Apex Legends is joining a crowded battle royale market, but Respawn’s shooter brings unique innovations and fun to the party.
Confirming the weekend’s worst-kept video game secret, Electronic Arts and Respawn Entertainment announced Apex Legends, a free-to-play battle royale shooter game set in the Titanfall universe. The game is available today to download and play on the Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and Windows PC.
News started leaking since Friday. Vince Zampella, CEO of Respawn, hinted at the launch when he tweeted a four-hour countdown to an announcement on Monday morning. I’ve played this on the PC on EA’s Origin platform. The gameplay is fun, thanks to some key design choices that the Respawn team made.
I think it’s going to be very well received, even though it’s coming very late in the battle royale market dominated by Fortnite, PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, Call of Duty: Blackout, and other titles. It’s the first game that Respawn is releasing since EA bought the Los Angeles studio for $455 million in 2017. And it looks like EA may get its money’s worth.
Because it’s so different from the first two Titanfalls, which were shooters with big mechs, the team decided to brand the game with a different kind of name, Apex Legends.
“While it is in the Titanfall universe, it’s something new and unique,” said Zampella in an interview with GamesBeat. “We want people to know that and understand that. Someone might have heard that Titanfall is such a hardcore game, so maybe if this one is branded that way, they don’t want to try it. This is something new. Come and give it a fair chance.”
The secrecy and speed with which Respawn made this game are surprising. While the team toyed with survival-game designs before, it began working on what would become Apex Legends in spring 2017. At that time, PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds blew up into a viral hit, catching the company’s attention, said Respawn design director Mackey McCandlish in an interview with GamesBeat.
“It was just one guy making a map and another guy putting the mode in at first, back in late March or early April of 2017,” he said. “It wasn’t until after Frontier Defense shipped that we had some more bandwidth. Those guys then joined our nascent battle royale. We identified, through our wide prototyping, that there was an opportunity within the squad, social space.”
They did a lot of iteration, trying out ideas like putting Titans, the hallmark of the previous two Titanfall games, in the battle royale game. But Zampella and the rest of the team learned that it didn’t make sense for balance reasons. The Legends characters, however, have a lot of additional capabilities that normal ground troops wouldn’t have.
“Once you play it, you don’t even think about that. It has to be fun,” Zampella said. “You could force something in for the sake of a name or an identity, but this is part of the Titanfall universe. It’s not just about having giant Titans. It’s about the characters, having more identifiable characters and less generic sci-fi pilots.
