San Francisco — Dave Jones, head of Scottish game development studio Real Time Worlds, had a new MMO — his first MMO — to show off at one of the most packed sessions of all of this year’s Game Developers Conference. He was showing “APB” a cops and robbers MMO in the works for, I assume for PC (Jones didn’t confirm for sure; and, after the session, Phil Harrison told me he was only in attendance out of curiosity).

So who needs an MMO from the makers of “Crackdown“?

Anyone who is interested in an MMO without a grind and who wants to play one set in something like the real world. Those are two of the priorities Jones highlighted at the beginning of his 45-minute presentation.

“I want to replace geek with chic,” he said, though later admitting he had multiple level-70 “World of Warcraft” characters. In his MMO, experience points, do not belong. In his game, there is no leveling up. There’s just a lot of character customization and lots of shooting.

Jones’ talk really was about eye candy, though. The designer’s voice became background sound to a series of impressive videos that left the crowd awed. Several of the videos features “APB”’s character-creation tool, which is designed to ensure that every player can create a unique character. The proofs of that concept were a scarred Asian gangster and then a geek squad of star game designers Richard Garriott, Shigeru Miyamoto, Peter Molyneux, and Warren Spector.

The famous designers were just samples. “We will not create any of the characters in the game,” Jones said. “The players will create the characters.”

All images in this post were taken by camera, off of Jones’ presentation screen. The images looked sharper in real life.

Character customization in “APB” appears to be quite involved. The tools are powerful, allowing for nuanced body and face sizing and shaping, drag-able hair-length adjustment, the creation of patterns that can be applies as tattoos or clothing logos, scarring and aging of scars, and even clothes-wearing subtleties like whether your character will have his boxers visible or his t-shirt over his long-sleeve shirt.

“It’s personalization that drives the characters,” Jones said. “I should be able to look at a character and be able to tell how long they’ve been in the game.” But he did not say how players would get the ability to make cooler characters even as he showed clips of newbie characters who had only jeans and t-shirts.

That character creation, detailed as it is, is supported by dedicated servers that will allow for 100 players to occupy any of “APB”’s detailed modern cities.

Two sample missions from the game were shown on video. In the first, three players decided to hijack an armored truck and then a fourth sped away with them. In a “dynamic matchmaking” moment, players who had chosen the law enforcement side were given an alert — an APB — to chase the criminal players down. Because there were four of them to apprehend, two pairs of police players were enlisted.

In another mission, four newcomers sporting bland wardrobes decided to break into a store. This caused one elite law enforcement player to get an alert. “We think that on his own he’s enough to take these four guys down,” Jones said, explaining the computation behind this particular dynamic match. “For him, he likes that. It’s a status symbol…For them they think, ‘That’s cool, he’s just one guy.’” But the four crooks couldn’t survive. The elite player walloped them with a rock launcher.

Jones also revealed a feature called Free Form Music. The players can sync music from their computer to the game via Last FM and to not just have a player’s own music play from their car, but to match that music with other players’. “If your friends have the same song, it will play on their machine too,” he said. “If not, it will match artist, then genre.”

Jones did not take questions. He did not say when the game was coming out. His presentation felt more like an E3 game demo or recruitment tool than a GDC speech. But if there was a message for game developers and gamers alike in there, it was that there may be yet another way to do an MMO — one that’s a bit less “WoW” and a bit more “Counter-Strike” and “GTA.”