Apex Legends -- New High-water Mark for Free-to-Play Games?

The Game Room
1

For anybody that enjoys multiplayer shooters on PC, Xbox, or Playstation, this game should probably be on your radar.

It’s a battle royale ala Fortnite, but is also character-based like Overwatch. It has a colorful scifi art style that strikes a good balance between cartoony and serious. It’s set in the same world as Titanfall but doesn’t have Titans (or vehicles of any kind).

It’s strictly squad-based, and they have a really clever system that lets you very easily tag items or enemies or suggested destinations for your squadmates. It makes it MUCH easier to coordinate with people, especially if they don’t have a headset.

I’m not a big online gaming guy and am skeptical of free games, but I am pretty darn impressed. Worth checking out if, like me, Fortnite seems fun but turned you off with its overly teenager-y vibe and clunky building mechanics.

2

I just started playing Fortnite a couple months ago and actually enjoy it quite a bit. I know a lot of people who’ve been playing for a while are migrating to Apex Legends, but I’m not burnt out just yet. The building part of FN is definitely my weak point. But solo battle royale is by far my favorite mode, which I gather is not a thing in Apex. How is the BR constructed? Squads only? How big are teams? Is there a possibility they could add a solo mode or does it not work based on the characters in the game? So many questions, I should probably just research it a little.

3

It’s squad-only, three to a squad. 60 players per game, so 20 3-player squads.

They’ve indicated no plans for a solo mode, and I don’t think they will add one except as a mini mode. It would screw up the balance, because some of the characters are support classes. Playing the healer or the bullet-shield in solo would be a bad time.

I usually prefer solo games as well, but they do a good job of making squads work with strangers. You can always see your squadmates, and the game will semi-automatically do things like telling your squadmates if you’re under fire or bleeding out. Your characters actually talk to each other with their character voices when you use the automatic communications (called “pings” in the game), which actually gives it an interesting sort of liveliness.

My only complaint so far is that players have a lot of HP, so it can be tough to get kills even if you get the drop on somebody. It’s similar to Halo or other sci-fi shooters where even a full clip at normal range won’t always take somebody out, especially since armor pickups are pretty common.

4

Oh, my other complaint is that I KINDA hate most of the character designs. They’re all just a little bit too “90s grimdark comic book” for my tastes. It’s fine in game and they all have distinct looks and personalities and such, but I can’t imagine ever, say, buying a bobblehead of my main for my desk like an Overwatch player might. Some of them might be improved with new skins, but most of the skins I’ve seen are just color swaps.

5

This is my main complaint coming from generally somewhat more realistic shooters. Too much bullet sponginess. That plus all the special abilities and other random elements make it really hard to rely on good tactics if you can never really tell if you will be able to win a firefight until you’re in it.

Still good fun for now, but I’m hoping something better will come along. Battlefield V’s Firestorm, maybe?

6

Not had a proper look at it yet but my son and his mates are all over it - Fortnite RIP.
I did wonder if they weren’t pissing millions of dollars down the drain with it being first person - nae skins. It’s also a 16 cert in the UK which may effect it’s takeup amongst the kids.

If it’s a bit more strategic than Fortnite that would be good. I liked a dabble with that game but it illustrated that my reflexes are basically past it - needs to have age-group tournaments like in sports, geezers building at a glacial pace and taking eight shots to get their aim down.

7

Nah, I think the first-person move is smart – skins still matter because, if you win, your avatar gets pictured on banners for the next round (and you’re looking at your own avatar between matches). I personally hate most third-person shooters because the angles just never feel quite right to me and there’s few things more annoying that having your own BODY blocking something you want to see.

It’s definitely a bit more tactical than Fortnite because moving and acting in a squad are emphasized and there’s a lot of support powers available, BUT it’s also a bit twitchy. I’m enjoying it, but starting to suspect I might not ever actually get decent because I’ve never loved aiming while running / jumping / sliding and it feels like Apex emphasizes that.

8

This game is absolutely amazing. It adds so many quality of life features like the ping system and respawning. The focus on movement and stuff is excellent. I’m going to throw all the money at it that they allow.

The best part is how people don’t turn into 8-story buildings when you shoot at them.

Apparently after like seven years of playing Dota, I’ve forgotten how to shoot straight. Save me, 3daimtrainer.com

9

This game seems to be cool! Though I am not a great fan of the genre, I’m going to try it as soon as possible. This week maybe)

10

I am remarkably horrible at this game. I honestly can’t even understand how bad I am. I’ve played about 25-30 non-crashed games now and I have like 7 kills, that’s how bad I am. I’m not terrible at BR games in general - I win way more than my fair share of PUBG games. I’m not bad at the strategizing and general movement, but I can’t manage to win a gunfight.

Everyone I play against feels like they’ve been playing arena shooters for the last 20 years. They’re zipping all over the damn place and headshotting me while flying across my screen like some pro q3 player. There’s obviously no matchmaking, so you’d think I’d come across other bad players I could beat, but almost never. Everyone is so fucking good.

Maybe it’s a play style thing. I don’t jump where everyone else is jumping, so by the time we come across enemies we’re often facing the groups that did a hot landing and managed to kill the other squads there. If I just jumped right away and landed in a busy area, maybe that’s when I’d face the other bad players, but since I avoid fights early on, I’m only playing against the better players that already won a fight. And because there are respawn mechanisms, they haven’t been worn down by attrition before they got to me (like they might in PUBG)

I also didn’t realize that the training had a complete firing range - it seemed to just be a basic “here’s how you jump, here’s how you throw a grenade” so I skipped it. So I was learning the guns, some of which work very differently from most FPS guns, on the fly. Definitely get good at the weapons on the training program before trying to play this.

The game is super crashy right now. I didn’t crash for my first 10-12 games I played last week, but they did something and now I’m crashing every other game. Same with the people I play with. I did about 10 things from a troubleshooting guide, but only turning vsync back on (the game has adaptive vsync fortunately) seemed to impact the crash rate. Or maybe I just had a lucky few games with few crashes.

The game has a lot going for it. The classes seem pretty good. The 3 man team oriented nature of it makes sense, although I generally prefer playing BR games alone. Definitely bring friends because your randomly assigned teammates will do all sorts of shitty stuff like randomly go off on their own or just quit right off the bat when they see you’re only level 7. I like the movement system and all of the ziplines laying around, and the way you can move with the balloons. The monetization is very fair.

I don’t like how small the map is combined with how far you can jump from the plane - I feel like landing strategy should be a bigger deal but it hardly matters since anyone can drop almost anywhere at the start. The loot may also be a little too well distributed - I’d like to see a couple of high risk beacons that attract a lot of people like the school and military base in pubg.

It’s definitely growing on me. I’m hoping I’m just really out of practice with fast moving shooters that play like arena shooters and I can get better again and I’m not just always going to be awful at it.

11

I’ve put about 15 or 20 hours in, and no wins yet. I’ve gotten second probably two dozen times, but never a win. I could probably get second in 75% games if I wanted to. But the final remaining squad is always guys who have 200+ hours in the game with thousands of kills, and while I’m slowly getting better, I still have only like 80 or 100 kills. Without the possibility of attrition, those inevitable super good squads are hard to beat.

The game is still crashy, and they’re super slow to patch it. I actually may have won one of two games - in two instances I had a teammate crash just as we were heading into the final fight with 3 squads left. In one instance, we had actually gone 2v3 and knocked down 2 of their guys, making it 1v1 at the end, and barely lost it. Without the crash, having a third player, we may have won.

They really need to be faster about patching. The crashes are way too frequent. And the class balance isn’t good. All compositions other than lifeline/wraith/bangalore aren’t really viable if you want to win. Having huge hitboxes with no compensating advantages render a lot of characters (gibraltar, pathfinder, caustic) useless.

I didn’t realize in my first 3 hours or so that Gibraltar was as bad as he was, and he was who I decided to try to learn on, since he seemed newbie friendly. But quite the opposite - I was getting slaughtered easily from long range because of his giant hitbox and didn’t realize it, until I came to realize that I almost never faced a gibraltar on another team and realized he must be pretty bad. Switched to bangalore mostly and I do better. Lifeline is clearly the best overall, but someone else on my team always plays her.

12

Had to post this, Two Out Of Three - Penny Arcade

13

Chinese players using VPNs are starting to play on the American servers, which will almost certainly lead to a massive increase in cheating. Given the very slow response of these devs to do anything at all, I have no confidence they’ll get on top of it.

14

After around 100-120 non-winning games (I came in 2nd like 20 times) I won 4 games in the last 2 days. 3 of them in the span of about 7 games. I got a little better at shooting, but not particularly better at tactics or anything else. Maybe worked a little better as a squad. But mostly I think I just got lucky to get in games without the super pro players.

I watched some streamers play the game the other day - they were racking up 25+ kills a game. You feel like cannon fodder against the elite players. I suspect that with a high skill ceiling and no matchmaking, probably 10% of the player base gets 90% of the wins. It may be worse than that.

I really hate wraith as a character. Not only is her hitbox tiny, which would be enough of an advantage, but all of her animations are designed to be abnormal and hard to hit. She runs with her head foward and her body leaned over, which decreases her vertical surface area and also makes headshots hard/impossible from the rear. When she strafes, she throws her whole body side to side in a totally unnatural way like a speed skater on meth. Just tap A D A D and even someone with good aim misses you most of the time. Her lines/personality are a little bit edgelordy, and there’s just not much to like about her. She’s definitely the biggest balance problem currently. Lifeline is up there too - her kit is just so good - but at least she has relatively normal animations and you can shoot her.

Rumors are that battlepass season 1 and a patch are dropping tomorrow.

15

Surprised there’s not much discussion here - the game is pretty huge, with apparently 50,000,000 people trying it as a few days ago.

16

It’s a battle royale game. They’re pretty much all the same game. I’m not sure if there’s much to talk about. Other BR games don’t generate much discussion either.

17

I guess I’ll provide my update. I’m hooked. Took a while to get used to the longer TTK, but now I’m all over it. My top 3 percentage is around 25% and my win percentage about 5%. Not an elite player, but I’ve gotten to where I can hold my own. Not much in the way of bugs or cheater problems for me, but that’s the joy of consoles. In fact, I would say that’s the main reason I’ve migrated to this game over other shooters. It works and it’s really damn slick. Wonder how long it can hold my interest, though, and playing with randos is driving me insane.

18

Battle-Royale style bores the pants off me. I love a good FPS with a good single player storyline. Goldeneye, Return to Castle Wolfenstein and the Quakes. I like online play to the extent where it doesn’t feel like online play. i.e. no chat, no interaction and there is a fairly decent possibility of winning something or enjoying losing. The other players are best basically just acting as a better version of CPU AI.

I had a go at Fortnite and lost interest after 3 goes.

19

This is exactly what Anthem plays like. It’s a FPS with a decent story (not great for a BioWare game but still better than average) and I do all the missions as co-op. Nobody talks, they all just do their thing and it’s like having great AI companions. And for all the flak given for the problems the game has had, I’ve never seen a reviewer criticize the gameplay; it’s fast and smooth and exciting. It’s probably the most pure fun I’ve had playing a game in a long time.

20

New patch and battlepass arrive. The battlepass is all shit tier loot, but it’s only $9 and it’ll pay for your next battlepass if you play it out, so meh.

I’ve crashed 4 out of my first 7 games, which seems to indicate that the crashing is actually worse, although I guess it could just be a coincidence. Either way they’re clearly not fixed.

It’s a fantastic game but their post-launch support so far has been ass. 6 weeks after launch, we have almost no balance changes (fire rates of peacekeeper and wingman only), 3-4 characters that are still useless, and one of the most frequently crashing games I’ve ever played. They have a gem on their hands, but their post-launch support thus far has been ass.

What’s stupid is that according to apex subreddit (700,000 subscribers, so it’s not a small crowd) don’t seem to give the slightest shit about balance or crashes. All they could do was post about how much they wanted a battlepass and how they’re all going to commit suicide because the battlepass wasn’t to their liking. I think there’s going to be a significant rebound of the player count now - not, stupidly, due to the lack of balancing or the crashes, but because the battlepass has shitty loot and the “what am I playing for” mentality.