We’ll be having sales across all of our Platforms in celebration of our console releases and Memorial Day (US Holiday). For PC users, starting on Friday, May 19th (5 PM PDT) the Armas store will see up to 50% off on items and a 25% Instant Bonus for PayPal purchases of G1C (see forum post for more information). Console Users will have up to 30% off of store purchases.
Xbox One and PS4 performance updates
The PS4 has seen patch and hot-fix updates to clear up the recent crash issues which has improved the PS4 experience dramatically. We are still working on the very latest patch and are aiming to launch it this week. With the work on PS4 mostly completed we are now aiming to push those fixes out to the XB1 as soon as the fixes pass cert for XB1.
The team has also been working with our network provider to mitigate effects of the ongoing DDOS attacks that have been happening since our console soft launch. When we switch to mitigation, players may experience additional lag or stuttering in game play.
PC – NEW Summer Survival Event, with user design input
We really appreciate our PC players hanging in there while we have been obligated to spend most of our very limited team working on the final fixes to the console versions. Now that we are finally out of the bulk of the console work, in order to get the PC players a whole new experience with the team we have in the fastest time possible, we have focused on creating a whole new event for the summer and we’ll be gathering feedback from the players on the forum threads on how we should change or improve the event as we go along. This event will need a new name and logo (feel free to make suggestions on the forum thread) and any other feedback you’d like to provide as we work on it. The goal of the event (after taking player input) is to consider it for a new permanent game mode if it proves to be popular. Based on similar events in the past (our Halloween event with the Headless Horseman’s Army) and seeing the success of Battlegrounds and H1Z1 Survival mode, we realized we have almost all the ingredients in APB to create a gang-land survival game, and we want to your help to make this event as fun as possible.
Here’s a description of the survival event. Numbers in (parenthesis) are subject to change and will be part of the user testing, and forum feedback.
Game Start
Requires at least (10) people in the district. After this, the survival event starts at the end of a (5 minute) timer. During this count-down new players can join the district until the timer hits 0. If at any point (70 players) enter the district it will be considered “full” and the timer will drop to (30 seconds) for immediate match countdown and start.
Limitation: You can only enter survival districts at the start of the round. Once a certain amount of players is reached or the timer hits 0, the district will lock and no longer be available for entry. If you get killed, you will be able to instantly join a new survival district.
Game Goal and Design
Be the last player standing (ends at 1 player left alive and declared the winner). If you die you will be ranked in accordance with your “death number.” In the future we will create special awards for the best repeat survivors.
Teams: Free for all.
Event UI:
Right top: Players left.
Notice timer: Block becoming unsafe.
Objective text:
In Safe area, stay alive and kill
In (soon to be) Dangerous Area, get to a safe area
While active, the play field will shrink to match the shrinking number of players. This will happen every (70 to 180 seconds) automatically, or (60 seconds) once there are less than (3) players alive per current safe block. Blocks will be selected based on distance from the end-block, with some randomization involved. The status of the blocks will be available on the map. Also the block’s walls will be visualized differently between dangerous and safe areas. Areas that are not part of any block are always considered dangerous.
In dangerous areas players will take (200 damage per second) after a (10 second) delay. When there is only one block left, the “tiebreaker” to get a final survivor is that everyone left will take an additional (10 damage per second) until there is only one player left.
The end-block will not be known to players until the end, and the end-block is randomly selected at the start of the event.
In the first version of the event, your “Survival Number” will be shown, and we will run promotions and giveaways for those with the lowest average survival number over some event period (this is also subject to the design of the event).
Possible addition: Resource Management
A big part of most survival type games is match-length resource management. In order to do that we are considering starting players off with a basic weapon (potentially the players’ secondary weapon), and only unlock their regular weaponry through pick-ups. The ammunition in these weapons will be limited, and players need to find ammunition pick-ups. Ammunition cannot be purchased at joker vending machines and/or ammunition during the match, or these items could provide a limited amount of ammunition instead. Weapon drops would be enabled in this mode so other players can pick up the weapons you drop. Weapon and ammo drops do not respawn.
Conclusion
If this event is successful (especially after initial input from the players), we hope to turn this (or some variation of this mode) into a new permanent mode alongside APB’s normal Mission Mode, Fight Club and now potentially Survival.
We look forward to your feedback and ongoing tweaking to these systems for the PC game. We also expect that survival mode will trigger some unusual behaviors in APB; for example since you can drive around with a buddy in your car shooting out the window, these kinds of collaborative built in mechanics means there will be some advantages to collaborating during survival mode at the start of the game, even though in the end you are bound to kill each other. There is a good chance APB’s version of survival will have its own flavor with some unique tension between collaboration and competition. In fact, we may want to explore this dynamic even further by encouraging initial collaboration turning into end-game competition.
Innova Migration
We’ve moved Innova to their own world (separate from our current EU world) since the Innova devs introduced weapons that we feel are imbalanced. Once ready, Innova players will be able to create a Gamersfirst.com account and transfer their character(s) over.
Once we’re ready, the Innova developers will send out an email blast containing a six-digit code that will be used to verify ownership of their APB Innova-account on Gamersfirst.com. If Innova players don’t receive a code for some reason they will be able to retrieve it with send-to-email functionality (sent to the email they registered Innova-APB with).
Note: We’ll be testing the Innova Migration on the OTW servers in the upcoming weeks.
Contagion Event
Previously this event was held to introduce new weapon into APB. We’ll be using this event to have some variation in events in the game and provide players with a way to win some of the RAF rewards that are no longer being used. The only way to participate in the event is by being infected (killed) by the designated weapon. Once you’ve been killed by the weapon, you’ll receive a temporary version of the weapon and then you infect / kill xx amount of players with it to receive a title. If you have suggestions for the Epidemic event titles, please post them to the forum thread.
Engine Upgrade
Now that we’ve successfully launched a version of the new Engine on the console platforms, the majority of the general engine upgrade bugs relating to game-play and rendering are fixed. Right now a full regression is being done on the PC to confirm fixes. Platform specific optimizations are being evaluated and ported to PC - including multi-threaded rendering and GPU texture generation for customization which the PC version has never had before.
Once we are done with the first pass we expect to release a new engine version that can be tested by the community on a larger scale than we can achieve internally (especially with more versions of GFX cards and CPU varieties). With the feedback from that testing, we will fix the remaining issues and finalize the engine upgrade release. This all takes time and we appreciate the patience our community has shown while we work on the Engine Upgrade and bringing it all back to the PC.
