Why is Apex Legends so hyped?
Introduction
The most fundamental necessity for a game to be successful is it being fun.
Science has a lot to say about what makes games fun. The feeling of enjoyment comes from endorphins and dopamine, responsible for feelings of pleasure and well-being. A game should give players a positive game experience while overcoming a challenge.
As such, games must strike a good balance between challenge and reward. A new player shouldn’t feel that everybody else has already “figured out” the game, making their efforts futile. Seasoned players who spend hours every day “grinding stats” have a higher stimulus threshold and thus need a bigger challenge.
This post will explain how Apex Legends, the newest addition to the Battle Royale genre, hits the sweet spot between challenge and reward.
Battle Royale (BR) is a video game genre that blends the survival, exploration and scavenging elements of a survival game with last-man-standing gameplay.
BR games feature many players exploring a shrinking map. Players start empty-handed and scour the map for weapons and equipment to eliminate their opponents. All the while, they must avoid being trapped outside the shrinking “safe area”. The last man standing wins.
The name for the genre comes from the 2000 Japanese film Battle Royale. The movie presents a similar theme — a last-man-standing competition in a shrinking play zone.
The genre originated from mods for large-scale online survival games like Minecraft and H1Z1. BR popularized with standalone games, especially 2017’s PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds (PUBG). PUBG has sold over 50 million copies and has over 400 million players worldwide. In 2018, the free-to-play Fortnite Battle Royale rapidly became a cultural phenomenon and overtook PUBG in revenue.
Apex Legends is free-to-play BR game developed by Respawn Entertainment and published by Electronic Arts. Apex is set in the same universe as Titanfall, Respawn’s previous title. The game was released for Windows, Playstation 4 and Xbox One on February 4, 2019. The game amassed 25 million players in total and 2 million concurrent players within a week.
If you’ve visited Twitch in the last year or so, you know that it has become a great advertising platform for big game publishers. The formula is very clear. A publisher pays a lot of money to get streamers with a large audience to play their game. The game then becomes the most watched one on Twitch. If the game resonates with the streamer’s audience and the streamer is having fun, their fans are likely to continue being interested in the game.
In most cases, though, the streamers audience aren’t interested. They wait for them to finish with the #sponsored stream and go back to their regular game. In Apex Legends’ case, this was different. It was clear that the streamers playing it were having a blast! It was easy for the fans to enjoy the game, hypnotized by the fun their favorite celebrity is having. Fans requested to see more and more of this game. Apex successfully converted streamers from paid agents to enthusiastic evangelists of the game.
Fun Gameplay
So how do BR games make their games fun to play? Let’s review different examples.
PUBG, the first major BR, opted for a sense of hyper-realism, giving the seasoned FPS player a bang for their buck. PUBG has huge, realistic maps and an insane amount of loot options. It also features a big element of slow calculated play that can get pretty boring due to the size of the map. But PUBG’s main problem goes much deeper: constant performance issues, game-breaking bugs, hackers and slow rate of improvements.
All these elements contributed to the fact that when Fortnite launched, people were more than happy to jump on the bandwagon. Fortnite was simpler, had a smaller map, quicker gameplay and, of course, building your own shelter. Many players left PUBG for Fortnite. However, because Fortnite is so much easier, it feels balanced for the new player considerably more than for the seasoned veteran.
I claim that Respawn, the developer of Apex Legends, understood how to achieve a balance here. Currently, Apex Legends only has one game mode. In this mode, you play with two more players against squads of three and the amount of players per match is only 60. These changes make the game easier for complete “noobies”. It’s important to note that Apex is the only Battle Royale game that launched with a tutorial game mode.
On the other hand, this game can be very punishing. Health thresholds are low and guns like the Wingman kill you in just a few hits. Aiming needs to be precise and recoil is high. All this means that it takes a lot of expertise to master this game, even when it’s still very much in diapers.
Communication
As any gamer will tell you, good communications are key to winning in a multiplayer game. Online multiplayer games have focused on team play and good communications for years. They reward teams with good communication by making them more likely to win.
The downside to making the communications integral to winning games — gamer toxicity. When you get a teammate who decides not to cooperate they can abuse those communication channels and upset the other members of his team. This will make them play significantly worse, something known between gamers as “tilt”.
Tilt leads to frustration and exacerbates toxicity. Game developers are caught between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand, they must enable multiple communication channels to allow players to work as a team. On the other hand, if they enable voice or text chat they are knowingly making the game more toxic.
Each BR developer has dealt with this in their own way. PUBG’s Bluehole created voice communications with a twist. PUBG allows players to hear the voices of those in proximity. The “proximity chat” feature works even if these players are not on their team. This doubles down on PUBG’s hyper-realism. While this contributes to a lot of comedy, it also gives the toxic players a bigger stage.
In comparison, Epic Games, the developer of Fortnite, opted for almost no communication at all. The game only has in-team voice chat and even then it’s easy to mute or report someone for verbal abuse. However, when you’re forcing players to communicate strictly in voice chat, you get a situation where information can disappear in all the jibber-jabber of your squad mates and even worse - muting a toxic teammate means you effectively opt-out of getting any helpful information from them throughout the game.
Apex took a revolutionary approach here as well by creating a revolutionary FPS (First Person Shooter) pinging system. Players use clicks and keyboard shortcuts to convey a ton of crucial information on the fly. This means they don’t need a microphone or text chat to exchange information.
On top of this, Apex also has voice chat and is the only BR game with text chat built into the game. Given how powerful the pinging system is, the other methods aren’t even necessary. The game even has a special button to thank teammates, encouraging players to be nice. Players can coordinate fully and yet mute someone with no cost to the gameplay. A perfect balance.
Unique
In today’s gaming industry a game has to stand out, and Battle Royale games are no exception. How can a game excel in an industry with so many established competitors? It must be unique! H1Z1’s “King of the Kill” game mode, PUBG’s greatest influencer, had the uniqueness of being the first of its kind. Everything was new and exciting. Parachuting onto an island, vehicles, and equipment spread around the map and a toxic cloud of gas making the playable portion of the map smaller. Even the message the winning player would get was an innovation of a kind.
Considering uniqueness it’s easy to see why Fortnite excelled where other PUBG competitors had failed. The unique building feature which was added to the game as an afterthought became its core uniqueness. The cartoonish artwork, kid-friendliness and emotes are also honorable mentions. Even those who dislike Fortnite must accept that it taught an entire generation of children how to dance.
Apex Legends uniqueness is quite unique indeed! To give a few examples:
- Different characters - Apex Legends has different playable characters (called Legends). Each one of those has 3 unique abilities. A passive ability, an active one and an especially strong one called “ultimate”, a concept that was already proven to work by Overwatch. This makes the game very different from any other BR shooter. The differences are enough to decrease the chance of the game feeling stale.
Note: Realm Royale was the first BR game to introduce classes with abilities though I would argue that it’s very similar, both by feel and concept, to other games outside of the BR genre. - No fall damage — In both PUBG and in Fortnite your character takes damage and can die when falling from heights. Fall damage is necessary for both of those games for different reasons. In PUBG for its realism and in Fortnite to punish building too high. Apex doesn’t have either of these limitations and even encourages jumping from extremely high places at no risk. This improves the overall flow of the game and really helps it feel smooth. Dying from fall damage is super frustrating.
- Smooth combat — Sliding makes combat really exciting. Zooming around and hiding behind cover while getting shot at is a genuinely exhilarating feeling. The combat mechanics are easy to learn and hard to master. This feels rewarding for both new and experienced players.
- Life beyond death — The norm in BR games is that when a player is ‘killed’ he enters the “down but not out” mode. This means crawling on the floor without being able to fight, slowly bleeding out. Their teammates can revive them by ‘channeling’ for a few seconds and get them back into the game. If the teammate is killed or bleeds out while in the DBNO mode, it’s truly game over for them.
All this is different in Apex Legends. Even a player who dies in the DBNO mode can come back. The process is harder and more dangerous, but rewarding. Teammates can pick up a token from their comrade’s body and bring it to a designated respawn zone. This opens up new windows for other teams to punish mistakes. It also rewards proper teamwork and reduces frustration.
Conclusion
It seems that Respawn has struck gold. The amount of small detail and elements working together to make an ultimate gaming experience is highly impressive. Apex succeeds through its great communications, fast combat and characters with different abilities. Apex Legends is a game that rewards the persistent, experienced player who’s seeking to crush his enemies. It will also be fun for casual players who are looking to bond with their friends over great gaming experiences.
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