Be Like Bill

This is all of the reasons you should play apex legends; For decades, game designers have been trying to get players to work together. In the beginning, multiplayer games had text chat — which was fine except for the fact that it's very hard to both play a game and type specific instructions at the same time. In 1999, "Counter-Strike" popularized two potential solutions for this: pre-recorded voice lines and microphone support. They were, of course, imperfect. The former made it slightly easier for players to communicate with one another, but you still had to dig through menus in order to find the right message, and using it effectively meant taking hours to memorize the dozens of lines and associated keybinds. The former made communication a lot easier, but it required another piece of hardware and also meant that any stranger on the internet was now more-or-less free to shout at you. Microsoft, seemingly determined to spark a new wave of multiplayer communication, packaged headsets with the 2005 launch of the Xbox 360. If everyone has a microphone, the thinking went, then everyone would surely want to play games over Xbox Live. Obviously, Microsoft severely underestimated the consequences of giving microphones to anonymous teenage boys with internet connections and short tempers. Since then, we've seen developers make half-steps towards designing multiplayer games with good communication systems. In 2005, "Battlefield 2" introduced a spotting system where if a player saw an enemy, all they had to do was hit one button and that enemy's location would be added to your team's minimap. This was later improved in 2006's "Battlefield 2142" by placing an actual marker over enemies within a player's HUD, and expanded into a radial menu where players could select a handful of common voice commands. Playing battle royale games can be a lonely, frustrating experience. You've already heard the formula by now: 50-100 or so players drop onto a single map with nothing, and then they loot and fight until a single player or squad is left standing. The randomness inherent within the battle royale genre is a huge reason why games like "PUBG" and "Fortnite" have exploded and come to dominate the industry within the past year. It's also a huge reason of why they can be so frustrating. Sometimes you drop in, immediately find everything you need and then spend the next 20 minutes or so gleefully trying to outsmart and outshoot the competition — otherwise known as "playing the game." And then sometimes, for like 5 games in a row, you drop in, find nothing and die within 30 seconds — spending more times in menus and lobbies waiting for the next game to start. Last week, developer Respawn Entertainment surprise-released "Apex Legends," a multiplayer shooter set in their popular, although arguably overlooked, "Titanfall" universe. Looking at the bullet points, it has everything you would expect from a multiplayer game released in 2019. It's a battle royale game, initially popularized by "Playerunknown's Battlegrounds." It's free-to-play, like "Fortnite." It has a class-based character system, like "Overwatch." A cynic might look at this and think that Respawn, and publisher EA, took every market-proven industry trend, crammed it into a "Titanfall" game, and then took out the mechs and the wall-running. But just three days after launch, Respawn CEO Vince Zampella announced that "Apex Legends" hit a mind-blowing 10 million players — a feat that took "Fortnite" two weeks to accomplish — and after the weekend more than doubled to 25 million players. Amongst my friends, on Tuesday no one was playing it. By Thursday everyone was playing it. Granted, the entry price of zero dollars surely has something to do with it, but just what is it about "Apex Legends" that hooked so many people so quickly? Did Respawn finally find the jumble of mechanics to lure away "PUBG" players and "Fortnite" players and "Overwatch" players? Maybe. But I would argue that the early success of "Apex Legends" comes down to a single button press. For decades, game designers have been trying to get players to work together. In the beginning, multiplayer games had text chat — which was fine except for the fact that it's very hard to both play a game and type specific instructions at the same time. In 1999, "Counter-Strike" popularized two potential solutions for this: pre-recorded voice lines and microphone support. They were, of course, imperfect. The former made it slightly easier for players to communicate with one another, but you still had to dig through menus in order to find the right message, and using it effectively meant taking hours to memorize the dozens of lines and associated keybinds. The former made communication a lot easier, but it required another piece of hardware and also meant that any stranger on the internet was now more-or-less free to shout at you. Microsoft, seemingly determined to spark a new wave of multiplayer communication, packaged headsets with the 2005 launch of the Xbox 360. If everyone has a microphone, the thinking went, then everyone would surely want to play games over Xbox Live. Obviously, Microsoft severely underestimated the consequences of giving microphones to anonymous teenage boys with internet connections and short tempers. Since then, we've seen developers make half-steps towards designing multiplayer games with good communication systems. In 2005, "Battlefield 2" introduced a spotting system where if a player saw an enemy, all they had to do was hit one button and that enemy's location would be added to your team's minimap. This was later improved in 2006's "Battlefield 2142" by placing an actual marker over enemies within a player's HUD, and expanded into a radial menu where players could select a handful of common voice commands.