Today we're going to officially reveal all the new stuff that's coming out in the next release. It's content - BIG content - so get excited! Shake that asset Customization is one of the core features of APB Reloaded, and it's also one of the main reasons that our game is so unique. There's no other game that allows you to customize virtually every aspect of the game in as much detail as APB:R, and every time we speak to someone about what they like about the game, customization is one of the first things mentioned. We have a dedicated art team that are always hustling to bring more clothing, weapons and vehicles to the game, and today we’re going to look at some of the fruits of their labor. The average clothing asset takes one of our artists about three weeks to create. Every item needs to be prototyped, modeled in high poly, normal mapped, modeled in a low poly version next, and then have color masks created for it - all of this before going into testing. There are other steps, but we won't go into the details of that just now. We asked Tim, one of our Senior Artists, about his time working on the clothing in APB Reloaded. "Each item presents us with a different series of challenges. One of the strangest difficulties is being able to find a way to make an item of clothing that looks unique and very cool, but also generic enough that you can customize and do plenty of different things with it," said Tim. His favorite clothing item he's created for APB:R is the jumpsuits for the new Bishada packs, and his favorite item ever created by our team is the Desert Scarf (which was created by another Senior Artist). Speaking of which, here's another image for your viewing pleasure: Something that’s become fairly critical to our team is trying to get a stronger sense of parity between the genders and factions in APB:R. At the moment, male characters have far more clothing items than female characters, so some of the old assets that weren’t released are awaiting creation of female counterparts. We’re finally getting through some of the backlog of old items though, which means that the Desert Scarf is, at long last, on the list for the next release! Where we’re going, we don’t need roads A while back, we showed everyone a piece of concept art that showed the new, cross-faction Bishada Rapier. Since then, our vehicle team has been hard at work turning that concept into a reality, and we’re really excited with the final product. So, ladies and gentlemen, the Reloaded Team is proud to present to you the first official images of the new Bishada Kissaki and Bishada Mako! When we design a new vehicle pack like this, we tend to think about it in terms of how the two sides play off each other.We like to think of the Enforcers being better funded than their Criminal counterparts – Criminals tend to have to work their equipment out of gear that’s believably available on the open market. Enforcers should be capable of getting their hands on more military spec and specialized equipment. While this isn’t a rule that we treat as gospel, it’s something that we run with when possible, and we feel that the hybrid we managed to achieve with the Criminal Bishada is great. A lot of the styling for the vehicle was provided by our Senior Vehicle Artist as something akin to his dream car. The latest addition to APB Reloaded’s arsenal – The Nekrova N-SSW, which we mentioned in a recent post, will also be released in an upcoming update. We’ll be bringing two versions of this gun to the game: one version that’s obtainable through the Armas Marketplace and another version that’s obtainable through Joker Tickets. We’re shaking things up a bit in our next post, with a Q&A session where we lovingly interrogate our Audio Engineer about the Artist Program (and his guilty music pleasures - Prefab Sprout anyone? Google it if you don't already know...), so stay tuned!

     This is the Nekrova Squad Support Weapon, a brand new LMG. It’s Nekrova’s first entry into the field of Light Machine Guns and it’s a hybrid of the ALIG 762, SHAW 556, and the N-TEC. Less damage than the ALIG and a slower rate of fire than the SHAW, but a much faster setup time. Other LMG’s suppress from a stationary position and are really effective, but this weapon’s more about mobility – it’s an LMG you can sprint with to get into position quickly before setting up and pouring the pain on your enemies.

      The Flare Gun has been a concept that we've been throwing around for a while now. It’s a secondary weapon that we think every team is going to want one of, and it's going to be a total game changer during missions! It carries four shots at the moment, but these bullets aren't like anything else in the game – they bounce and explode causing very light damage (don't worry, it’s less damage than a perc.)

      The real beauty of this weapon is that the flare tags every enemy in line of sight of the explosion on your radar and HUD. It’s an AOE tagger and can change the flow of any match by highlighting your enemies for the rest of your team. It’s the ideal support weapon and a must have for San Paro's elite groups.

Ever since the start of APB Reloaded’s development, we've wanted to make player performance more of a factor in how you get matched up. One of our earliest tasks in the bug database (the 19th task that was brought into the database, in fact) was to simplify the scoring system and expose what it did to the player.

Version 11, introduces a whole new version of the score mechanic – everything you do while on Mission will count towards your score and your score will count towards your Threat. As you can guess, this feature inspired the name for the update - "Settling the Score."

Here’s the current system (this is a really, really simplified version):

You ready up, you get into a match and you win the match. Your threat goes up a little bit. If you lose your threat level goes down.

This is an ‘okay’ system. It works fine, but it leaves a lot to be desired in terms of edge cases. What if you lose because someone called for back-up with a minute left on the clock? What if you stomp on the other team but lose at the last second? What if the other guy on your team does really badly? And why should that guy get to be gold if they're getting carried there?

While some of those edge cases are covered (players called into a mission late only receive a fraction of the penalty) we can do better. These are the sorts of edge cases that we really want to address with the new system.

From Version 11 onward, when you kill an enemy player you get 100 score. Objective completion scores vary depending on the task. When you're e near an objective getting completed you get 75 score for providing cover to your team mates. You get more score for kill streaks, blitzkriegs, arrests, stuns, freeing teammates, and vehicular kills. You get a major chunk of score for winning a match and a lot of score even if you lose.

If, at the end of a match, you're in the top 50% of the high score table, your threat level goes up. If you're in the bottom 50% your threat goes down. Even if you lose, if you fought harder than anyone else in the match, your threat will still go up. If you win but got carried there by the rest of your team your threat’s going down until you start to be more of a team player. You get a breakdown of everything that gave you score during the mission and you get to see how the rest of your team did.

Score has the potential to make de-threating much harder, and with new server restrictions (which we'll talk about in another blog post soon after this one) making sure that the right people get into the right districts (and there are the right districts for them to go into – no more ‘no gold at peak time’) we're confident you'll start to see fairer matches, no matter your threat level. We'd love to see Score take on a bigger role in celebrity too – who wants to hold the Worldwide High Score for The Tiger Mole or Your Uranium is Showing?

• A password will no longer be required.
• All members must be registered to the mumble server.
• Only officers can register a user.
• Officers will be identified with a Asterisk (*) next to their names.
• The community group will be open to everybody.
• Members Only and Official Business can be accessed by authorized (registers) users.