APB: All Points Bulletin

Girls, guns, Cool Cars. What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

APB: All Points Bulletin, also known as APB: Reloaded, is a Massively Multiplayer Online Action Game, clearly inspired by the Grand Theft Auto series and developed by Real Time Worlds, creators of Crackdown. The players can play either as Enforcers or as Criminals of San Paro — for each side there are two factions (Prentiss Tigers and Praetorians for Enforcers, and G-Kings and Blood Roses for Criminals), each with its own bonuses and unlockable content.

One of the most important features is customization. During a presentation on Game Developers Conference, the creators showed lookalikes of Peter Molyneux, Richard Garriott, Warren Spector and Shigeru Miyamoto, complete with logos of their respective companies (or, in Miyamoto's case, the Mario sprite and boxers with the 1UP mushroom pattern) on their clothing. In a later gameplay, Mark Rein's character sports the U logo on his back.

Due to a disastrous launch phase and lackluster sales that fell far below predictions, Realtime Worlds was placed into administration in August 2010, and on September 16, 2010, the future of the game was sealed when Realtime Worlds announced that the servers would be shutting down soon after. However, GamersFirst has picked up the game and has put it in Open Beta, under the name APB: Reloaded, and in December 2011, released the beta on Steam as well.

Not to be confused with the Atari arcade game of the same name.

Tropes used in APB: All Points Bulletin include:

• AKA-47 - Both the cars and weapons are fictional, but you can recognize at least the AK47, H&K USP, G36, MP 7, Desert Eagle and fifth-generation Ford Mustang (named "Patriot Jericho" in the game).
• And Your Reward Is Clothes - Gaining standing with organizations and spending time in the clothing editor gives you customizable clothes, while gaining standing with contacts gives you preset ones, in case you're lazy and don't want to fiddle with the editor, but still have something decent-looking on. Preordering also granted you two different sets of clothing, one for Criminal characters, one for Enforcers. Beta testers also got a special shirt called "The Lousy Shirt," which says "I was in the APB beta and all I got was... MULTIPLE BULLET WOUNDS".
  • With the patch 1.8 you can also now give your guns purely cosmetic skins. In order to get these you need to have maxed out the rank for the weapon class, which requires around 10000 kills in total.
• Arms Dealer - Tyron Sennet and Grayson Fell.
• Author Existence Failure - Real Time Worlds went under in August 2010, and the game followed briefly.
• Awesome but Impractical - The OSMAW rocket launcher may one-shot ANYTHING if it hits, but it only carries 2 rockets: one loaded in the chamber, one reload. It one-shots most vehicles easily (hitting a moving one can be tricky; but also impressive) - but to one-shot a player you have to directly hit them WITH the rocket. This is... not easy due to painfully slow projectiles.
• Awesome Yet Practical - The O-PGL is a 4-shot repeating grenade launcher that can one-shot kill at its epicenter and has an ample blast radius. With experience, you can engage any enemy at any range with little detriment to yourself, and can be nightmarish for enemies assaulting an objective. However, it is rarely seen in the hands of high-level players due to its more popular (and cooler) counterpart in the form of the OSMAW, and its learning curve dipping into Difficult but Awesome territory.
• Ax Crazy - Lilith Bloodrose. An interesting Beware the Nice Ones example, as she often tells you to kill people in an eerily calm voice.
• Bag of Spilling: GamersFirst allows you to import your character from the retail version. You keep your clothes and some other customizations, but lose all your gear.
• Big Bad Wannabe - Seung Bloodrose. He's constantly rambling about how he's better than his cousin Jeung and how he's gonna build his own empire one day.
• Bribing Your Way to Victory:
  • APB has "G1 credits" you can use to buy neat stuff with. It's not really needed though, as a player with decent marksmanship skills can take on any foe with the starting rifle.
  • The "pay 2 win" debates have been going on in the G1 forums for quite some time. For the most part, premium weapons in G1's cash shop play differently than its closest non-premium counterparts (ie. STAR 556 'LCR' versus STAR 556, N-HVR 223 'Scout' versus N-HVR 762), and they mainly provide advancement for the cost of money instead of having to grind through contacts and roles. Also, you get a unique weapon that most people don't have.
• Car Fu - For a good start of Mark Rein's video, someone gets run over for the lulz. The same thing happens in The Stinger for PAX'09 trailer. This can be surprisingly difficult to pull off due to the flighty driving physics (think Halo 3), but merely touching someone with a speeding car can kill them.
• Boring but Practical: The Joker SR 15 Carbine and Obeya FBW pistol, both are not very flashy, lacking the speed or power of most not starter weapons but striking a very good balance between both, while being quite precise. Likewise the humble Star 556 is far from being useless.
• City of Adventure - San Paro.
• Color Coded for Your Convenience - Enforcer characters on the concept art usually wear white and blue, Criminal characters - black and red.
  • Subverted in the full game in which the colors are more diverse and more of a backround theme. Bloodroses still keep to the black and red theme, however G-kings have a mint green theme, Praetorians olive green and Prentiss Tigers yellow.
  • Also subverted for most players who will just use what ever colors they want, making the red or green name and the faction tag the only way to seperate Enforcer players from Criminal players.
• Cool Car - Muscle cars, sports cars, SUVs, take your pick.
• Cowboy Cop - A Cowboy Cop Is You if you play as an Enforcer.
• Creator Killer - The game's commercial flop caused Real Time Worlds to shut down.
• Dark-Skinned Redhead - Pagan Bloodrose.
• The Ditz - Britney Bloodrose. Said to be talentless, clingy and not very bright. Also speaks with a Valley Girl accent. Veronika Lee is another Valley Girl, but marginally smarter and much more badass looking. She is also more selfaware of it than Britney.
• Does Not Like Shoes: Double B, as well as any player character if they so choose.
• Do Not Call Me Paul - "Don't call me Clarissa! It's Britney! BRIT-NEY!"
• Drives Like Crazy - Mark Rein's driver in the gameplay mentioned above. The city, as you may see, is designed just so the players can Drive Like Crazy: ramps to jump off from, gaps in highway barriers allowing you to drop to the street below, all sorts of random trash to be run over like in those '70s movies and drainage canals for that Terminator 2 kind of chases.
• Dummied Out - With the newest patch Pagan Bloodrose was fully removed. However her podest and equipment aswell as the Joker Ammo dispencers are still present.
  • Original there were also two additional factions and one extra district planned. The Red Rain and the SPPD in the Midtown District. Reverences to them can still be found in the character bios.
• Dying Like Animals - Chickens specifically. If a civilian sees one of the city's omnipresent gunfights, they cower in fear or run like hell... likely directly into the line of fire or into an oncoming car.
• Every Car Is a Pinto - Every car catches fire and then explodes if sufficiently damaged. It can be cleverly used to take out enemies taking cover behind one.
• Flavor Text: The pre-designed clothes all have small descriptions about who designed them and in what context. These can range from being just informative to funny to squick inducing. An example of the later, one Bloodrose skirt apperently became popular after a woman wearing it gave birth to a baby during a famous show, life on camera.
• Flashed Badge Hijack - What happens when you jack a civilian car as an Enforcer. Criminals just unceremoniously toss the civilian out.
• Funny Background Event - Being an open world MMO game these can be all over the place either on purpose or by accident.
• Gas Mask Mooks - with the newest patch the players can now look like this. Also Tip Toe of the criminals wears one.
• Generic Graffiti - Don't be surprised if you see a Pedo Bear, Shinra logo, The Joker or the Awesome Face sprayed on a wall or billboard up high.
• GIFT - This game seems to attract a good deal of whiny teenagers, trolls, idiots and "hardcore" "bro" gamers.
  • A particular infamous example is the usage of dumb trucks. These vehicles can blow up other cars by ramming them into other cars or walls without taking too much damage themself. Players soon found a way to use them to ruin other peoples mission by killing them with it in crucial chases.
• Girlish Pigtails - Two kinds of selectable hairstyle for female characters. Britney Bloodrose has pink ones.
• Glasgow Grin - Double B. Britney Bloodrose has one drawn on.
• Guide Dang It - Figuring out which contacts and activities unlock what is a major pain in the ass since the official guide (known only to the betatesters) was outdated anyway and the new version is still "coming soon". Thankfully the beta version fixes this. You can hover your mouse for a second to see what rank in contact/badge you need. Also, when talking to contacts you have a list of what you can unlock at certain levels.
• Hated Hometown - A lot of dialogue involving the civilians will mention their hatred of the city (or at least, the ongoing conflict) and their desire to move away.
• Heel Face Turn - Violet Prentiss, known earlier as Violet Bloodrose. Also, Wilson LeBoyce.
• Hot Scoop - Terri Quan.
• Impossibly Cool Clothes - With the right amount of customization, they can be impossibly cool.
• In Vehicle Invulnerability - As long as you don't stick yourself out of the window to shoot enemies, you're completely protected.
• Itasha - With car customization, you can get impressive effects or abominations of various kinds. The latter are more common.
• Jerk Jock - The Prentiss Tigers take it up a notch. Those guys look like jocks and cheerleaders... and they are The Law.
• Level Grinding -
  • To unlock the basic model of Charge Cisco, you had to achieve Level 2 in "Wheelman" rank, which required bringing no less than 48 cars to chop shops scattered across the districts (to say nothing that some documentation and in-game text referred to it as the "Car Thief" rank). Every chop shop had a cooldown that disabled it for a couple of minutes and to top it off, when you stole a car, the FARTHEST chop shop from your location was highlighted on the map - but if you knew the city well, you could dump the car in any other chop shop closer to you. And that was the Criminal path - Enforcers had to find vehicles that already have been stolen and bring them back to impound lots. Wanted a better Cisco? Well, you had to steal even more cars to unlock the slotted versions...
  • Some clothes, car parts and decals forced you to spend (lots of) time in vehicle or clothing editor respectively. Of course you could leave the game running and go to lunch, just as a lot of people did. Unlocking other cars, car parts, clothes and decals was even more of a pain in the ass due to having to gain standing with either particular NPCs or factions as a whole. To add insult to injury, no info was available how to unlock particular elements of clothing or decals. Real Time Worlds promised to update The Vault after changes to unlock progression during thebeta, the official unlock database, but didn't do it before nor after release.
  • Level grinding only exists in the GamersFirst incarnation as ranking up 'roles' with weapons to unlock better mods.
• Lost Forever - All gear earned from the original incarnation of APB. The game was thought to be this until GamersFirst picked it up.
• Mama Bear - More like Little Sister Bear: when Double B was a kid, some punks killed her brother. She ran away, came back with a Sawed-Off Shotgun and killed every last one of them.
• Manipulative Bitch - Charlotte Bloodrose.
• Mini-Dress of Power - Lilith Bloodrose, Charlotte Bloodrose, Akiko X and Violet Prentiss, and considering the female player characters are Action Girls by the virtue of jacking cars and running people over alone, their minidresses can be considered a power element.
• Names to Run Away From Really Fast - Pagan, Lilith, Sabbat...
• No Export for You - Australia is screwed again, but this time, the reason isn't Moral Guardians - it's Money, Dear Boy, as the cost of renting servers and high-speed connection in Australia is tantamount to extortion.
• Of Corsets Sexy - Charlotte and Lilith Bloodrose.
• Ooh, Me Accent's Slipping - Grayson Fell sometimes speaks with an odd Scotirish accent. Also, the supposedly Korean-American Seung and Jeung (especially the former) slip in and out of variously exaggerated generic Far Eastern accent.
• Outlaw Couple - Charlotte and Jeung Bloodrose, the founders of Blood Roses.
• Private Military Contractors - The Praetorians.
• Put on a Bus: Pagan Bloodrose with the newest patch.
• Rebellious Spirits - The G-Kings. Poor ghetto kids who decided to stick it to the Man. And they're backed by the owner of a garbage disposal company. Well played, Mr Benjamin.
• Rage Quit: An interesting variant due to the 'threat system'. Some high-threat players, who want to keep their high threat, will often kick most if not all of their teammates right before a game ends to prevent their threat from dropping too much or to super-inflate their threat. Threat is directly affected by how many people are on your team and the enemy's, as well as the threat levels of everyone, and threat change is only calculated at the end of a match. There are some cases where a high-threat party leader kicks the entirety of his friendly team (which could be as much as nine people in a 10-on-10) just so their emblem could stay a certain colour.
• Ramming Always Works: Mostly subverted since damaging other cars with your own does not do much damage and trying to push them off to force the players to exit them is quite difficult. Brutaly subverted with the Dumptruck which once it get's speed is near unstopable and can cause smaller cars to explode by pushing them into others. This has become a tactic of some Griefers.
• Red Eyes, Take Warning - Britney Bloodrose, although she's an Affably Evil Ditz. Also popular with some players.
• Retired Badass - Chiro. Ex-gangbanger who now owns a tattoo parlor and tips players off about new missions.
• Rich Bitch - Bonita Benjamin.
• Screwed By The Devs - The game was released by Realtime Worlds already in high waters due to the prolonged development time, in an Obvious Beta state, and they did little to fix the kilometric list of problems it had, like they knew they were going belly-up already (mostly because of disastrous financial model of the company, as one of the ex-employees pointed out on his blog). The game had great potentialities but no time to reach a state to really express them, and people have basically paid to be beta-testers for a cancelled product. The game's servers were shut down a mere three months before release. The game has now been acquired by GamersFirst with a new Free To Play model and is currently in Open Beta.
• Self-Made Orphan - Lilith Bloodrose.
• Soundtrack Dissonance - When you'll hear songs like "Favorite Jeans" by Bertie Blackman or "Rewind" by Make Sparks, you will most probably ask yourself why the hell did the devs even choose it.
• Split Personality - Strega Bloodrose. She often says that "Strega is out" while referring to herself by her real name, Jocasta, and calls the player "her own private Ninja Strega shouldn't know about".
• Spoiled Brats - The Bloodroses. They hang around in trendy clubs and commit crimes for laughs and just because they can.
• Standard Status Effects - Enforcers can use Less-Than-Lethal armaments such as a taser pistol and a bean-bag rifle. These weapons can stun Criminals, leaving them helpless for a few seconds and able to be arrested by an Enforcer, giving them more than triple rewards compared to a kill and taking the Criminal out of the game for a longer period of time. Criminals universally consider these weapons Game Breakers, despite the fact that the lethal counterparts to many LTL weapons often do the job faster with fewer rounds spent. This also has more irritation as the criminal is forced to kneel for several seconds helpless, allowing the enforcers plenty of time to abuse the game's numerous emote options.
• Stripperiffic - Well, for starters: Pagan and Lilith Bloodrose, expect the players to roll with it as well. There are CrossPlayers out there after all.
• Tattooed Crook - Lots of them, both players and NPC Contacts.
• The Mafia - Michael Simeone, the Bloodrose boss, is an ex-mafioso turned state witness. He's running a successful club and slowly getting back into "business"...
• The Man Behind the Man - Luke Waskawi is this - and the Ultimate Evil. He doesn't appear in the game directly, but is responsible for what the city became. After assassinating the mayor and spending twenty years in the slammer, he escaped and started manipulating both the G-Kings and the Blood Roses for his own gain.
• The Smart Guy: Byron Bloodrose for the Crims, with a bit of The Strategist mixed in. He is the brain behind a lot of the Bloodroses operation and their hacking expert. Also while he likes to tell you about the things he does for them in secret without ever becoming famous for it, he seems to be rather happy that way.
• Uncanceled - APB has been released into a Free To Play Open Beta by GamersFirst.
• Vanity License Plate - Fully customizable, allowing for up to eight characters. The plates on Criminal sports car in the concept art actually say "STOL3N".
• Vice City - And how! Wander through town and you'll have people diving vans into store fronts, stealing cars and engaging in massive gunfights and demolition derbies in the streets.
• Video Game Cruelty Potential -
  • Some Enforcers have a nasty habit of stunning the Criminals and then killing them.
  • There have been reports of one particular group of enforcers who have choreographed entire dance routines using the game's varied dance emote options, all solely for the purpose of dancing in front of arrested criminals to piss them off. It varies from well choreographed, flashy routines to being grinded upon/tea-bagged by seven grossly obese bounty hunters.
• Virtual Paper Doll - ...is you, again!
• "Well Done, Son" Guy - Arlon Benjamin is this towards his son Harmon.
• Witness Protection - Michael Simeone. See above.
• Wrench Wench - Chiza. She liked boosting cars for joyrides (and not profit) prior to the formation of the Prentiss Tigers. Ophelia of the Praetorians is another, who apparently designed most of the Enforcer-only premium cars. As of now, she isn't available as a contact, but Chiza is.
• Wretched Hive - San Paro, apparently. Not full-blown as many other examples, but most of the high-level criminal contacts are considered as celebrities by the rest of the public.
  • It gets worse if you read the backround informations provided by E-mails and Contacts. The entire media is apperently devoted to showcasing crime and death. Suji in particular mentions his reason for comming to San Paro is how common crime and death are, including a live TV show in which a masked men disects living animal.
• A World Half Full - Main mentality of the Prentiss Tigers.
  • Suprisingly also the mentality of the G-Kings. They really think they can change something to the better.
• Yandere - Charlotte Bloodrose. She's so jealous of Jeung that she set up her perceived rival, Violet Bloodrose, to be killed by another gang. Violet's not at all happy about this now. Neither are her new friends from Prentiss Tigers.
• You Gotta Have Blue Hair - Chung-Hee and Double B have blue hair. Most Criminal characters also have outrageous dye-jobs in other colors.
• Zettai Ryouiki - Akiko X and Lilith Bloodrose.