APB Reloaded open beta date

By Robert Purchese Published 3 May, 2011

GamersFirst's revival revs up.

The open beta for APB Reloaded - the re-commissioned and free to play APB - will begin on 18th May.

But there's a good chance of getting an invite before then, providing you do two things: create a GamersFirst account and submit your details to the APB newsletter sign-up page.

GamersFirst is the developer that pulled APB from the Realtime Worlds wreckage. The aim is for APB Reloaded to get running in basic form - i.e. have a working micro-transaction shop - and be built upon thereafter.

"There are still a few important features that are not yet in the game," noted GamersFirst boss Bjorn Book-Larsson on the APB Reloaded blog - "new skill rating system [being] probably the most critical, and skill-based district segmentation and progression."

"[Also,] various tweaks to spawning, but those will be added as we move along, and likely some of the new ones will be there before Open Beta."

GamersFirst also mentioned full credit refunds for people helping test the micro-transaction store, plus character restoration for people with old APB heroes. You'll get an email about what you can reclaim.

There was a message for cheaters, too.

"It keeps baffling us that people are cheating in one moment and then paying for premium - and then continuing cheating," shrugged Book-Larsson. "Seems really odd, given the amount of money you will be risking for something that literally only will help you aim.

"We have on purpose not kicked hackers for over a week to monitor what they are doing. That clearly will change. One semi-famous aimbot site realised that we had caught a slew of their users over the weekend (though we did so silently), then they stopped their own hack, and then earlier today re-enabled it. Sigh: when will they ever learn?

"Anyway," he added, "before Open Beta we will perform various changes that will be good for the game and bad for the aimbotters. Long-term we have a more radical solution to the issue, which we will share when it's ready."

APB 1.0 - the game that ruined Realtime Worlds.

Picture of Robert.

About Robert Purchese

Bertie is Eurogamer's Senior Staff Writer. When he's not hunting down news stories he's often found playing with his kids or gabbling about fantasy games and strange online worlds. @Clert on Twitter.

Read more articles from Robert by visiting the Robert Purchese archive page.

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Comments (8) Latest comment 1 year ago

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  • Ryze #1 1 year ago

    Interested.

    I wonder what they can improve? CONTROLLER SUPPORT, PERHAPS?

  • trjp #2 1 year ago

    err - the last Beta is probably the biggest factor in it's failure, in that it gave people adequate time to see there wasn't really a game in there worth playing...

    Having another Beta seems kinda ironic...

  • adofessex #3 1 year ago

    I think running another beta is to test out their own modifications and to give those who enjoyed the idea of the game, but not the gameplay, a chance to re-evaluate it.

  • Zapatero #4 1 year ago

    I gather aimbots are imposible to run on World of Tanks due to it being run exclusively from the server - would that not be the solution for APB?

    (Just to say I'm a complete dolt at understanding the technicalities, so I could just be revealing my big fat naive side)

  • Crea #5 1 year ago

    @zapatero

    You've basically got two extremes - client-authoritative or server-authoritative. In the former, the game client is trusted. This gives the best player experience because the client can instantly respond to player commands without delay, but obviously leaves you wide open to a variety of hacks and cheats. Server-authoritative is the other extreme. The client cannot change game state, merely sends input and other data to the server which does the necessary calculations and returns update state to each client. Games like Eve are more or less completely server authoritative, and the loss in responsiveness is mitigated by the design of the gameplay. In a twitch-based game like APB, this kind of pure server-based gameplay couldn't really be tolerated - it would kill the feel of the action.

    You can have have systems where the client is permitted to change player state, but can be corrected if the server checks and determines that something is amiss - things like client prediction, where the client moves the player immediately upon command, so the game feels responsive to the player, but the server may correct the player's position so you get the occasional jump. Games like WoW initially actually checked very little and progressively added more and more checks to player state as hacks appeared - you had a kind of 'semi-trusted' model where they basically gradually ramped up the verifications the server did on player movement over time, though spells and combat was obviously server-authoritative. The more checks the server does, the more costly the game becomes to run as you can run fewer players on a given bit of hardware.

    I'd guess that they won't ever move to a completely server-authoritative model for things like aiming, too expensive, too severe an effect on player handling, but I'm sure they have tricks up their sleeve to combat hacks.

  • Sir_nilo #6 1 year ago

    It really sucks. I'm in the Closed Beta and I can't stand it. It is a TORTURE!

  • Zapatero #7 1 year ago

    Thanks for the words Crea. And the booming headache ;)

  • Stratix #8 1 year ago

    Thanks for the info Crea, that made an interesting read. I remember the early days of Vanilla wow, watching some dude dashing round the whole of Mulgore at the speed of light, and I had no idea what was going on!

    I have to ask, are you the iSeries Crea?

    @ Sir_nilo

    Shame you are not liking the beta, I would be interested to learn why?

    The bit I disliked most about the RTW version was that higher level players ran around with masses of upgrades and were unbeatable by anyone who didn't have them, now they have changed upgrades to modifications with downsides and they are no way near as overpowered.