shooter itself. We don’t want a level 15 wiping the floor with a level one character. A level 50 character with max gear can only be twice as good as a level one character, so we’re able to show the players that this is a game about skill. This isn’t a game about leveling up.”

“We want to introduce the FPS players… to all of the great character-building content that MMOs deliver and put that into their world in a way that makes sense.“

The company also plans to run their own tournaments and have a robust community site that displays in-game stats. Krasnov said that they’re giving players the tools to judge their skills and place it on leaderboards with the “reputation system,” a rating that shows how good the player and his/her gang is in the game. Based on that, players will be rewarded with titles and special items. “I think because of that, we fit in the competitive shooter space, whereas those other games are more filling out the MMO space,” he reiterated. “We want to introduce the first-person shooter players, the Halo and Call of Duty 4 people to all of the great character-building content that MMOs deliver and put that into their world in a way that makes sense.”

Citing the RPG aspects in Call of Duty 4, Krasnov thought that adding these elements was more a natural progression for the shooter, and that a game like CrimeCraft is the next logical step. “We want to give players the tools to plan their event, get right into matches, do their gang wars type stuff but also have a crib to hang out in and decorate,” he said. “There are cool things that are in MMOs that I think shooter fans just haven’t really been party to before this.”

With all this focus on appeasing shooter players, I wondered if the developers had to compromise any of the MMO features that were being put into the game. Krasnov said MMO players needn’t worry. He revealed that Chris Behrens, another Warhammer Online content designer, had revamped the crafting system, something that MMO gamers will appreciate. “We’re now almost as in-depth as EVE Online‘s crafting system but it’s still very accessible for the first-person shooter crowd,” he said. “One thing we’re doing is that gangs must pick a craft type. We’re playing with the dynamics of the auction house so that gangs will be able to corner the market on certain things… so we’re going to start seeing rivalries and some cool economic stuff for that.”

With Vogster having both shooter and MMO gamers in mind, it seems that the main barrier to entry now is the fact that CrimeCraft is only available on the PC. “We understand that we’d be a very good fit for consoles,” Krasnov said with a smile. “It’s something we’re looking into.”

CrimeCraft will be released on August 25 in Best Buy stores and via digital distribution.

MMORPG-APB E3 Video

What’s the game about? Calling APB “online multiplayer cops and robbers” might be selling it a bit short. It’s more like “massively multiplayer cops, bounty hunters, SWAT teams, car thieves, arsonists, murderers and robbers who all moonlight as fashion designers, auto detailers, and tattoo artists.”

MMORPG-APB and EA

We knew that Realtime Worlds, the company behind the urban crime MMO All Points Bulletin would have something to announce and show at E3 2009, we just weren’t sure of what to expect. That announcement came today at the Electronic Arts press conference. Imagine our surprise when Realtime Worlds creative director Dave Jones (who you may know as the creator of GTA and Crackdown) appeared on stage to announce that EA will be publishing All Points Bulletin. The announcement was followed up with a rather stunning trailer, depicting all manner of urban badasses. Tattoos. Fast cars. Lots of guns. Criminals and Enforcement fighting for the streets in a vast, open urban environment. The game will accommodate 10,000 players per world, divided into 100 player district maps. If you’re a fan of games like GTA and Saint’s Row, you will be blown away by All Points Bulletin.

All Points Bulletin has a newly revamped site, with screenshots and a game features page, and now hosts an APB video podcast from the developers. The game is slated for a PC release in early 2010.