Apex Legends: still the best FPS to play with strangers

It may seem strange to compare a free-to-play battle royale to an arthouse indie game, but here it comes: Apex Legends is actually the trip of first person shooters.

The latter, which was developed by Flower creator thatgamecompany and released in 2012, is a game about traversing the desert ruins of an ancient civilization through non-verbal communication with an array of complete strangers. It is possible to stay with the same player throughout the game. Thus, the themes of connection and trust in the game can surpass beauty and end up in the sublime.

Apex Legendswhich Fall of the Titans developer Respawn released in 2019 as a foray into the thriving genre dominated by PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds and Fortnite, is a game about launching canisters of noxious gas from the balcony of an apartment building before zipping through a public park to escape the shrinking, deadly boundary of an ethereal circle. It is also, to a large extent, about non-verbal communication and it can alsosometimes bend in the sublime.

Image: Respawn Entertainment/Electronic Arts

With the growing ubiquity of battle royales as a free-to-play phenomenon in the late 2010s, it made sense that many Top players would dip their toes in the water without a friend or two beside them. And despite voice chat’s tendency to often be worthless, it also made sense that thousands of players could benefit from some form of non-verbal communication.

Enter: The ping system, which has long allowed FPS players to place a beacon on locations, events and items of interest. Respawn took the idea (variants of which appeared in series like Left 4 Dead and Battlefield) and increased it tenfold, allowing players to pinpoint not only the location of a weapon, for example, but also the exact location of a weapon. type of weapon. Crucially, the ping system has been combined with each character’s different voice lines to give players as much information as possible, whether they’re in the next room or far up the map.

It’s an organic flow of information from Respawn, to me, to my teammates, all through an elegant ping system and a vibrant, unmistakable art style

The improved ping system worked so well that both: Topthe main competitors at the time — PUBG and Fortnite – added proprietary ping systems within six months of Respawn’s release. And when Call of Duty: Warzone went live the following year, followed suit.

I’ve always been fascinated by how first-person shooters talk to the player without actually saying anything – I remember running Destiny strikes with strangers in the early days of the MMO, marveling at the unmistakable visual language of the individual classes’ abilities. That fighter just used their super on that bossI could say to myself. Time for me to throw in on the damage too.

Image: Respawn Entertainment/Electronic Arts

What makes Top really special though is how the designers so skillfully combine that kind of visual vocabulary with the game’s actual communication mechanics. The playable heroes (the Legends of the same name) are recognizable from hundreds of meters away. When I see a Lifeline player taking cover behind a distant boulder, I know how powerful a support character she can be when we successfully take down her teammates. If I don’t have the weapon to take her out from this distance, I can ping her as a threat to my teammate who plays Vantage, who excels at long-range encounters. Once we (hopefully) take out the enemy squad, I’ll be able to ping all the heavy ammunition and sniper rifle attachments between the loot, keeping Vantage in shape for the next firefight. It’s an organic flow of information from Respawn, to me, to my teammates, all through an elegant ping system and a vibrant, unmistakable art style. And all this time I haven’t spoken a word.

This brings me back to trip. The real revelation of that game for me was how downright intimate it could be. This person could have gone alone at any moment, but here we are, trekking these snow-strewn cliffs, surfing the glittering slopes of a mountain lost in time, just the two of us, alone together.

It surprised me, not in the least, to feel that same kind of digital connection in Apex Legends, just minutes after headshotting a character who had jetpacked onto a ledge I’d sealed off with my teammates, in the final moments of a long and arduous journey across a cartoonishly vibrant island. The circle came closer and I knew Vantage could be trusted, because she’d been communicating with me the whole time – but that Bloodhound? They’ve been quiet.

They do have 17 kills. So I let it slide.