Realtime Worlds founder and creative director Dave Jones says that the release of PC MMOG APB will usher in a number of cultural changes at the Scotland-based developer.

Speaking in the second part of our recent interview, he explained how the growing independent studio will no longer simply be just a game developer following the title's launch.

“First of all, it’s just getting everybody to understand that we are going to be transforming to a service-based company,” he said. “For example, our engineers have to be on call now – sorry guys, but the servers only have a problem in the middle of the night. What I’ve been trying get them to think culturally is, don’t expect it to be like any other MMO out there where the expansion pack comes out but really it’s more of the same. That’s what I call a vertical way of expanding the game.”



Jones goes on to explain that Realtime aims to support APB for many years post-release, although not in the traditional MMO sense.

“MMOGs tend to expand by raising the level cap, introducing more items, and more dungeons, but keep to the same mechanics. We’re thinking horizontally. We’re not going after that audience. We’re going after the more, although we’re on PC, console mentality, the FPS guys, we’re not going after the WarCraft guys. I’m one of them. I like variety. I don’t want to get bored after three, four, five months. Once we’ve built these living dynamic cities and people have established themselves, they’ve got the looks, the vehicles, the weapons. So what kinds of content can we bring to them, based on that core APB experience, which is ‘I wanna play that now with a hundred players’. To me it’s a whole open ballpark. There are very few hundred-player games out there which are highly dynamic, fast-paced, run on a server. You cited Left 4 Dead earlier, so basically we could do that. If you look at Gears Of War’s Horde mode, that was a big thing and people loved it. We can try simple things out, like a map that has no AI, it’s much smaller, but it’s an immense 50-vs-50 battle. We could very quickly try it out. Or one with a thousand zombies and it’s just you and your clan but it’s online. Or maybe two opposing clans and a thousand zombies. So it’s starting to innovate, try things out that we haven’t been able to do before. I treat APB and everything we’re building now as a platform. It’s a platform for trying out fun, innovative, multiplayer games.”

The second part of our interview with Jones also explains how APB's 100-person multiplayer in a persistent world will work. You can read part one here.