APB Roadmap

Hi everyone,

Today, I'm going to attempt to outline our Roadmap and approach, so you guys can see our priorities for what we're working on.
This is a little overdue, and I apologize for that. I gave what I thought was a decent overview of the APB Roadmap on the Q&A, but since then several players have expressed that they would like to see something a bit more formal.
I'm going to divide the Roadmap into Projects. Some of these occur in parallel using different teams and team members, but I'm going to list them in chronological order here.
As a side note, most of this early development focuses on PC for a number of reasons. APB console currently has a different publisher, so we have to jump through some hoops when submitting those builds to Microsoft and Sony. That slows things down. But more importantly, we're trying to align the PC version with the console versions to consolidate everything on Unreal 3.5. That means that the bulk of the work is focused on PC.

Project #1: Infrastructure (1.19)We're about halfway through this project. It's everything we feel we need to get out of the way before diving into Unreal 3.5.
Version 1.19.5 (PC Only)
For the month of May and June, we've been focusing on cleaning out the cobwebs. It took a little bit of time just to get a PC build through QA and out the door properly. This version focused on eliminating as many of the cheat opportunities in the game.
- Integration with new client-side Anti-cheat
- Some exploit fixes (coming up in the next patch)
Version 1.19.6 (PC Only)
This version focuses on some quality of life changes for players.
- Fixes to networking to help lag
- Overall weapon balance pass
- Fixes to Friends system
- Update to visual design of ARMAS to help with navigation
- Dropping unpopular items from ARMAS
Version 1.19.7 (PC Only)
This version focuses on some quality of life changes for players.
- New Trade System for players to move items and money back and forth without getting scammed
Version 2.1.0 (Consoles Only)
We need to do some basic console SDK upgrades that have to be completed before we can submit any new changes. Our goal is to get this out of the way in July.
Notes on Project #1:
We also plan on supporting Two-Factor Authentication in this Project.

Project #2: Unification (2.2)This project focuses on bringing the PC version up to Unreal 3.5, and then optimizing and adding some features to the console versions. Some of this work will start in July.
Version 2.2
There is quite a bit here that I'm not going to specifically list. This version focuses on the remaining bits of Unreal 3.5 for PC. But it also includes:
- Fix crashes on console related to memory handling
- Fix level optimizations
- Fix bad frame rate for dynamic lights / night lights / day night cycle
- Fix level collision meshes
- Add music studio to PC/console for Unreal 3.5
Notes on Project #2:
It looks like we will be dropping support for Windows Vista when we upgrade APB PC to Unreal 3.5. Microsoft officially stopped supporting Vista in April 2017, so it just isn't worth the extra development time for us.

Project #3: Critical Mechanics / Minor Content (2.2.1)This isn't as far out as you think, but we have some content planned including progression changes, 1 new gun and 1 new vehicle.

Alongside all of this, our 2nd team is working on Unreal 4. This will not be a short project, but it has lots of milestones along the way. We are initially focused on getting the third person shooter mechanics of APB up and running in one of the existing districts. From there we'll start layering on customization and other systems.
I plan on doing regular updates to this Roadmap, and hopefully a dev blog to show off things we're excited about.

Thanks,
Matt

The Development Road Map

In our effort to "hyper-communicate" about what we are working on, today we have released the Development Road Map (also reachable as a tab on top of this blog page).

At the moment it only has the high level public items we are working on for the next 30 days (and a lot of low level details which are not yet published). However, later this week we are going to expand  include all the cool long-term features that we are working on, such as Clan Warfare, Asylum, Racing etc. which really will open the game up to a whole new set of experiences.

Instead of answering the same questions (and quite frankly - zany conspiracy theories) over and over again on forums and on the blogs, we figured we'd rather publish all the ongoing work in one place, so if you have any concerns or constructive suggestions, hopefully the most common issues (lag, queues etc.) are addressed as ToDo items in the Road Map; for example the upcoming Firewall rebuild happening this week in the EU, the new ISP peer and IP provider we are adding next week to improve latency for EU players, the launch of the CBAK (Closed Beta Appreciation Kit), the launch of car kits, the new matchmaking and the new district recommendation items.

 So - while the current list is just a taste of what we are hoping to share, at minimum our aspiration is to NOT promise things "soon" Wow-style, nor on "Valve-time"  but instead the plan is simply to share things that we feel comfortable promising within some reasonable time frame. Will we ever miss a date? You'becha. And occasionally we will beat a date or two by getting there a tad early. But the general development direction should certainly be very clear from the roadmap itself.