In the second part of our interview with Realtime Worlds boss David Jones, he explains how APB's 100-person multiplayer in a persistent world will work, his plans for expanding the game after release – does your clan against 1000 zombies sound fun? – and how his company has had to transform itself to produce this big, ambitious game.

You can read part one here.

In APB, you’re dynamically assigning missions to players as they move through the game world. It’s a big change for games, moving from a designer deciding what’s going to happen to a designer creating a procedural system.
Yes, we use a lot of blunt instruments in game design just because technology hasn’t been able to afford us new ways of doing this stuff, but that’s all changing now. So I’m pretty excited about how rapidly it’s changing and what we can do.

How big a part in APB’s development has creating this system taken?
Pretty big. We’ve also looked at missions changing dynamically as well. Typically, missions have five or six stages and initially we had a list for players of what they would be doing next. But we actually change the missions now dynamically on the fly. For example, if they’re too far away from each other for some reason. In real life, you wouldn’t assign a chase to people that are three miles away from each other – you’d find someone closer.

So you have to think in terms of common sense reality?
It surprises me sometimes as we’re designing and playing it that all these problems that we’re encountering are actually just typical problems in real life. What we’re really trying to break down is what if you brought lots of real, live players to a computer-generated world, and to me that’s proved a big next step as well. Because people thought, oh it’s great, just throw a hundred people into an open freeform world. And believe me, it’s not great. It all breaks down into anarchy.

What happens?
There’s no law. There’s no consequence for anything. You give everybody guns – of course we tried it – and within three minutes... It’s fun, but it’s just complete anarchy! But we are leaving those options open and we are going to have different servers with different rule sets. I think people just say, I want to go anywhere, I want to shoot anybody at any time. I don’t think I can look them in the eye and say, "Believe me, that’s actually not fun" – they won’t believe it. So we’re leaving those systems open so they can try them. And for some hardcore but a very small minority, I think they will migrate to that, but they’ll definitely not be in the majority.

Online games develop forms of social conduct over time, though.
It amazes me, the roleplaying servers on MMOGs. As you know, they can’t strictly enforce it but the community does. So it is kind of surprising how many groups are out there.

Are you trying to create a system that manages missions in such a way that you’re creating dramatic lulls and crescendos in the same way that Valve’s AI director does?
Yes. That is something that we’re specifically trying to do. Because you know, you absolutely want ‘moments’ in the game. Even if it’s just for thirty minutes, you want people to become celebrities – OJ Simpson on TV with the police chasing after him: you want those kind of moments in the game. We can’t create them, so it’s about what mission can ultimately lead to those kinds of experiences.

How do you achieve that?
We have what we call heat mechanics in the game, so if a criminal has just been on a complete rampage, recklessly blowing stuff up and killing people, heat builds up until eventually we unlock him to every single enforcer on the server. It’s not part of their missions, it’s just that this guy has become number one wanted and everyone has the authority to take him down. That’s a fun mechanic from both sides; everybody who’s a criminal is going to want to reach that and if you’re on a mission for the enforcers you’ll see that guy and wonder whether you should break away get him. You get a lot of compound stuff which we never planned for, because it’s a hundred real players interacting in ways we don’t expect.



So you can’t just take down anyone, anytime – what happens if you walk by a battle?
It depends what server and ruleset you’re playing on. The one we found seems to be the most appealing is that if everyone enters the server at the same time, effectively, you cannot shoot anybody until the criminals have done something wrong.

So if enforcers see a criminal and they take a shot at them, what happens?
Nothing. It just passes through them. In a car, which is very, very physical, you can kind of knock people over and you can have a bit of fun, but you can’t directly kill them. That’s the equilibrium, but it very rarely happens because not everybody enters the server at the same time. Now, for some people that’s really strange, and I agree, it does sound strange. But the other option is you flip it and you say anybody can kill anybody, and you’ll never finish your missions, basically, because it’s just a non-stop deathmatch.

And that would attract griefers.
Yeah. But we’re going to leave that open anyway because it’s simple for us to do and it’s actually good that if there’s a bunch of players you really hate, you can say, "OK, let’s take it to" – we call it the chaos server – "and sort this out, no holds barred".

Typically, though, once criminals commit a crime they become unlocked, but only to the players that the system – it’s like a dispatch system – allots them as targets. You’re now on a mission to take these guys out. It’s as simple as that. That bar is dynamically getting lifted and imposed depending on the missions – the system may need to bring more people into them because they’re carefully balanced matches. For somebody who has nothing to do with your match to just come in and shoot you, obviously would be frustrating.