Apex Legends is not the first so-called Battle Royale game I've played, but I did think I would not be playing any more after playing the ones I did. Honestly, these absurdly popular games do not need more publicity in my opinion, but I'm going to talk about them anyways. This post has a broader scope than what I usually do, but I hope you'll still find it relevant.
I would like to start with some background regarding Battle Royales. I'd say as far as games go, the game that sparked this genre was the DayZ mod back in 2012. DayZ basically went like this:
You start out generally far from others, and with nothing on you. Usually, the next while is spent on running around the map, checking various houses and other locations for weapons, armor, and general supplies. Sooner or later you run into someone else, a fight ensues, and somebody emerges victorious, getting to loot everything the loser had on them. Sound familiar? That's because it's extremely similar to the Battle Royales we have today.
There has been some experimentation with the formula over the years with different games trying different things. The following is not the exact order of how things went, but...
DayZ actually kind of (re-)sparked the "zombie survival" theme at first. Many games that required you to worry about your human needs while gathering other equipment to kill zombies emerged. But it was soon discovered that people didn't quite care about the zombie aspect. Rust strikes me as a notable example, starting out as a DayZ clone (with some Minecraft-esque resource gathering and base building, some of which has survived to the BRs of this day, namely Fortnite) in 2013, but removing zombies in 2014. ARK came out in 2015 and became perhaps the most popular game in this building-survival-PvP genre over the next year(s), but I would wager that that's where that train stopped. (Hey, even ARK got its own Battle Royale version of the game in 2016.)
Scrolling a bit back in time, although I do not know much about it, a movie by the name of The Hunger Games came out in 2012 and got quite popular. That quickly led to a Minecraft mod of the same name and similar content, and in 2013 - although the author didn't say it was connected to the movie - a mod to DayZ (mod) named Battle Royale. Instead, a different movie was cited as the inspiration - a 2000 Japanese movie by the same name, Battle Royale, but apparently the contents of both movies were similar enough. Battle Royale (the game) gave the genre its name (although I suppose it was really the movie that the name came from... or the 1996 book before that? Listen, really, Battle Royales are not a new concept...), along with a lot of other much-needed things, like simultaneous spawns making sure everyone started on equal footing, a goal to be the last one alive instead of just playing until you were inevitably killed by some new spawns or got tired, and a closing ring to make sure the action kept going and the remaining survivors would inevitably find each other.
There's actually quite the funny story here, as the author of this Battle Royale mod perhaps sounds familiar. It was PlayerUnknown, mostly known for his Battlegrounds (2017). But before working on Battlegrounds, he actually assisted in the development of a branch of H1Z1, that would become another well-known Battle Royale in 2016. (Worth noting that H1Z1 used to be just a late-to-the-party zombie survival game back in 2015, but the project was split, and not many cared about the zombie part of the game anymore.) The punchline of course is that PlayerUnknown made a trio of Battle Royale games that he had compete with each other in a Battle Royale fashion. At least I find that humorous.
While all of the previously mentioned games enjoyed a huge amount of popularity, it was PUBG that really exploded, having the most consecutive players online in any game ever since League of Legends. (Okay, there's the Asian shooter named CrossFire, but that's not relevant here for multiple reasons.) After that, a lot of large companies took interest in the Battle Royale genre too, quickly refitting their shooters into a Battle Royale to reap the cash from the craze. Fortnite Battle Royale, releasing the same year as PUBG, was particularly successful, supposedly smashing all consecutive player counts ever, probably due to its Free to Play nature. And then most recently there was the also Free to Play title Apex Legends, which I played a bit more than the rest, which was supposed to be the main topic of this post, and what I will finally get to in a little while, after some of my own thoughts on all this.
I just wanted to mention that if you look back at this pile of games in the past 7 years, you'll find them all connected in various ways. Each next one has been trying to use or build upon the popularity of the last one, almost without exception being rushed out the door so fast they end up as a buggy and unpolished mess, quick to forsake anything they had previously been working on. And I hate each and every one of them. It's not just because they're blatant rushed cash-grabs made by people who evidently don't care about the games they made, past or present (with the exception of the original DayZ mod which started this, which was a buggy mess for other reasons), but also because I find the concepts around which the games are made to be flawed in design. Looking at the player numbers, people obviously don't agree with me, but at least let me explain why I dislike them.
To start off, I'd like to establish that I believe the goal of the game is to win. Doesn't sound too far-fetched, I hope. Now, since the game is a free-for-all, and the winner is decided by who's alive the last, not who has the most kills or any other score metric, the best approach is to just steer clear of combat unless you're going to get a clear victory or are absolutely forced to fight - generally at the very end. Some disagree and believe conflict gives you better chances of winning later on, but I simply find that claim to be unfounded. Of course, the game leading you to avoid one of, if not the main gameplay element, combat, is pretty bad.
Secondly, for all the fairness the games are believed to have, most of the conflicts aren't actually very fair. Usually someone will be at an advantage or disadvantage, often quite a major one, due to luck of finding loot, being caught off guard or in a bad spot, being attacked by 2 people/squads, or something else. While I'd agree that it is ultimately kind of your fault if you engage at a disadvantage or get caught in a disadvantage, that does not change the fact that a lot of conflicts don't feel fair and thus as exciting as they could be. Further, they can put such an abrupt end to your game. All that time preparing for a fight, only the be caught with your pants down feels terrible.
Finally, people love winning. I know PvP games upset a lot of people because they lose so often in comparison to PvE games. People want a challenge and losing is acceptable, but most would want something better than a 50% win rate, as that doesn't quite feel fulfilling. Sadly, nobody has yet to find a way to have more than half the people win in a PvP game, for for each winner there has to be a loser, on average, lest the losers be doomed from the very beginning. However, it amazes me that people would be fine with the opposite. Indeed, this does not mean giving any players an inherent (dis)advantage in the beginning, but it does mean you'll very rarely win. Perhaps already knowing that victory is probably not coming desensitizes people to losing over and over again. Still, I do not buy into this, and find the "everybody loses" design to be terrible.
In light of these problems, it baffles me how Battle Royales became so immensely popular. At least League of Legends is a well-made game. Not a mess of bugs. Has a balanced progression through the match, maximizing the challenge and excitement by keeping the game as fair as possible, adjusting as time goes on. I don't understand how, several years later, the standards of players have dropped so much.
By now, I've pretty much explained everything about Battle Royales in general, and Apex Legends is quite adhering to the standards with no major deviations. However, there are still a few reasons why I've been playing this for the time being, instead of some other Battle Royale. What first captured my interest was that it was made by Titanfall developers. I had heard a lot of good stuff about Titanfall, but never really got to play it. When I heard that Apex Legends felt a lot like Titanfall in terms of movement and combat, I figured I should try it.
While it's still a Battle Royale in all its design, it's also quite well made. I like the graphics, I love sliding, running up walls, how the guns handle, the long time to kill, the fact that all the characters have some unique abilities, and that I have not found nigh any bugs, and definitely nothing that would hinder my gameplay.
Still, my frustrations listed above remain, and while I've been having fun playing with my friends for the past few days, it's already beginning to exhaust itself. I feel like I played it, enjoyed it, but am very quick to put it back down, and leave on brief-but-good terms with the game. If Battle Royales don't interest you at all, Apex Legends is probably not going to change your mind. But if you like them or have been curious as to what they are, I believe Apex Legends might just be the best place to go to right now. That is, a partial recommendation from me.
So there, that should be an overview (and my thoughts) of the evolving trends that have been dominating a lot of the game market in the past 7 years. For how much longer, I do not know, but I am looking forward to some completely new vector popping up, and it being something I can get into more, instead of a few more years of this stuff. All of the games losing massive amounts of players some time after launch gives me hope, but with how many new titles are coming out, they might just be migrating. In any case, you probably won't see me heading back to these, but then again, that's the same note I started this post on.
