How Apex Legends Improved the Design of Battle Royale Games

I’ve been playing Apex Legends here and there since it debuted in February. At first, it just sounded like another game trying to get in on the battle royale genre. Buuuuuut it was also free-to-play and my friends were interested in trying it, so I thought why not give it a shot.

Turns out — it’s made HUGE improvements to the general design of BR games.* Aside from generally better ease of movement (vaulting is smooth, sliding lasts for as long as you remain on an incline vs. always only lasting for x seconds, etc.), here are some specific improvements they made:

1. Pinging system. Probably THE best thing Apex could have done for BRs (I read that even Fortnite has reworked their system to emulate this). Prior to Apex, players could generally only communicate there’s an enemy in the vicinity by pinging on a flat, 2d map and hoping teammates pay attention, or shouting something like “west, 285!” if they were in a voice app chat. If the enemy was far away, they’d have to estimate distance as well and hope teammates could tell how far that was.

It was generally not accurate and rather annoying to have to look at the direction indicator at the top of the screen in the middle of a gunfight.

Finally, a pinging system that’s not just sane, but delightful.

Apex, on the other hand, thought of EVERYTHING for pinging. Players can ping not just enemies, but items that they think teammates can use, and where they think the team should go next. Instead of having to guesstimate distance, players can literally ping on the game screen, and the game would automatically show the respective distance on every individual teammate’s screen. There isn’t even a need for a different key for pinging different things — players can use the same button for pinging anything, and the game would automatically say if it’s an enemy or a weapon or ammo that’s being pinged (because why not??) and remove any additional friction. Additionally, teammates can then interact with the ping icon that appears on the screen and call dibs on the item, and even get a choice of thanking the player who pinged the item once they do pick up the item. I like that the option is there because multiplayer online video games could generally use more reminders to be polite. What a revolution.

2. Weapon/attachment switching. One thing that early BRs (ahem, PUBG) established was the frantic picking up of weapons/ammo/attachment and fumbling in your inventory in the middle of a swarm of players all trying to kill each other. Even if you weren’t surrounded by enemies, it was a serious annoyance to decide to switch out a gun in your inventory, because it meant removing every attachment from your current gun, dropping them to the ground in case you didn’t have room in your backpack, picking up the new gun, then individually putting every attachment back on. Just typing all that out pained me.

Apex, on the other hand, automatically switches out and replaces attachments that work with the gun you want to swap to, and does so seamlessly. It even tells you when a piece of apparel is an upgrade or not, making it a simple tap to replace if it IS an upgrade, and a longer keypress if it’s NOT an upgrade, so that there are fewer accidental downgrades. The design team really thought the process through — it’s hard for me to imagine that these designers haven’t experienced the disaster that usually accompanies the BR looting phase.

3. No fall damage. Maybe this is controversial, I don’t know. People have come to expect fall damage in games, so perhaps it was considered a bold move by the devs to completely remove it — but I’m a big fan. It makes mobility so much easier, and ensures players aren’t punished when they aren’t certain if a ledge is just the right height for landing or if they’ll take a fatal amount of damage from the earth.

I imagine there might be some people who think of these design changes as “dumbing down” the BR genre, but I’d argue that the changes don’t affect the act of fighting itself, just the actions that build up to firefights, and thus keeps the fighting mechanics pristine.

There are a bunch of other small design details that really make a world of difference to ease of gameplay, but in the interest of keeping this a blog post vs. a short novel, I’ll stop here.

One last note: I’ve read bits and pieces about Apex Legends tournaments cropping up. Since every multiplayer game is getting the “eSports treatment” these days, I’m not too surprised, but I’ve always thought BRs have to change some fundamentals to make it spectator-ready. It would be interesting to see if Apex can redesign that experience and really make it work.

* Note, I’m comparing mostly to PUBG and Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 —Blackout mode. I haven’t played (and probably won’t be playing) Fortnite.