The First Annual San Paro Egg Hunt

(Warning: Egg puns in the following blog post)

It’s Easter, which means it’s time for an egg-straordinary and egg-citing San Paro event! This year we’re pulling out all the stops to try and give you the most egg-cellent Easter we can, in a two week egg-stravaganza from March 20th to April 3rd. We’re giving every player the chance to win a customizable Animal Suit and Rabbit Head hat in our in-game Egg Hunt Event, and we're adding eggs-essively brilliant Easter content to ARMAS in the way of an Easter Egg Weapon Skin and an eggs-travagant Chicken Costume!

The Chicken Head mask (bundled with the Animal Suit) will only be available from ARMAS, so you can finally be the Baddest Motherclucker in the city!

 

All you need to do is log into the game and go into either Financial or Waterfront. Then find one of the Bunnies walking around the city, mug them by pressing your interact key (usually F), and take their eggs to your nearest Faction Contact. You’ll hit five stars as soon as you finish ‘interacting’ with Mr. Bunnyface, so you’ve gotta run if you’re going to get to your contact before someone takes you down and steals your eggs! It’s sure to be egg-splosive! Killing Mr. Bunnyface doesn’t make him drop his eggs though, so you’ve got to make sure to go up to him and press F. And remember! Enforcers can mug him too so everyone gets to play!

Level 1 of the new role gets you the Easter Bunny Suit. Level 2 gets you the Easter Bunny Head and level 3 gets you the ‘Easter Bunny’ Title!

Now, if you’ll egg-scuse us, we're off to compile an egg-saustive list of egg puns for future reference.

Welcome to the Future of APB Reloaded

At the beginning of 2013, we promised we’d take a lot more time to communicate what’s happening with APB Reloaded and our plans for the future. Starting March 2013, we’re going to make “Reloaded Day” the start of our Reloaded calendar year. In this blog post we’re going to share an overview of our plans for the year.

2012 was a massive year for Reloaded. We had a newly-launched game and all the associated teething issues that needed to be ironed out that we attacked with zeal - things like compatibility with thousands of different PC set-ups, launching localized versions in Russia and Brazil, and creating and managing in-game events for Valentine’s, Halloween, and Christmas to name a few.

For us, 2012 was the year of Consolidation – making sure everything worked, that the game was fun and that we were listening to your comments, suggestions and bug reports from the community. 2013 is the year of Delivery. With the game and our development systems improved and more advanced, we can look to delivering more new features and content; things that we all want to see, and that you've been asking for.

Everyone knows that game development is a very fluid process – new software and hardware is released all the time, new ideas are born, new, unforeseen challenges appear. Regardless of the challenges that all passionate game development teams face, our goal for 2013 is to do everything possible to deliver on planned updates, so long as they are highly polished and ready for our players.

New & Improved Features for 2013

Our ‘To Do’ list  for this year is pretty ambitious. Some projects are only in the design stage, but others are being coded as you read this. We’ll also be constantly working on performance, anti-hack measures, and bug fixes throughout the year.

So on to the good stuff! (Please note the list below is not in order of release or priority.)

Our major goals for 2013 are:

• Score system update
• New tutorial
• Brand new front-end design
• Mission re-vamp in mission districts
• Elective spawning
• New  contacts
• Asylum map with new game mode
• Threat segregation
• Joker Ticket activities in mission districts
• Smart district spin-up
• Re-designed HUD

“Settling the Score” (Version 11)

We’ll be releasing a few major updates throughout the year, the first of these being called “Settling the Score” (Version 11), set for an April release. This update will feature an improved District instancing mechanic, a new scoring system that balances arrests, kills and mission objectives, and a new way for players to choose their own spawn point after death. We’ll write a blog post with full details just before release.

ARMAS Marketplace Content

We have a small but talented team of artists constantly working on new content for the game. 

As we've already revealed in a concept teaser we’re working on an Enforcer Performance Kit for the Bishada, and of course we’re working on the Bishada Criminal Performance Pack too. There will also be some new clothing elements for both packs, and these will be revealed a short while before release. This is all a few months away, so consider this a very early sneak peek.

Special Events

We’ve had a lot of positive feedback about our in-game special events because they allow us to create some fun seasonal gameplay and rewards. We’ll be doing major events for the usual big holidays - Valentine’s, Easter, Halloween and Christmas – and there will be plenty of other stuff in between. Our next major holiday is Easter, and while we don’t want to reveal it all yet, let’s just say that you can expect to find a brand new character walking around the streets of San Paro.

We’ll continue to work on improving online game performance, update current anti-hack measures, pursue new possible anti-hack measures and destroy bug that may pop up throughout the year.

A Bright Future

Improving APB Reloaded is a continuing conversation with our community. We appreciate your feedback and we read every Forum, Facebook, and Twitter suggestion. We’ll continue to work on improving online game performance, update current anti-hack measures, pursue new possible anti-hack measures and destroy bug that may pop upthroughout the year.

So 2013 is the year of major updates, more content, and more communication. We appreciate your support, we hope you like what you've heard so far, and we look forward to seeing you in the game.

The History of Reloaded Productions

Before we take you on a journey through the history of our game development studio – Reloaded Productions, we would like to apologize for publishing this blog post a day late. We have been in crunch mode trying to get everything ready for Reloaded Day, especially all of the celebration gifts we mentioned in our previous blog. So without further ado, please join us for a stroll down memory lane …

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Back at the end of 2011, we finished up APB Reloaded’s open beta period and went live with the game. It was a pretty eventful time for us, and we’d like to share some stuff about what we’ve done in the last year and what that start-up was like for us.

While the initial development of APB happened in a huge multi-floor building in Dundee, the continued development of APB Reloaded has been taking place in a single floor building located in the bustling city center of Edinburgh. It started as a fairly spacious location, but in the last six months, as we’ve brought on more staff from around the world, we’ve found that it’s actually starting to get a little cramped! The pictures below show what the room looked like before we’d really moved in, and what the same space looks like right now.

You can see our audio, production, design and community departments. Qwentle, Scottomon, Jotunblut, Revoemag and Farfletched all share this area and it’s typically the loudest part of the office. To the right of the picture is where our artists are kept, which probably explains the sheer number of action figures that there are loitering in the area (‘they’re for anatomical research reasons only, honestly’). We keep the programmers in the background of the picture. Aphadon, StuartReloaded, Hezeki and Androvald are just a few of the programmers that we have on site. Over on the right behind the glass wall is the QA area where Funkadefunk, A3 Paper and Digitalbeeps keep an eye on features to make sure everything’s ticking as it should.

The last two years of APB Reloaded’s development could be described as a kind of ‘organized chaos.’ 

We’ve really gotten to grips with a lot of the unusual methods that were employed during APB’s original development. The last eighteen months have been all about us learning the framework of the game so the next year can be all about more fixes, more content and faster development. 

We’ve added a lot of content (six new Contacts, Fight Club, server performance fixes, environment changes, new Weapons, new Mods, new Vehicle Kits, more clothes), all while coming to terms with a huge game and codebase. Now that we’ve had time to get to know the systems that exist in the game , we have some very cool plans for the 2013 that we will tell you all about in our next blog post.

We’re really proud of what we’ve achieved with APB Reloaded. We have to make a lot of difficult decisions every week – which feature gets pushed to the next release, which assets to include in the next update, sugar or no sugar – but we feel strongly that we’ve done the best that we can and we’re in a fantastic position for the road ahead.

We’re really excited about the next twelve months and beyond and hope that you all are too. It’s great to see so many people that are so passionate about the game and it’s always heartening for a developer to have a dedicated and lively fan base. Thanks for reading and remember: tap fire the n-tec for greatest damage!

We asked our developers what their favorite moments of the last twelve months were: 

“I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you.” – Senior Systems Developer, U.N.C.L.E.

“Killing pumpkins! The squeaky laugh you got every time you killed one was great. The whole Asylum preview was really fun for me.” – QA Tester A3Paper.

“I think the highlight of my year was getting sent muffins in the mail from the SPCT. Muffins and brownies.” ‘So what you’re saying is that free food is the highpoint of your year?’ “Kind of, yeah.” – Androvald and Alistair, Game Programmer and Hosting Programmer respectively. 

“Does the time someone kicked a hole in the wall count? Okay then, how about when we went live on Steam?” – Revoemag.

“Staffing up with people from back in the day.” – Tim, Clothing and Character Artist.

“The CS ticket explaining in great detail what a camel-toe is, and then asking for one for their character.” – M, Head of Intelligence and Office Manager.

“Getting our clothing pipeline actually fixed so we can start turning out more clothing faster.” – SoleSurvivor, Lead Artist.

“Getting visual studio 2012 up and running. Performance boosts all round.” – Aphadon, Game Programmer.

“When the folks at Effigy News sent me a real life Joker box for Christmas. That was pretty much the best.” – Jotunblut, Community Manager.

“I have to say my favorite moment was basically everything that went on in the ‘Monte and Kogey’s Stupid Competition’ thread. There is no prouder moment for a developer than watching folk sacrifice themselves in formation just for the fun of it and because you are an egomaniac with too much time on your hands in the evening, a keyboard, and a varying list of whims with which to formulate your demands. It was fun, and the community availed themselves magnificently.” – MonteCristo.

“Late night totally sober community interaction.” –Qwentle, Lead Designer.

“My favorite moments of the last twelve months are not suitable for public consumption.” – Michael Boniface, Studio Manager.

Get Ready for Reloaded Day!

Hello from sunny Scotland to all our Reloaded fans! It’s time to kick-off the month of March with style AND substance as we share our plans for the year ahead and reward our loyal players.

March 7th is the birthday of the APB: Reloaded team and so we’ll be celebrating this as “Reloaded Day” with a whole week of free stuff and the best contests we've ever launched. We’ll also be blogging about the history of APB: Reloaded and what we’ll be doing in the future.

We’ll be giving away over 400,000 G1 Credits in total prizes with Kill and Customization Contests. The ‘Almost Famous’ customization contest gives you the chance to see your design in the game and featured on billboards across San Paro as the new Joker Industries spokes-model!

Other giveaways include an in-game party hat & streamer and FREE 3-DAY PREMIUM for everyone – you get Bonus XP, Bonus APB$, and 20% off purchases from the ARMAS Marketplace!

We wanted to come up with something to reward our long-term players so we've created totally unique Titles for Closed Beta Test and Open Beta Test players. We truly appreciate all the help in getting Reloaded started.

Thanks for all your support,

The Reloaded Team

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Upcoming Blog Posts

•  4^th March – “History of Reloaded” blog post.
• 7^th March – “Future of APB: Reloaded” blog post.

Reloaded Day ‘Kill-a-thon’

Duration: 00:01 hrs UTC Monday 4^th March 2013 to 23:59 hrs UTC Sunday 10^th March 2013.

This is a simple “Most kills wins” event. The top three players with the most unique kills in each world will win a prize (Mission and/or Fight Club Districts).

Top 3 players per World win:

• 1st Place – 40,000 G1 Credits
• 2nd Place – 20,000 G1 Credits
• 3rd Place – 10,000 G1 Credits

Winners will be announced week commencing 11^th March.

‘Almost Famous’ NPC Contest

Duration: 00:01 hrs UTC Monday 4th March 2013 to 23:59 hrs UTC Sunday 10th March 2013.

Design a new Joker Industries “Spokes-model” contact! Your character will be added to the game and will also appear on Joker Industries billboard ads throughout the game.

Design a character on your account and submit their image, character name and up to 750 word back story to the forum post. One entry per account, please see forum post for full rules.

The Top three creations as judged by the Reloaded Productions team will win:

• 1st Place – 40,000 G1 Credits + Character appears in game!
• 2nd Place – 20,000 G1 Credits.
• 3rd Place – 10,000 G1 Credits.

Winners will be announced week commencing 18th March.

Celebration Gifts

Free ‘Reloaded Day’ Party Hat and Streamer

Log-in to the game and automatically receive these two customizable in-game items for free.

Duration: 00:01 hrs UTC Thursday 7th March 2013 to 23:59 hrs UTC Sunday 10th March 2013.

Free 3 days Premium Account

Log-in to the APB: Reloaded ARMAS store during the offer period and enter the following code to receive a free 3-day duration Premium account:

ReloadedDay2013

Duration: 00:01 hrs UTC Thursday 7th March 2013 to 23:59 hrs UTC Sunday 10th March 2013. (3 days Premium begins when you enter the code during this period. Even if you enter the code on Sunday, you will receive the next three days as Premium).

Get the following benefits in-game:

• 20% discount in the Armas Marketplace.
• Up to a 90% bonus to all Contact Standing (XP) gains.
• 125% bonus to all APB$ (in-game currency) gains.
• 50% reduced cool down on activated abilities.
• Advanced access to customization suites (up to 100/50/50).
• Extended duration for free Armas trials.

Free Titles

Free in-game titles for players who have been with us since the Closed Beta and Open Beta days.

Duration: A promo code will be automatically delivered to qualifying players on Thursday 7th March, and is available to redeem until the end of this month. The code can be claimed by logging into Armas and going to the 'Redeem Code' page.

• “CBT Veteran” Character Title Unlock (Account Lifetime) 
• Closed Beta Players (First logged in before 23rd May 2011)
• “OBT Veteran” Character Title Unlock (Account Lifetime)
• Open Beta Players (First logged in 23rd May 2011 - 6th December 2011)

Many Cheers and Happy Birthday!