Saving APB

Boniface now heads up the Edinburgh studio, a hive of friendly passion and energy, littered with the playful detritus accumulated by most development environments and decorated with swathes of APB's striking artwork.

"When I first had a chat with GamersFirst it was with Bjorn last December," Boniface tells me at his desk in the open-plan office. "They'd just picked up the title. They'd secured some of the key developers. They approached me to ask about how to do things. I think there was a general feeling we'd keep it in the UK, but not necessarily Scotland.

"One of my first tasks when I came to the company was to do some analysis on whether we'd stay in Dundee or go to Dublin or Cambridge or somewhere else. Essentially what it came down to was that we feel there's a really good talent pool in Scotland. The ability to attract more talent was something we thought would be best kept here."

Finding staff who wanted to return to the project wasn't difficult, despite the game's disappointing reception on release.

"People left other companies to come back," the relaxed Scotsman explains. "I think what that shows is that the people who are working on the game now and many others who didn't rejoin but requested to do so, they showed a real passion for the game.

"One of the things that was really nice was that people were saying - 'I really want to to see this through, to get it out there and make it successful. Finish what we started and get the game where we wanted it to be. The enthusiasm for the product really drives it."

For me it's my first proper title so it means a lot to me. It's the same for a lot of the guys here. No one wants to see it stay the way it was in 2010

Scott Stevenson, production designer, Reloaded Productions

So why move south? Edinburgh is a fine city, but relocation always throws up problems. For Boniface, the matter was a simple as a fresh start.

"The reason behind moving to Edinburgh was that, although we felt that Dundee had a lot going for it, we could have even stayed in the same building, we wanted to make a clean break.

"We wanted to change our corporate identity; we're not RealTimeWorlds any more. It was a nice clean break to come down. Plus, being in the centre of Edinburgh, the transport links back and forth to the US are so much better.

"When Bjorn first came here in December, the snow had just hit. He got as far as Edinburgh and couldn't get any further!"

Paring a team of over 200 down by nearly 90 per cent is no easy task, however. Larsson is keen to highlight the importance of taking the right people, and of fitting them into the right roles.

"We were fortunate to find people from the original RTW crew who may have been frustrated under the old setup, and we then promoted them," says the CTO.

"Our production designer used to be the lead QA person. He'd spent years taking notes on how things should have been different. Essentially, when I met him the first time he rattled off a huge list of what he thought should have been different. Just an insane amount. We just said, maybe we should just hire you as a designer.

"It turned out to be a really good move because not only did he have extremely intimate knowledge of the product, he also had a lot of ideas that we were willing to try out. Things like weapon balancing, changing how cars drive and behave in the world. Visual effects around things like running and recoil."

That lead QA was Zak Littwin, now APB Reloaded's lead designer and eager evangelist. He plays a key role in fine-tuning the game's balance, defining the line between encouraging customers to spend money and making sure that players understand that the game is in no way 'pay to win', a mantra I hear repeated in almost every conversation I have at the studio. Across from Zak sits Scott Stevenson, production designer. He also rose through the ranks at Reloaded Productions, joining as a QA member and being promoted at Reloaded from the production role he held at Realtime.

He's pleased with the new arrangement, and makes it clear that the critics and the public weren't the only ones disappointed in the game's first launch.

"We're a much smaller team, the big benefit for us has been agility," he tells me. "We can just go, we don't like that, we're going to change it. For me it's my first proper title so it means a lot to me. It's the same for a lot of the guys here. They put a lot of years of effort into it. No one wants to see it stay the way it was in 2010."