Reloaded Productions Announces Kickstarter Campaign For New APB Game

Reloaded Productions, the team behind the free-to-play MMO APB Reloaded, announced exclusively at GDC last night, that they are working on a new title within the APB franchise – and have launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund the game.

APB Vendetta will be a first-person shooter, which incorporates competitive multiplayer with free-running/parkour elements, allowing players to make use of the cityscape and environment in creative ways during combat.

The Kickstarter page is light on details, but IGN reports that the team is planning to make modding a significant part of the APB Vendetta experience.  According to IGN, Reloaded’s CEO, Bjorn Book-Larson, told them a lot of the ideas for Vendetta came from the game’s community and forums.  One of the most popular requests from players is the ability to mod the game.

APB started life with one of the most sophisticated and capable player customisation capabilities in the games world, so players have clearly been inspired to change the rest of game world too.

Players will be able to select from a number of players they previously interacted with in APB Reloaded, with three class archetypes, Acrobat, Mercenary and Juggernaut available at launch, offering different combinations of health, speed and agility.

At launch the company is promising several servers where players can all of the base levels and characters.  However, Reloaded’s ambitions for the game go much further.  Players will eventually be able to rent servers and modify almost every aspect of the game, from visuals and aesthetics through to physics effects and gameplay.

IGN notes that this last aspect is more than likely contingent on the success of the Kickstarter campaign.  APB Vendetta is currently in development for PC, but again, should Kickstarter come through for the company, they may well be able to bring it to current and next generation platforms (though the Unreal engine, used for APB has not yet been announced for the PlayStation 4).

This is an ambitious step for Reloaded and one which could see the company establish APB as a bona fide franchise.  However Kickstarter and crowd-funding campaigns in the games sector have undergone something of a dip in the last several months, so it remains to be seen how much buzz the project generates.

Having said that, APB Reloaded has a very large and active audience, which gives the company and the game an immediate fan base and dedicated audience who may well take the prospect of a new parkour-like FPS to heart and evangelise the campaign to the wider games world.

Good luck to the Reloaded team.  If you’re interested in backing APB Vendetta, you can find the Kickstarter page here.