I'd like to share personally from my own experiences playing the game what I enjoyed, what could be improved or changed, and to create a couple of suggestions myself.
Obviously these are subjective to my own opinion, I'm not asking you to agree, but your opinion is valued nonetheless
In brief, I'd like to share what I thoroughly enjoyed first, and what I think works really well in Apex Legends.
- Well refined, fluent movement, doesn't feel clunky at all.
- UI is well thought out, compact, yet informative, from pings, to colour coded damage indicators.
- Inventory is easy to manage, attachments aren't a brain teaser, the important stuff is done for you and your only thought process is a matter of preference (which scope type should I use?)
- A simple and efficient looting system.
- The characters are well rounded, and none of them feel like easy cheese picks, the abilities are modest and don't provide insane outplay potential like in overwatch for instance, they simply compliment the core gameplay.
- Weapons are diverse and feel good to use, there are a couple awful ones which I will mention soon, but I look forward to new additions to the weapon roster (and character roster of course)
Now, what do I dislike about Apex Legends?
- The main issue, cosmetics. I feel like the crafting materials system is too harsh and unless your going to spend quite a lot of money, access to legendary cosmetics is for the most part, completely restricted (unless you get lucky in a level up loot box) this whole system has EAs greasy fingers all over it, and I am confident that nobody likes how this has been implemented. Of course any game needs to generate revenue, but honestly cut out the crafting material restriction, and just let us outright buy the legendary skins for straight up cash, Id happily bank a few to be able to purchase some wraith legendary skins, instead of spending god knows how much money and praying to RNG it drops the wraith skin I want, (which is statistically unfair on my wallet might I add)
- HOW players respawn. The concept is new and intuitive for the Battle royale genre, and a major selling point, but I think it could be implemented better. As it turns out, the further on into the match you go, the more punishing, and honestly counter-productive respawning members of your squad is, everyone in a huge radius can see you respawning thanks to the giant dropship, and to add insult to injury, you drop with absolutely nothing to protect yourself, and reveal your squads position too, I completely agree that respawning so late into the game should come with severe compromise, but at the very least, the person respawning should at least come back with a basic weapon (light pistol) and some ammo to help fight his ground.
- Learning curve. Sometimes games have an essential learning curve, not a problem with that, but an issue Apex Legends has, and basically every battle royale game in existence, is new player experience; for example in Fortnite, you drop in, first time playing, suddenly you encounter someone who has been playing for 3 months and is a total veteran at building, boom your dead, not even a chance, try again. It's a frustrating experience, and happens in Apex too, and I wonder how difficult can it be (being so popular as well) to create an algorithm for players of similar stats to be matched up into a game? This could be more complicated than I realize to implement, but an important point I wanted to bring up nonetheless.
What could improve Apex Legends?
Extensive movement Mechanics:
- Implementing proper parkour elements, you can actually find tutorials on Youtube of a technique that involves bouncing off a wall, considering this, the no fall damage, the fluent movement that feels so good, it'd be nice to add onto this mechanic in the following ways.
- A button combination to execute rolls or slides when jumping down great distances, it kills the tempo a bit when jump off of somewhere and get stuck in a recovery animation, with no fall damage is partially makes no sense to even have this in the game, I feel it'd be brilliant to have some methods of maintaining movement after dropping to keep up the momentum.
- Wall running, I think this helps create more tools in the box for traversing the map, and even in the middle of combat, and adds to the overall fun factor of the game, it's the little things that really bring a game together!
Create use for the jet pack everyone has, perhaps it can be used through acquiring a specific resource from loot, but using a jetpack to boost your speed in a slide or jump, can add to movement mechanics in and out of combat, and can even provide opportunity to design the map in new ways if people have more ways to access the space around them.
- Dodge rolling, this would be a useful mechanic if you need to make a fast maneuver, not abusable of course, and could be bound by a stamina bar, limited to 1 or 2 dodges with a recharge time.
More than one map:
This would be a huge selling point as a battle royale game, even in character lore, it mentions information about characters home worlds, suggesting off planet travel, which creates huge opportunity for creating more than one battle royale map, on other planets, or even in space on a giant dreadnought or space station.
Solo play: Not much to say here, a lot of people enjoy solo play a lot, hopefully this can definitely be implemented in the future.
Season rewards: I have a hunch this one is already in the works, and if so then bravo, the season reward system is always oh so rewarding and fun to climb up, and as someone who highly values cosmetics, its always fun to stand out in the crowd.
Day/Night: Super immersive to be able to start a match in the day, or night, being a random chance, and also have the cycle progress as a match goes on.
Vehicles: Vehicles are fun, provide fast travel, at the price of constantly giving away your position, my only suggestion with this though is not allowing players to just instantly kill you by ramming into you, absolutely never a healthy mechanic, entertainment for one party and plain misery for the receiving party.
Weapon/Armor ideas?
I would like to throw out a couple weapon or armor ideas I thought of:
- Compound Bows
- Grenade Launchers
- Rocket Launchers
- A Melee Equip Slot (Be cool to be able to loot and variety of weapons slotted onto your melee which do significant damage, and is useful in heat of the moment scenarios or as a last resort)
- Duel wielding single hand weapons
- Crossbows
- Lethal Throwing Ordinance (Like Kunai)
- Sawed off shotgun
- Thermal Goggles
- Night vision goggles (if a need ever arises in the game for night vision which would be cool)
- And of course, some miscellaneous concept weapons (Laser arm cannons, throwing disks that return to you, sonic sound weapons etc, imagination is your limit)
And lastly I wanted to talk about gameplay stuff, specifically with whats good an whats just awful.
M O Z A M B I Q U E: Good god this weapon is just awful, you have to hit every single shot to actually do anything impactful, like kill them, or take off their shields, and to add onto that, if your enemy has this and you have literally any tier of shields equipped, you can absolutely guarantee that enemy is not going to kill you before they first must reload the gun, which means they just die instantly to you. Well this is what I recommend changes about this gun:
- One more shot in the magazine, that 4th shot is very much needed.
- Reduce the spread a bit, and increase its range, the gun literally does nothing to someone after a few meters of distance is between you both.
- Slightly increase its fire rate.
- Reduce the reload time.
This is supposed to be shotgun, it needs high kill potential, and it's honestly a fun gun, just needs some love...
P2020: I personally don't understand why the premise of this being a starting weapons must automatically mean its supposed to be bad, I'm not saying you should be popping people who are unloading an R-99 at you with this thing, but it should still receive a little love too in my opinion.
- Increase magazine capacity to 12, every bullet counts, your probably going to miss a few too and its damage is bad as it is.
- Increase headshot multiplier to x2, headshots aren't easy to land as it is, and I think a solid 24 damage for a headshot on this gun is perfectly fine in my opinion.
RE 45: Honestly this gun is mostly fine in my opinion, but I feel the recoil pattern on it is a bit harsh.
- Small buff to its accuracy can't hurt
- Lower the reload time, don't see much reason for it being half a second longer than the semi automatic P2020.
Overall, still going to be outclassed by other weapons naturally, but still needs to feel reliable.
The very much less bad weapons:
Wingman: Kind of a controversial topic among the community rn, should it be nerfed? No I personally think it should be compromised instead.
I think the Wingman having such high damage is absolutely fine, in fact it should be higher, not without compromise of course...
- Buff the body shot damage to 75
- Lower the headshot multiplier to 1.2x
- Lower firerate to 1.50 from 3.42
- Lower magazine to 5
This way, it hits harder, because I feel like this gun should be a handcannon, but produces less overall DPS and requires more skill to use, I think getting hit in the head or body by the wingman should be really punishing, but should also be punishing if you miss your shots, and can get you killed, whereas right now, missing your shots with the Wingman doesn't matter so much, especially when you have a heavy extended mag... which brings me to the last change that should be made to the Wingman.
- Remove its extended mag slot: I'm sorry but running around with extended mags on this thing is completely ridiculous, you pick up a level 3 mag for this gun, 12 rounds? Are you joking? coupled with its damage and fire rate, the damage isn't the issue with this gun, its how much ammo it can hold, and the lack of punishment for missing shots, it should have its base amount and that's it, it has more than enough rounds in a clip to kill literally anyone.
Peacemaker: I think the damage is fine again, being able to one shot someone with no shields if you get a solid shot on them is fair play (white shields aren't hard to find people) however this gun shines too brightly in other areas.
- Reduce the fall off distance: This gun literally can be used from a considerable distance and still deal tons of damage, its a shotgun not a hunting rifle, need to bring things a little closer to home if you want to deal the big numbers in my opinion...
- Increase reload speed: I feel this gun reloads really really really quickly for a pump action shotgun, should definitely be increased a tad.
- Reduce magazine capacity: Don't feel like this gun needs 6 rounds, considering the damage and its already forgiving reload speed, needs to take some skill to use right?
Looting: Considering how the shields system works, I think blue armor is too rare personally, the amount of times I have dropped and had to play out the game with white shields and inevitably die is frustrating, it would be nice to see level 2 armor spawn more frequently, anything higher than blue is fair play, and is only an extra 25 shields.
Final topic: TTK...
Many have pointed out that TTK in this game is slightly too high, and a lot of weapons struggle to take down anyone with full purple shields for example, this is mostly due to magazine capacity in my opinion, if you really look at the numbers of most weapons in the game, they are capable of dishing out serious damage, way over 200, I feel a couple weapons (so many of the light weapons) need some serious buffs to magazine capacity, RE-45, R-99, Mozambique etc... But overall, I think the current TTK is perfectly fine, certain weapons just need to some to more easily take people down in one magazine, all that's left to do is for you to be able to aim properly...
Thank you for reading, I can extend on this as time goes on, and I experience the game more, these were just suggestions I had, and hot topics I wanted to share and put my opinion on the table about