![]() ![]() This is an area that I have been holding back since we took over because I felt it would be a waste of money to attract players to a game that just wasn't ready for them. The launch of APB 2.1 needs to be accompanied by real marketing. I hope to do progress posts to share more details as we go. I have built a very aggressive timeline, shared it with my leads, and we'll get started on Feb 1st. Additionally, we are about a quarter of the way through a massive effort to go line-by-line through every inch of the code and identify problematic areas. After weeks of sifting through resumes and candidates, we are now ready to move forward. But, after the holiday, I made this our #1 priority. To that end, we are in the process of signing deals with some Unreal 3.5 consultants that specialize in performance captures, identifying bottlenecks, and recommending specific optimizations that will work for the APB engine.Īdmittedly, these kinds of resources have been very challenging to find in the past, which is why we haven't done this before. ![]() We have done 5 Open Beta tests, and while there has been a lot of hard work and some progress, it's not enough to meet our goals. ![]() Another large overhaul of our online storeįor APB 2.1, it's become obvious that we don't currently have all the resources we need in-house to properly evaluate and solve the remaining issues.Phasing R&D and further matchmaking upgrades.New car, new guns, new clothing - all immediately available in the in-game Joker Store.Many of you have seen these roadmap items before, but this year I also wanted to share more information on how we expect to get there. Now, here is what we plan to do about it. We still have a major project that cost the company millions of dollars held up in litigation, and while the APB playerbase grew dramatically over the summer, we ended the year at an all-time low concurrency. In addition, 2020 was a difficult year for Little Orbit overall. I think players would have tolerated that better had the new engine come out, but to-date we still haven't launched APB 2.1, and we haven’t seen the progress we were hoping for in our Open Betas. With our focus entirely on the new engine and on the transforming our store, we were largely unable to produce new content or new events. It would be disingenuous to talk about the good without acknowledging the bad, so I also took a moment to review some of our problem areas. We’ve come a long way, but there is still a lot to do with APB. And we added ways for players to earn Joker Tickets to finally make the game truly free to play with all content available to all players.We removed Joker Mystery Boxes and created an entirely new rental system for getting Legendary guns with Joker Tickets.We revamped how some purchases are delivered to player accounts so they don’t need to be kept around when not in use.We added bundled items to the Joker Store that automatically adjust their price based on items you already own.Instead of forcing players to go to our website for paid purchases, we launched the in-game Joker Store and added hundreds of items for purchase, including guns, clothing, and vehicles.We formalized Joker Tickets as our in-game paid currency.So, with sincere gratitude for your guys’ patience, let’s take a look at the results of my deep-dive.īefore I jump into the roadmap itself, I want to briefly look back at some of the tasks we did accomplish last year. I can assure you that none of those things are happening or in the works. As a result, I am certain there are those who immediately leapt to one of several conclusions: (1) the company is shutting down, (2) the company has been acquired, or (3) the game is being shutdown. Truthfully, I've been so busy that I haven't had the time to sort through my forum inbox, read forum messages, or do more than the occasional retweet. I am not normally absent from the community for what has now been over a month. That led to quite a bit more research and planning sessions which in turn further delayed this post. ![]() We hit so many road bumps last year and the year before that, I felt I owed it to the players to take a long hard look at the game and to be 100% honest about its future. When I came back, I immediately jumped into organizing the roadmap post for 2021, but after reviewing my first draft I felt like it was mostly lip service with no actual tactical plan behind it. I chose to do something I rarely do, which is largely disconnect from the computer. It started with a bit of extra time off after the holiday to try and decompress from an exhausting year. This year, I'm substantially later getting this organized than I wanted to be. For the last 2 years, I've done a State of the Game or Roadmap post for APB. ![]()
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