APB Reloaded 1.30 (64-Bit) Thoughts

Another revival of APB Reloaded they said. Personally I don’t really think so.

For those who’ve never heard of APB, it’s an action MMO third person shooter with cops and criminals. This game has originally released back in 2010 with total budget counting over $100,000,000 which makes this game one of the most expensive games in history (Wikipedia).

First let me go back to 2018 when this game was acquired by Little Orbit (previously known for large titles like Barbie Dreamhouse Party and Kung Fu Panda: Showdown of Legendary Legends for several Nintendo consoles) with promises that they will upgrade the game to UE3.5, upgrade the anti-cheat & actually work on the game, compared to the previous owners - GamersFirst. First few months after they took over were pretty good, people got their hopes up, our beloved game is finally coming back after all these years (me being one of them). Sure Matt¹ communicated in the beginning, but slowly but surely the communication died out. Let me skip some years into the future and go to the year 2022. I don’t think we’ve heard much from Matt¹ that year. Well we did a bit in January, he showed us the APB Roadmap for the year 2022. Roadmap that stated that the UE3.5 upgrade is not happening and that they will focus on the live version of the game instead - upgrade the game to 64-bit, to solve several issues with the inner workings of the game. (and we got a weekly maintenance announcement and a couple of reused holiday events that we’ve all seen already). Now we are at the end of 2022, another year of silence passed… People from the community got concerned what has happened, so they wrote a pretty extensive open letter to the CEO. I must say I was quite surprised how both sides acted, the letter was well written and Matt has acknowledged that he’s in “mud”. It looked like we are getting somewhere, again… At the end of the CEO’s AMA Stream, he showed us a test build of the 64-bit port.

420th Revival of APB - One month later, and we got a public beta test of the 64-bit release, it looked and played exactly the same as the preview that he has showed us on the AMA stream. They promised us that 64-bit will fix the biggest issue with the game, the one minute stutter that’s connected to the garbage collection dumping. Well, they already failed us here. The game is still stuttering, but not as often, most likely due to a raised memory ceiling. The performance compared to the 32-bit version was much better, but there’s a caveat to it, even 40 minutes in an action district would slice your frames in half, forcing you to restart the game to have playable frames again. To be honest not many people played the open beta. The beta was hosted for about a week. You may ask why only a week? Well… they have pushed the beta version to the live version of the game with all the flaws I’ve mentioned above. I thought it was a joke, but they were serious.

We will see where this game heads, so far I don’t really like the direction.