Why Apex Legends has kept me playing for 500 hours - MW

That's it. I have been playing Apex Legends for over 500 hours now. The multiplayer online shooter, developed by California studio California Respawn Entertainment and released in February 2019, is my obsession throughout the year, seeing many contenders for Doom Eternal coming Animal Crossing: New Horizons.

For the casual observer, there is nothing remarkable about it. Set in a sci-fi universe associated with Respawn's hit Titanfall series, it's another battle royale game alongside Goliath, which is Fortnite, as well as PlayerUn Unknown Nott Battlegrounds and Call of Duty. : Warzone. You fall into a futuristic high-tech setting with two teammates, then rush to find weapons, while 19 other teams try to kill you and everyone else. The last team alive is the winner.

More importantly, Respawn is one of the largest designers of fast-paced shooters in the industry. Founded in 2010 by creative directors of Call of Duty, Jason West and Vince Zampella, the studio was created with most of the technicians and designers of the legendary Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. - and this experience appears in Apex Legends.

An important element of game design that explores perfectly is the interaction between flow and friction. In fact, most of the time, Apex Legends feels frictionless. When you move in the environment, you do it freely; If you want, you can press a button to glide, which helps you speed up the ground but also lets you glide extremely fast on the slope. It's fast, satisfying, and if you swipe to an object, you can press the jump button to exit the animation, gracefully avoiding collisions. The two Apex Legends maps we've seen so far are designed to encourage and facilitate this form of travel, with lots of trails and valleys to explore.

Buildings and stone fields also allow players to move. Whenever you approach a tall object, there is almost always a practical attachment point - say, a window sill or window sill - a few feet higher than your character. When you jump on a vertical surface, you blur a little, add height and place this grip point at hand. This scrambled animation makes you feel like you've worked for it, giving a sense of accomplishment, though advanced platforms are almost always accessible. The game works with you.

In case the player isn't entirely sure they can go somewhere but decides to try anyway, 90% of the time, they will succeed, video game design expert Dan Pearce, director of Four Circle and the fans from Respawn. Everything in Apex is balanced like that, like the way the balls in Halo bend slightly to hit their targets, or Mario has about half a second that he can still jump after running around the edge of the surface. .

Another aspect that Dan and I love is the decision to follow a three-man team, instead of the four-person team favored by Fortnite or Call of Duty. This means that no one can do it - everyone must work together and be an integral part of any strategy. Third team players also mean it's easy to form a well-balanced rock / paper / scissor style team, where someone is focused on crossing, someone is focused on aggression. , someone focused on defense, said Pearce. The three players are also a sufficiently small group, if you are really in the area, you can imagine the whole team in one hand.

But the key to cooperative play is the game ping system, which allows players to highlight areas on the map, useful items, and enemy locations for their teammates without speaking. . This, along with a chat wheel that offers a bunch of tactical phrases, means that he can play as a team with strangers without having to use your voice, which is scary and open. giving you the possibility of abuse - or unwanted noise. It's a real blessing for the gaming culture, said Pearce. I may never have to clumsily describe an enemy's position to the sound of an unknown barking dog when I was hit by a bullet.

Spending a lot of time wandering around two maps of Apex Legends - King Canyon and Edge Edge World - what I noticed was the architecture and the terrain; How they work together to provide a fun mini playground, a choke point and a risk center. Icy slipped towards Epicenter, the fragile passage, surrounded by lava of the Dome, the wide neglected streets of the capital. In a game with such extravagance on the design of the weapon and its special abilities, you need each area of ​​the environment to provide strict and specific roles. Respawn's approach to directing is more theatrical than the film.

There are very few things that are not relevant to the design, according to Pearce. There is almost nothing just because it is superb. So far, each Respawn game seems to be able to play with block prototypes and stay relevant, because each element mechanically justifies its inclusion. This type of puzzle box design, where everything deliberately clicks on each other, is more difficult to find in larger-scale games. Respawn is the only developer to do so - Remedy Game orders seem similar to me, but very rare in the big three budgets.

But what I really like about Apex Legends is the simple, barrier-free fun of traveling the world. Many game designers are very interested in the concept of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's flow, a very concentrated mental state in which actions become almost automatic. The support flow is one of the most underrated design elements - it can be found in the way a game lights up certain regions of the world to show where players should go (Dead. Space does it perfectly) or uses scolding comments to indicate the sides of a road in a racing game. But what Apex Legends does is reduce friction so that players feel skillful.

I think that's why Apex has been very successful, even among players who don't regularly like battle royale games, said Pearce. The software is easy to overwhelm players when introduced to these games, but Respawn balances everything so that players feel more capable and aware by about 20% more than they are.

Of course, I have to face the fact that the game I have played the most this year is the one that Design flatters me about. But 500 hours later, I really don't care.

MW