Apex Legends: the team-based Titanfall Battle Royale

So, after the first weekend, my feelings for EA's new Battle Royale game are thus:

• It's very much team-based, with the tag system being insanely useful and implemented in an organic way, and the surprising respawn feature being fair and rewarding.
• TTK takes ages. Not only armor is seriously overpowered, as you have to shoot it off first instead of it offering a percentage of damage reduction known from pretty much everything else, but guns feel underpowered as well, particularly most of the shotguns (people use Peacekeeper only). Downed characters have ridiculously huge health pools as well.
• People ignore grenades, mostly because they're not that good. You can't cook them, and the default fuse on the frag grenade is ridiculously long (about as long as the AT bundle fuse in Battlefield V).
• Mobility is pretty good, with two characters (Pathfinder and Wraith) offering additional options in this field.
• There is no waiting room. Yep, the bane of players, streamers and viewers everywhere is gone.

"what the complete, unabridged, 4k ultra HD fuck with bonus features" - Mark Von Lewis

Given how popular and successful this game has been, I figured it was only a matter of time before it got it's own thread.

I've been semi-addicted to it for the past couple of days, ever since I got over the initial hump of being abysmally bad at the game. It's definitely very team-oriented, almost to the point where you can be effectively crippled if you drop without a full 3 squad members. That happened to me a couple of times- either they left immediately for some reason or the matchmaking isn't quite up to snuff, but it's a fairly infrequent occurrence.

Cohesion and communication is incredibly important, as I quickly found out playing in the public lobby. Pubbies virtually never use the F key to spot enemies, which makes me want to pull my hair out, and keep wandering far off to find loot and get picked off with no practical way for me to reach and rez them. TTK is definitely longer than other games in the genre, but I still find it plenty easy to get rekt, especially in CQB. If someone has a solid bead on you, you can go down in easily less than a second. Firefights at realistic distances however are rarely decisive. You're more or less just plinking away at a distant target until their shields drop, then they scurry back into cover to recharge them.

yey

So, after hearing the Jimquisition singing this game's praises, I felt like I should try to get in on this. Played two matches so far as Lifeline, under the assumption that I can be sorta useful if I occasionally hit that Q button.

Turns out that I have no idea what I'm doing. Like, at all. There's just so much stuff to keep track of, and by the time I finished checking out the loot and guessed at what it'll do, my teammates are at the other side of the map. All I've managed so far is working myself into proximity of my teammates (eventually), and provide another moving target for the enemy to shoot at.

Still managed to get carried to second and first place, though. Even got a kill somewhere in there.

Seriously, though, I think I'll start my career in this game by reading a couple of guides. This is not the game for relaxed learning on the fly.

I miss trying to get into Overwatch or TF 2. Nice training mode with no time limit to test out stuff and that actually explained something, easy-to-learn or at least intuit maps, and if you underperformed you could at least feel lost in the crowd rather than actively dragging down your team.

I mean, seriously, they explained the controls, but so little about the game itself. I'm not even sure yet what the Ring does. How sad is that?

Which is why I don't play the game with pubbies. I try to get a group first.

"what the complete, unabridged, 4k ultra HD fuck with bonus features" - Mark Von Lewis

How long before EA decides to EA things up with this game being a Sleeper Hit?

If anything, many worry about the future of Titanfall 3.

Uni cat

So some tips I can provide.

Lifeline you want to do

• Put up her care package ult up as much as possible, always be popping ultimate accelerants. Be careful though as sometimes your ult may tip off some enemies
• Put up your health drone up in a out of way place during or after a fight. You want it to be out of the way because enemies can also use your health drone if they see it. Wraith's portals also work this way.
• Of course reviving your teammates as much as you can

Some general tips as I see people make these mistakes a lot

• Those little robots that look like the Apex Packs? They have good loot in them, you want to use melee on them or shoot them to get the loot
• Ping everything, Ping the enemy especially as even if your aim sucks if you ping an ememies location to your squadmates chances are they'll come running to kill the ememies and may have better aim.
• Pathfinder's ult and passive are more useful than it looks, use it as much as possible. Just be careful of your surroundings.
• You can ping clues as Bloodhound to your teammates, pretty helpful if someone very recently went through there.
• If someone kills your or your teammate's clone as Mirage you'll see this little icon pop up showing exactly where their location was when they shot it.
• Gold shields can revive you, be on the look out for reviving enemies so you do not get blindsided
• Do not go for executions/finishers unless you know your enemy is alone as you will get shot if your enemies teammates are coming to their aid.

So many tips to write

From my understanding Respawn Entertainment purposefully has been keeping EA out of their games as much as possible. They purposefully kept the game under wraps until it was ready to release partly due to being published by EA.

Edited by Wispy on Feb 11th 2019 at 11:58:23 AM

Pathfinder's ult. They did not see that coming.

"what the complete, unabridged, 4k ultra HD fuck with bonus features" - Mark Von Lewis

Thanks for taking the time.

Edited by Kayeka on Feb 11th 2019 at 8:56:23 PM

Am I an idiot, or do you not even start a match with guns?

No you don't. You have to find loot wherever you choose to land which includes guns.

In all battle royale games you start off really sparse. Usually with just melee and you have to find guns or shields/armor and all that.

Same thing in this game. No guns at first, you have to find them and then keep upgrading your gear by either killing other squads or looting airdrops/care packages.

Stay clear of the Mozambique though. It really sucks.

Yup. The early-game scramble to find loot is a staple feature of the Battle Royale genre. Some folks don't like the RNG aspect in such a competitive game, others think the rush to be the first to find a gun in a contested drop zone is thrilling. Personally I'm more risk-averse, and so tend to pick drop zones where my squad can gear up in peace before confronting other squads on a more level playing field.

Edited by Gault on Feb 12th 2019 at 12:58:25 AM

yey

I keep dying & dying.

Multiple tens of plays & I've only racked up 6 kills total.

Edited by slimcoder on Feb 11th 2019 at 9:18:14 AM

"I am Alpharius. This is a lie."

Its hard to get used to at first.

Whats your playstyle in other games?

Get a weapon & either hide or move closer to the circle & then hide.

If I get lucky I shoot someone in the back from a distance or someone without a weapon.

Edited by slimcoder on Feb 12th 2019 at 2:43:31 AM

"I am Alpharius. This is a lie."

So flanking?

I would go with Wraith or Bloodhound then. Pathfinder can flank too but you need to get really good with his grapples to pull it off. Mirage can flank or confuse the shit out of people as well.

Lifeline and Bangalore are pretty simple, generally frontline. Gibraltr is mainly good for his ult from what I have seen as it can wipe whole squads if used right. Caustic is good mainly for defense and close quarters as his traps can be used as alarms, so if another squad walks into your traps or shoots one you'll known and be able to ambush them or prepare for a firefight.

Caustic would be pretty good if you want to hide in a building for example. He excels at that

Edited by Wispy on Feb 12th 2019 at 3:13:55 AM

I was awful at first too, and I almost quit the game because of it. Now that I've gotten the hang of things however, I'm glad I didn't. There's a whole bunch of behaviors you sort of just have to learn in order to really be competitive. Some are deceptively simple and might not be all that obvious at first- how to move, where to move, where to look, what cover to pick and how to use it, etc. However, if you do end up getting better at the game, you'll start to see them. At least, that was my experience.

Wraith is a particularly newbie-friendly character as her active ability lets her lolnope out of firefights she's losing. Be aware however that you can't see enemies when phasing, but they can still see you, so it isn't a form of stealth.

Edited by Gault on Feb 12th 2019 at 7:21:47 PM

yey

Your portals are not team only either. Your enemies can also go through them so be careful of that

Portals, sure, but Wraith has that phantom dash as well, which - due to the purple streak she leaves behind - doesn't really work as an invisibility, but allows you to lolnope out of trouble pretty quickly.

I also managed to pull a nigh-impossible stunt with Pathfinder yesterday: I picked up my teammate's banner, jumped off a cliff... and when I realized that it was a suicide, I grappled my ass out of there, leaving the enemies pretty confused.

Then I extracted another teammate's banner and died because I missed with the Triple Take on my way to the respawn beacon (or, as I call it, a toaster).

"what the complete, unabridged, 4k ultra HD fuck with bonus features" - Mark Von Lewis

Been enjoying this game, since I always gravitate towards supports Lifeline is my most played character. This game also gave me my first win in any Battle Royale game so yay for me.

So, after a few days of playing solo, I grabbed some friends, hoping that not playing with randos would be better.

On the one hand, it was definitely more fun, and we could actually coordinate battle plans. On the other, between the three of us, we got a grand total of zero kills in eight matches.

The theory of this game is easy to grasp, after some light reading. We even managed to get second and third place occasionally. But then the time comes to actually confront another team, and we get rolled in seconds. It's so weird, it feels like we're emptying our magazines into the other team without so much as breaking their shields, while they shoot once or twice and take down one of our own.

We're having fun, but I do hope we'll soon get to the point where we can actually get in a fight and maybe not get painfully humiliated. It's rather discouraging, and phat loot isn't half as interesting when you know that you're not actually going to kill someone with it.

Edited by Kayeka on Feb 14th 2019 at 1:37:00 PM

TTK can be frustrating especially with purple and gold armors and sadly I don't see them changing it too much if at all because their is a lot of people that say they are okay with it because it makes the game more tactical.

I think the issue might not even be the armors themselves necessarily it might be the fact its pretty easy to heal yourself to full in this comparably to most B Rs. Well that and this game is very squad based so anyone whom is stuck with randos chances are will get massively screwed if their team doesn't push up with them if they down someone. Can't tell you how many times that has happened to me were I downed one or two people and my squadmates didn't bother pushing or the last guy downed me and they all fell to that one guy.

That's a situation I've often gotten in as well, going 10+ minutes, a dozen different towns, and most of the match without running into anyone.

I don't think it's doing anything wrong, strategy-wise, but wonder if I should go for/advise more aggressive drops just to get more firefight experience.

People can be harder to hit than you'd expect, especially when recoil and projectile trajectory come into play. I've often fired of a bunch of shots, died, and been surprised by the "total damage" stat showing few of them actually connected.

I don't think shield tier makes that much of a difference—standard and Epic/Legendary armor is the difference between 150 and 200 health (total health, not just from the shields). Certainly useful, but less important than things like aim, movement, surprise, or force of numbers.

Well, I'll let this excerpt from an interview from Titanfall 2's launch speak for itself as to the kind of people that are running Apex. Bear in mind that EA launched Titanfall 2 in the same window as Battlefield 1 (which EA also published) and COD: Infinite Warfare.

Edited by GoldenKaos on Feb 21st 2019 at 10:11:37 AM

"...in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach."

I keep hearing people say that this game is going to “destroy” Fortnite. I don’t think that’s likely …