APB's Second Life

I think the initial game had a lot of great elements, but a lot of things like the monetisation strategies and the way the progression and balancing worked felt out of context. So I think that once we address some of those items and also look at some of the more subtle things people actually do in the game... Again, we don't really care about the 30 day sales cycle, which is very much a retail-driven thing. We expect to present this game to a whole new audience who have never even seen it. The initial round was people who were really excited and hardcore players, and I think this round will be a much wider audience. We'll figure it out if our presumptions are right and the modifications we are proposing will actually address some of the core concerns from first time around.

Yes, patch 142. They had an add-on patch that addressed some of the balance issues, but beyond that we intend to modify several of the key components of the game. So I think it's gonna be a very interesting experience. [Laughs].

We publish games strictly for North America, South America, Europe and the Middle East - our biggest audience tends to be in Western and Eastern Europe. The US and UK certainly have a large portion of the audience but as a percentage it's relatively smaller because you have such a penetration of game consoles in North America in particular. The US audience is not the traditional audience for PC gaming.

But in general consoles are very expensive in other parts of the world. If you go to a place like Turkey, a PS3 is $1000. And other markets tend to buy PCs first, because it's generally thought of as an educational tool. So we think this game will map just like our other games do, which is that we have a large audience, for instance, for War Rock in Germany and Italy. It does have a strong following in the US, but on a percentage basis it's lower than console titles like Medal of Honor or Call of Duty. For us, we think this title will fit the same pattern - it might have more success in the US because some of the enthusiast gamers there will be more interested in this title than some of the last-generation titles that we currently have in the US.

That's true. In its current form, the game's not gonna work for our entire audience - it will for a portion of the audience, and we're okay with that. We also have to keep in mind that, if we think of this as a more long-term project, by the time we get the game back out again and as hardware of the general public improves year by year, at some point the game specs are not going to be that daunting.

As well as that, one of the plans we have in the mid to long term is to have a lower end version of the game and a higher end version of the game.

Yes, we can have a client that's almost a starter edition, and then we can have what we could call an enthusiast edition for those who are willing to endure much longer downloads and a lot more effort.

Well, we're always open to creating almost complementary titles which would connect with the game itself. I think this particular codebase is very, very demanding - it's very high-end and very complicated, so I think it would be hard to do direct ports to other platforms. It's a technical possibility in the future for sure - I don't think it's in the initial year at least.

Well you could, but the challenge is that that code is very tightly integrated into the current engine. It might be harder to take that out and put it into other games than it is almost to take other game modes and put them into the game. One of the things that we're definitely looking at doing is expanding the modes, so right now you have the sort of open, big city, shooting and driving mode, but there are other ones that we have considered, including a collaborative mode and sort of session-based or clan based modes. So you can have other kinds of maps and modes as part of the same game.