Dave Jones, head of Scottish game development studio Real Time Worlds, had a new MMO, his first MMO, to show off at one of the most packed sessions of all of this year's Game Developers Conference. The website of curse reported the details of this new MMO: All Points Bulletin.
San Francisco. Dave Jones, head of Scottish game development studio Real Time Worlds, had a new MMO, his first MMO, to show off at one of the most packed sessions of all of this year's Game Developers Conference. He was showing "APB" a cops and robbers MMO in the works for, I assume for PC (Jones didn't confirm for sure; and, after the session, Phil Harrison told me he was only in attendance out of curiosity).
So who needs an MMO from the makers of "Crackdown"?
Anyone who is interested in an MMO without a grind and who wants to play one set in something like the real world. Those are two of the priorities Jones highlighted at the beginning of his 45-minute presentation.
"I want to replace geek with chic," he said, though later admitting he had multiple level-70 "World of Warcraft" characters. In his MMO, experience points, do not belong. In his game, there is no leveling up. There's just a lot of character customization and lots of shooting.
Jones' talk really was about eye candy, though. The designer's voice became background sound to a series of impressive videos that left the crowd awed. Several of the videos features "APB"'s character-creation tool, which is designed to ensure that every player can create a unique character. The proofs of that concept were a scarred Asian gangster and then a geek squad of star game designers Richard Garriott, Shigeru Miyamoto, Peter Molyneux, and Warren Spector.