Apex Legends - Damn, I'm addicted. (English)

Important:
This article was originally written in october, 2019. Today I decided to translate it into english to see if there's any interest in my reports about the game. There are two until now and possible more in the future if the interest is there. The translation of the second part will follow. Please excuse my sloppy english as I machine-translated the rough text and corrected it afterwards. Any feedback is welcome. Thank you.

Ugh. I always thought I am something special. I always assumed I am something better. There are few genres in video games that I really avoid consistently: Racing games. Sports games. Point and click. Strategy games. Shooter. And of course the modern, incestuous child of Mommy Mainstream and Uncle Brainless - Battle Royal.

The genre does not have a good reputation among video players who are really deep in the medium and its possibilities. Not only, but especially since the highly contagious zombie disease Fortnite gotits hype, a game which is known to infest 7 - 16 year old, overweight, psychologically unstable children and etch their money out of their flesh, causing the T-virus to blush in shame. It’s difficult for me to identify with this genre, which has made it into the largest markets in the game industry for a long time. You know, what I'm playing with passion and joy are genres like Visual Novels. J-RPGs. Fighting Games. Playable Movies. Story-driven Games. All the entries in the ‘About Me’-are of my application and my Tinder profile, which are guaranteed to take me to any job and make me a hit at lively nerd parties. I play stuff that gives me the feeling I’m something better than you. Not this ragged mainstream nonsense, which only undemanding people play anyway, and yeah.

But my fall eventually came. And this did not without clear hints: For years I have been looking into some PUBG-Lets Play on Youtube. I found them to be quite exciting and entertaining to watch and the principle with the enclosing ring seemed refined to me. But playing it myself? No, that didn't allure me one bit. We don't even need to talk about Fortnite, and even aside from that the genre could never serve as a potential time killer for me because I could neither see the appeal in a Battle Royal nor reconcile the interest in it with my self-awareness. I stayed with Let’s Plays. 

Until a friend came into my life, whose questionable influences on me I should rethink by now. He told me about Apex Legends and how great and different it would be from the rest. He would understand my enormous aversion to Battle Royal because he felt the same way, but Apex Legends was different. He wanted to play it with me, but I refused to spend money on something like that. When he explained to me that the game is free and that you don't even need a Playstation+subscription at the PS4 (Playstation+ is the most impudent, outrageous subscription model in the world), I finally gave in and downloaded it. What harm could it do to take a short glance?

Oh, the naivety. The youth, the shame. For a little over a week now, I have owned and played Apex Legends, daily, and have to admit that I am (a little) addicted. Contrary to my enormous skepticism and the self-image of the unapproachable, cool elite gamer, I broke in after just a few games and had fun. Actually, I am very, very reluctant to play online with others, especially shooters are just too fast and too wild for me, I can't handle it. But the fact that I could talk to my friend in real time here and play together in a team and that we were both beginners who learned together developed an uncanny pull on me as a notorious single player. Even in games without him, you play in teams of 2 to 3 in Apex and you’re rarely alone. The learning curve is steep. The Battle Royal principle is incredibly entertaining.  

Aha. 

That's why the whole world is playing these games. 

And instead of standing next to it sniffy any longer, I am now an active part of it. Ugh. But not only that - I'm addicted. I can say that if my longest session so far was seven hours in a row (!!) playing apex, from 8:00 p.m. to 3:00 a.m.

Enough of my self-pity. Let’s get to Apex Legends itself and what the appeal of the game is. The fact that it is free is important, and the extremely fair handling of micro-transactions is also a point - there are only cosmetic items to unlock, and even most of those you can actually buy with the ingame currency won - this takes extremely long, but is absolutely okay if you consider that micro-transactions are the only source of revenue for Respawn Entertainment. One has rarely seen such fair and pleasant micro-transactions. Furthermore, the game looks really not that bad - Yes, I didn't like the legends at the beginning and I still don't like the designs. When I look at brands like League of Legends or Overwatch, the standard is just too high. But I got used to the legends and learned to appreciate their crude teen charm. The ingame graphics are extremely okay, nothing special, but no comparison at all to the gray-green-brown PUBG porridge or the Fortnite rainbow pamp, which causes brain cancer in the curse of minutes. The learning curve is as mentioned very steep - At the beginning, my friend and I - of course - only died, we had to get used to the looting, get to know all the weapons, explore the map and develop a sense for of Battle Royal - After a day or two, however, we felt significant improvements. And through the levels, experience points, currencies and unlocks you always have a feeling of reward, even if you played badly. This is especially important for me, since I am usually very bad in video games, especially in competitive genres like fighting games, and can still be good here by training, learning, getting better. The game is not unfair, and even the greatest, most experienced professional can be brought down by a beginner. The marking system is the beating heart of the gameplay - it is a great way to communicate, support each other, set the path, split up, warn from enemies and so on. A simplistic and yet completely successful idea, without which the game would have a much weaker appeal to me. 

Of course you can definitely improve the system - I still don't know exactly how to trigger certain announcements of the characters that my teammates regularly knock at my ears. It is simply not explained anywhere, like so much else.

Also incredibly essential for the tiresome addiction spiral is the gigantic community - out of pretty much all the multiplayer games I've played online so far - and those were mostly niche fighting games or RPGs - I learned that you have to wait at least 2-3 minutes for a game. Here it takes a maximum of 20 seconds. 20 seconds. 

A third of a minute and you're in the next game. Doesn't it go well? Quit and jump to the next one. Only one more try. One more game, another level, another kill. 

No escape. 

I didn’t really use the skills of my main legend wraith frequently for the first ten to twenty games until I had finally figured them out. What you can clearly criticize about pex is the tutorial - It only explains the basic mechanics, but not the individual legends or the different weapons. What the skills or guns can do - you have to find out for yourself in the heat of the moment. Not a very inviting solution. Even today I still use the skills sparingly, which is due to the fact that in an exchange of shots you are lying on the floor after 2-3 seconds anyways before you can even think of doing anything other than firing back in panic. 

What also motivated me enormously are the variable gameplay options, which are also very useful in Apex: There are different ways to survive. Sure, you can shoot your way through from the start and look for any conflict, but you can always just stay on the edge of the action, avoid every opponent generously and sneak your way through until the end and hope that the others send each other to the afterlife. Or you can camp heavily armed in a remote house as long as the circle allows it. I have already tried all of that, all of that already worked. For a rather calm player like me, those are pleasant options. 

All in all: Without having played the other Battle Royals, I’ll say that Apex Legends is better. At least better than most, and thus in the upper average of the genre. The game is a free, colorful, quite accessible mix with a very high addiction effect, an extremely active community and constant reward frenzy. This is not an excuse for my case, but at least it explains it. 

Right? ... Right?!

Let me talk a bit about the special event currently taking place - shadow fall.

Shadow fall is a mode that I was of course not informed about before restarting the console, suddenly the new menu just greeted me and I was thrown into it like a toddler. My excitement was immense, my enthusiasm for a new map at night, with jumpscare monsters in loot boxes, shadow monsters, single player mode and a scary atmosphere TREMENDOUS. Then came the disillusionment, anger, frustration, acceptance. 

Shadowfall is a mode that could be really good, but in its essence it is rather a memorial of the intolerable. The main reason for this is that it is - the entire Internet kinda agrees about that - hopelessly unbalanced and unfair. I’ll briefly explain the mode again: 

You start as a single legend. If you shoot another legend, it becomes a shadow. If you are shot down yourself or killed again by a shadow, you become a shadow to kill legends. With each legend that has died, the "dark side" grows stronger. Every shadow killed comes back after a few seconds. So you fight each other first, making the collective enemy more and more dangerous and ultimately joining them. Only when you have survived long enough as a legend, you form a large survival team. An insanely interesting and well thought-out concept with gaping weaknesses.

Everyone who has played the mode knows - the shadows are incredibly difficult to beat. To win as a legend here you have to reach a rescue ship available after a certain time. That may seem logical considering that every legend that is killed turns into a shadow, but that's not the problem. The problems lie with the balancing of both factions: 

- Shadows can kill a legend with mostly one, sometimes two, rarely three strikes

- Shadows are much, much faster and more agile than legends, but can only withstand 2 shots 

- Shadows see where on the map is their killer, where other shadows die, where legends are fighting, where legends die, they hear where the shooting is going on, see legends as red-lit silhouettes very clearly even at great distances, are in the majority in the last third of a round by far

- As soon as the rescue ship has landed, shadows become even faster and see all legends permanently on the map just like the rescue ship.

- The time to reach the rescue ship as a legend is incredibly short - Usually it lands 500 - 800 meters away from you, which is a cruel and endless running route in the game, when shadow opponents appear every few seconds, who hit you and thus can kick you out of the game. It takes 100 seconds to land, then you have 30 seconds to get on board and save yourself. Needless to say, most shadows just besiege the landing site and kill everything that moves. 

The main problems of the mode should be clear. If you want to approach other players peacefully and signal them to work together because there is no point in killing each other and strengthening the real threat, you will be mercilessly shot down every time. The only solution: camping. Camping, camping and camping again. For me, this was by far the most successful legend-strategy. I have won several times as a legend, but that was really three of maybe fifty games. The mode is not relevant fun, it is extremely difficult, frustrating and relentless, every mistake leads to death. The guess is in the community is that this is the intention of the developers. That would make sense - Shadow fall is opened as a bitterly evil Halloween event in the darkness, the (after some time annoying) commentator for the mode, who sees himself as an overlord of evil, makes it clear that legends have nothing to laugh about here. Well, then it was just intentional. I still don’t have to like it.

It is a waste and I would hope that the mode will still be tweaked, but since it will (in any case) permanently disappear again in two weeks, that will probably not be necessary.

What more can I say. In the meantime it has gotten better for me - I play a little less apex and set limits. This is also because I am again dealing with other time killers like my Playstation Vita or my SNES Mini. Still, I neglect my duties and other hobbies too much for Apex, and that is something that I seriously question and condemn. Apex is fun, no question, but unlike story games, it gives me nothing, does not advance me in terms of experience and is more or less an activity in which I turn in a circle where I could be productive.

So if someone who reads this disturbing addiction report plays with the idea of ​​trying Apex from their PC or PS4 for free, I can only say - 

Please pay attention to the risk of addiction.

- Yoraiko