GDC: "Players as content" for APB

At a session during the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco the boss of Crackdown developer, Realtime Worlds, unveiled some of the motivations behind its forthcoming MMO, APB.

Dave Jones, the man behind Lemmings and Grand Theft Auto, showed the audience during his session several videos of his team's work-in-progress title, and explained that he wanted to make something different from the prevailing MMO mechanic.

Particularly he envisaged "players as content", pointing to one of the most successful online games of all time as a role model - Counter-Strike: Source - a title that has "no persistence, no progression, no customisation, just the most polished mechanic ever."

That view is what has led the APB team to discard the "grind" against "Artificial Incompetence" traditionally found in MMO titles, and put the players' competition with each other front and centre.

The gameplay videos demonstrated the Crackdown-like environments, as well as showing off the detailed character creation model.

APB (short for All Points Bulletin) is being developed in partnership with Korea's Webzen, in which you choose between playing as a criminal or somebody out to catch them, and is due for release this year.