THE ART OF NOT SUCKING AT THE VIDEOGAME APEX LEGENDS (PART ONE)

Hi-ho (as Kermit the frog used to say), Park here, with a slightly different cultural direction today: the first of a series on the video game Apex Legends. Apex Legends is a free videogame for the Playstation, the Xbox, and for PC gamers, so it’s not like trying it will cost you anything. But if you don’t play Apex Legends, and if you never ever want to, you may be excused from class today.

BUT FOR THOSE OF YOU STILL READING: Let’s say you might want to try Apex Legends, or you DO play it—maybe you’ve tried playing it some, but you feel you’re not very good at it. YOU HAVE COME TO THE RIGHT PLACE TODAY, FRIEND! I am here to explain to you how to how to improve your experience on Apex Legends, and you’ll be on your way to seriously slaying it on the battlefield. For I was like you once... I’ve been playing it since the first week it started, over three years ago. I was there... 3 years ago... and I sucked at it.

BUT... I got somewhat better. And then I wrote a series of articles about it. And I was waiting and wondering if I should really bother to put them on the internet, when lo and behold, I saw someone on Discord say “I kind of suck at Apex, anyone got any advice?”

Clearly, my time had come.

NOTE: If you don’t like some piece of advice I say after this paragraph, I encourage you to discuss it on the internet! Just don’t contact me to try to correct me nor argue with me, because I am not interested in hearing about either of those things.

Infodump:

--Apex Legends is made by the people who made the two games called Titanfall. Titanfall was about piloting big robots around and fighting in space and the future and stuff.

--Apex Legends is in that same universe, but (so far) you do NOT pilot big robots around. You do, however, fight in the future and stuff. Everyone has guns, and everyone has special abilities.

--Apex Legends is a shooting game, a battle royale game, in which they dump 60 people on a big map and they fight to see which team will be the last one standing. Mostly this is done with 20 teams of three people each, although there’s also a mode called duos where it’s 30 teams of 2 people per team.

--When your character takes a lot of damage in Apex, your character “gets knocked,” meaning they can only crawl around the ground looking for safety, or maybe crawl over toward a teammate (because a teammate can revive them, or literally “pick them up” again. But there’s a limited time for you to get picked back up by a teammate, so if it runs out-- or if you take a bit more damage), you die, and turn into a “deathbox” that contains all your gear you were carrying. Okay, fine, that’s symbolic, whatever.

--But teammates (who weren’t able to help in time) are able to get a “banner” from the deathbox, and if they can take it to one of about a dozen “beacons” scattered across the map, a flying vehicle comes and drops off that character, alive again. Obviously, this makes no sense. There can only be two possible explanations: 1. They are clones, or 2. They’re duplicates of themselves from a different timeline (which would be even more insane except that one character actually has a certain amount of access to her selves from alternate timelines, so who knows). We do know that they "respawn" in a "respawn chamber," but we don't know what that means, exactly.

--The characters don’t ACT like this is super-weird. They also don’t act like it’s super-weird that your character might fight another version of themself on an enemy team. So... I guess we should try not to think about it either, and we should really just relax?

--Anyway, this is the NFL of the Space Future. This bloodsport is watched on Space Future Streaming Channels or whatever by lots of Space Future people. Got it?

--The appeal of Apex Legends (and indeed all battle royale games) is: the other characters, and your teammates, are all OTHER REAL PEOPLE just like yourself. So they don’t act like dumb video game enemies. They are, usually, geniuses of combat. You win a game? Your team just outlived 57 other badasses, and, almost always, outfought at least one of them (often more). Winning a game like that is a feeling to be proud of. Yummmm, yummy serotonin, yum yum.

OKAY BUT NOW THAT I’VE EXPLAINED ALL THAT:

I’m sorry, I’m not giving you what I promised: tips on how not to suck!

So anyway, when I started playing, yes, it’s true: I really kind of sucked at it. The main problem was: I was a terrible, terrible shot. I was poor at hitting targets, and REALLY REALLY poor at hitting MOVING TARGETS WHO WERE TRYING TO KILL ME, which was pretty much everyone. But I’ve gotten better.

Here’s how to do better than sucky:

1. Character. Who you play is important. There are different types of characters: Assault, Recon, Support, Skirmisher, and Controller.

Or that’s what the GAME says. I say, what’s important can MOSTLY (not entirely, I admit) be broken down into just three types of characters: Movement, Information, and Defense.

MOVEMENT characters are my favorite, because they can get you across the map in a hurry. And it’s a big, big map. And the game starts with the whole map, and then literally eventually herds you toward one point, and literally kills you if you don’t get a move on toward that point. You never start a game knowing where that spot will be, but you’ll definitely end up there, or near it, if you’re going to come in first or second.

My two favorite examples of Movement characters are Valkyrie and Octane:

--Valkyrie can fly short distances. Sometimes Valk can fly her teammates with her.

--Octane has limited super-speed running, and he can toss down trampolines to go even faster (and higher) now and then. His teammates can use the trampolines.

Also very high on my list are Maggie and Pathfinder:

--Maggie tosses a ball that generates little super-speed-granting points so she and teammates can run in a mostly-straight line (so I’m counting her as a Movement character).

--Pathfinder makes zip-lines that others can also use, and also he can basically web-swing like Spider-Man (though sadly he can’t stick to walls).

The last character I officially (in as much as anything I’m saying is “official”) consider to count as a movement character (though the game doesn’t) is Loba, because she tosses her bracelet, and (almost) wherever it lands, she teleports there.

Then there are some “almost-movement characters” –Bangalore, Bloodhound, Wraith, Mirage, Horizon, and Ash.

--Bangalore has enhanced running speed, but only when someone’s shooting at her. That’s not useful when you’re just trying to outrun the Ring of energy that the game uses to herd you toward the final round. (Bangalore can also sometimes drop missiles on people, but that’s not the point right now. Valk can also fire (smaller) missiles at people, but I didn’t mention that before now because that’s not the point. I’m not going to explain all of the abilities of every character here. You can look those up elsewhere online. I’m just trying to stick to certain relevant points right now, and in this section, the only thing that’s relevant is rapid horizontal movement.)

--Bloodhound has super-speed, but it takes a long time to recharge, so Bloodhounds can’t use it very often.

--Wraith can make temporary portals that can move herself or anyone else between two points. First they nerfed her speed, but now it’s better, and she can run up on you in a HURRY now.

--Horizon can create pillars of levitation, and that gives a tiny boost to her speed, but it isn’t remotely enough to really quite count as a Movement power as far as running around the map horizontally, and that’s all I’m talking about right now.

--Ash can create a tear in reality that can teleport herself or anyone else forward (that is, it’s a one-way trip), but like Bloodhound’s speed, she REALLY can’t do it very often.

...Then, well... I might as well mention Mirage. Ah, Mirage. He’s fun. He never runs any faster than anyone else, but he almost counts as a movement character in the category of “I need to run away from an enemy in a hurry and not die.” His big power is to go invisible for just a second, and then to have several other holographic duplicates of himself that look just like the real thing, copying every aspect of how he’s moving (except if he shoots his weapon, they don’t), run in every other direction he’s not running. It is VERY confusing to enemies. Half the time, by the time they shoot some of the others, the real Mirage is out of sight behind a corner of a wall or something.

Okay. So that’s all the Movement characters, and all the characters who almost count as movement characters.

Next time: I talk about INFORMATION CHARACTERS, and more!

See you again soon!