APB Free to Play

Oh Man. All Points Bulletin, commonly called APB for short, is re-releasing as a free to play MMO shooter and will be publisher by GamersFirst. The game will relaunch as APB Reloaded The F2P game publisher bought up the APB assets from the now defunkt developer real-time worlds for a paltry sum. The game took some $50 million to develop, but GamersFirst bought up the rights to the game for less than $2.5 million. GamersFirst is best known for a handful of successful free to play games – their two most popular games are War Rock andKnight Online. Both games are fairly old now, but they still remain popular. APB isn’t the first “dead” game that GamersFirst bought up. They actually bought the license for 9Dragons once Acclaim Games shut down. The entire Acclaim Games story is quite funny – as they were bought by Playdom, but Playdom shut their entire website down within a month of buying the company. Needless to say, they got burnt.

According to the new APB Reloaded website – the game will be officially launching sometime in the first half of 2010. I think the entire APB concept was really neat. The idea of combing open world Grand Theft Auto environments with persistent world MMO / RPG elements sounds incredibly fun. APB is a game I never got a chance to play, as it was one of the few MMOs that didn’t have free trials. Nowadays, I play mostly free to play games, so I never actually bought APB. Even if I wanted to buy it, I had a small window to do it, as the game shut down within 2 months of launching. I think it’s one of the biggest flops in history. APB won’t be the first failed pay to play game going free to play though, Archlord used to be pay to play for its first year of release, but eventually became free to play

through Webzen and still remains F2P to date. RF Online went through the same release schedule. It launched as a pay to play game, but failed to attract a sizeable audience, so it went F2P. Even though both games aren’t huge successes, they are both still around today – they survived for years. So the whole F2P business model actually works. I think when The Lord of the Rings Online and EverQuest 2 announced that they will be going free to play, I knew F2P was for sure here to stay. Before that, I was merely speculating. Maybe Final Fantasy 14 will go Free to Play soon too.

Those who also like the APB concept, but don’t want to wait until APB releases could try that new browser based GTA style MMO – PoisonVille. The whole “Ville” bit reminds of FarmVille, PetVille, FrontierVille and all those other social games. I should mention – PoisonVille is by BigPoint and it most certainly is not a silly facebook game. The graphics are decent for a browser based game and it has some neat open world gameplay. In terms of content though, it’s quite disappointing. I’d actually hold off until APB relaunches as an F2P title, as PoisonVille has been a big disappointment. If you really want to try it though, I think you can use your SeaFight and Deepolis accounts to access it, as it’s by the same company – BigPoint.

Anyway – I’m waiting until APB releases. Anyone else pumped?

Where are all the Turn Based MMORPGs?

Turn based RPGs on the Playstation 2 were big business. Single player RPGs like Tales of Vesperia and Final Fantasy 13 on the Xbox 360 were fairly big games too. As an avid MMORPG gamer, I’m a bit disappointed that there are so few turn based MMORPGs available. I’ve looked for quite a while and I’ve only found a handful of decent ones. I think Atlantica Online from Ndoors is probably the best one. The game has great 3D visuals and a ton of playable characters. Like Sword 2 from GamersFirst, you can also control 3+ characters at once, which gives the game some unique dynamics. The only other remotely popular turn based MMORPG is Wonderland Online from IGG. It’s a 2D MMORPG with awful graphics. I actually like the 2D graphics in WonderKing and Grand Chase, but the visuals in Wonderland Online are bleh at best. Graphics are important, but its not a deal breaker for me. After all, one of the best MMORPGs if you ask me is Ragnarok Online from Gravity Interactive, and it doesn’t have very good graphics, especially compared to newer games like Iris Online from gPotato.

If you’ve never played either Atlantica Online or Wonderland Online do yourself a favor and play Atlantica Online. Of if you want to lower your exceptions before playing either, try Myth War 2 Online or Zodiac Online. Those are both pretty low tier turn based MMORPGs. WeMade Entertainment has Digimon Battle – which is also a pretty bad game. The only reason Digimon Battle is bad is its a really old MMORPG. The game is like 6+ years old. But if you were to only play ONE turn based MMORPG definitely make it Atlantica Online. I think Ndoors did a phenomenal job with it the game. It has some 10+ playable classes, top notch 3D graphics and a huge game world. I can’t imagine why there aren’t more games like it. Ndoors has proven that turn based MMORPGs can be successful – so why are so many game developers still releasing very generic 3D anime MMORPGs? Iris Online for example from gPotato is a really sleek game, but it brings nothing new to the table. The same thing applies to Zentia from ChangYou. It’s a fairly solid title, but it brings nothing new to the table either. I had a chance to play Loong: The Power of the Dragon from Gamigo the other day and I was really surprised by the game’s visuals. Too bad even though the gameplay is fluid, there aren’t really any special gameplay mechanics which would make the game unique.

One thing I can’t quite figure out is why game developers keep churning out MMOFPS games. Ijji just released Genesis A.D last week on Nov 8 and plans on releasing their World War 2 themed Karma: Operation Barbarossa later in the year. I think aside from fantasy MMORPGs the second most popular genre is MMOFPS games. Sci-fi MMORPGs are probably less popular than turn based MMORPGs, as the only sci-fi MMORPGs I can think of are RF Online and Megaten. That’s it.

Anyway guys, I know I got super side tracked with this one, but I’d like to see more turn based MMOs out there. More specifically, more games like Atlantica.