Since the other F2P BR options on PS4 haven't looked like my cup of tea this is my first experience with BR and I'm having a pretty good time! I suck complete shit and there's definitely a part of me that misses wall running, double jumping and mechs but otherwise this has all the tightness a Call of Duty/Respawn crew game is known for. I had one issue where the game lost my persistence and reset my level / forced me to replay the tutorial, but I didn't lose any of the skins or other cosmetics I'd unlocked which to me is the truly important thing.


I don't know if I'll be sticking with the game long term since online competitive FPS is just not my bag, but if you're into this kind of thing this seems like an upper tier one of those.


~~~~~~~~~
"This is the streets, and I am the trap." � Jay Bilas
http://www.popmatters.com/pm/archive/contributor/517
Hip Hop Handbook: http://tinyurl.com/ll4kzz

A surprise release Titanfall spinoff without the Titans and walll running? I thought EA must be doing it for tax reasons.

But I was very wrong. I played half a dozen matches and had a blast.

Respawn says development was done and completed before their EA acquisition. Basically saying EA ain't have shit to do with this including how it's monetized. Makes total sense as I doubt EA would want to drop another shooter so close to Anthem but here we are.

stayskrunchyinmilk.com

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since I ain't play a single Battle Royale game before this. Only played a few matches, but my random squadmates carried me to a second place finish last night (I was the last survivor before the win too). I only got one kill tho...

The UI is mad busy and a little confusing. I can't even figure out how to drop ammo and gear for the teammates. haha

I'll probably bounce off this quick, because fighting games are the only multiplayer I got any attention span for. Still, I hope this funds the next legit Titanfall game. Would hate for the series to be just this.

Just using the ping system.

I got carried again, but I was a medic so I got a couple revives, took out the kill leader, and snuck around to flank for the last kill.

This is my first battle royale game, but I think I caught the bug yo.

And as much as I enjoy PUBG I still don't like the fact that every company wants a Battle Royal game. I tried Fortnite and absolutely hated it because the building aspect of it made it feel so cheesy and directed towards children.

This game does have a really cool feel for it so I'll check it out a bit more. I do really like that they paid attention to the community and added very detailed pinging system so you don't have to talk to your team at all. My second game ever our squad ended up in second place do the ping communication having us on the same page. It was a lot to take in and I didn't really utilize my special abilities that much until the end but with a little time that'll get better also.

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(and my Street Fighter habit)

a nigga can't play for hours at a time like back in the day, but i play a little after work each night. i don't got enough time to fit in all the games i wanna play at the moment tho!

if it's good I might be able to get my wife and her brothers on it, we play overwatch now, but they're big Call of Duty fans so the respawn angle may work

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No message

definitely more fun to squad with friends, and unlike Overwatch you don't get punished for it. Also enjoy the fact that the hero abilities/ultimates are useful but not overpowered, so they don't dictate each match.

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I've never played Overwatch, so there's that, but when I've heard the Giant Bomb or Game Informer guys comparing the two games, one thing that comes up is that Overwatch characters have a hard counter for each other whereas Apex's heroes are more about mastering their particular skills and learning when to apply them in scenarios rather than how to counter one character's skills with another's.

For a different comparison, Titanfall 2 would "punish" you at the Titan phase of the game if you had the Titan that fired rocket volleys and everyone you ran into was piloting the Titan with the shield that absorbed incoming fire and launched it back at the enemy.

Pathfinder is a mostly passive character on paper but he's not at any disadvantage head-to-head with any other character other than the basic way all characters are technically at a disadvantage to Bloodhound one on one assuming both players are equally kitted with equal skill.


~~~~~~~~~
"This is the streets, and I am the trap." � Jay Bilas
http://www.popmatters.com/pm/archive/contributor/517
Hip Hop Handbook: http://tinyurl.com/ll4kzz

the abilities in apex aren't really strong enough to counter each other, it's just a very different type of game.

in overwatch even if someone is playing a character that is a "hard counter" it might mean you need to adjust your play style, but if your team works together you can still be effective.

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the matchmaker often matches you against players with higher individual ranks to compensate for the perceived advantage of having superior communication/teamwork from being in a group. The vast majority of players who play competitive never group with more than one friend...and in solo queue or duo matches, the game plays completely different.

That's the gist of it anyway...pretty much every Overwatch content creator on youtube (Your Overwatch, Unit Lost, etc) has made videos breaking the topic down further.

it's...the kind of thing people whine about on youtube.

oh word, there's a conspiracy about why it's hard for you to climb in rank that's keeping you down?

idk man, the point of competitive is supposed to be playing the best players in serious matches.

for all of the other players to hunt down and gives them a bonus for killing you.

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but if you're a youtube who wants to please viewers of a ten minute video, there is possibly no better genre than "it's the game's fault that you're not ranking up like you want to"

all of the people I know who play at high ranks...play in groups. I don't know if that goes for everyone, but somehow they still go up.

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>but if you're a youtube who wants to please viewers of a ten
>minute video, there is possibly no better genre than "it's the
>game's fault that you're not ranking up like you want to"
>
>all of the people I know who play at high ranks...play in
>groups. I don't know if that goes for everyone, but somehow
>they still go up.
>
^^^ Now I understand why I keep getting cussed out on Destiny 2 (and why everybody I play with is max-ranked out)

everybody wants to fuckin rank up, and it's the game's fault, or your fault, if they don't.

and hell, they might be right, but they're not complaining just because they have legit gripes, it's just how it is.

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I need to find more playin time.

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Saw your invite dude.
Baby started crying soon as I went to accept.
Lets ride, whenever you see me online.

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I think my message indicator reads 99+.... my bad

and I have no respect for you as a person

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I’m glad Respawn is handling the next Star Wars game.

Consistently in the top 3 squads left. At this point maybe I should start charging some of these folks to get them to the promises land.

My only gripe is the TTK should be lowered just a bit but other than that this has really satisfied my BR genre fix when PUBG was the only other one I really enjoyed.

again and they're *still* not dead is a weird. you gotta go for headshots I understand, but damn

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That's MAD annoying. I'm already no good at FPSs and if the only way I'm going to get a kill is to get head shots, I'll never get a kill. So far I've only got 1 kill, but I feel like I have more considering the number of times I end up shooting dudes.

This is where the matchmaking/battle pass is gonna come into play. I bought a headset for this game and am using a mic for the first time since SOCOM II and the chiller days of NCAA/Madden online, but between still wanting to play other things, falling off a bit once the loot packs switched to every two levels and the ever rising rate of people with millions of damage points and hundreds of kills, the game's definitely lost me a bit.


I still have fun when I play, but my only hope of getting Top 3 anymore is the ultra conservative, 19 minute creep across the map slowly kitting up via random luck and stumbling across coffins. I will have a guy dead to rights and then fully embarrass myself and cause sub-100 damage before I'm shot to hell.


I had one game a few days ago where I was the right level of wine drunk and the right level of locked in and had 9 kills, 4 revives and a respawn with Lifeline wielding a hopped up Devotion and a Peacekeeper and thought that was the turning point for me (one kill for me is a good day, two is a masterpiece), but I haven't got a kill since lol.


~~~~~~~~~
"This is the streets, and I am the trap." � Jay Bilas
http://www.popmatters.com/pm/archive/contributor/517
Hip Hop Handbook: http://tinyurl.com/ll4kzz

is to pick your weapons as a damage dealer and a finisher,

so extendo clip on whatever your primary is, then instead of reloading switch to your wingman/peacemaker to down em

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But it's so different from most other games where weapons are entirely situational that it's hard to remind yourself to just switch guns instead of reloading. Plus the anxiety for people like me who miss a lot of shots, my worst nightmare is having an empty clip in BOTH guns, though I suppose at that point I deserve to die anyway.


~~~~~~~~~
"This is the streets, and I am the trap." � Jay Bilas
http://www.popmatters.com/pm/archive/contributor/517
Hip Hop Handbook: http://tinyurl.com/ll4kzz

>is to pick your weapons as a damage dealer and a finisher,
>
>so extendo clip on whatever your primary is, then instead of
>reloading switch to your wingman/peacemaker to down em
>
>www.engadgethd.com - the other stuff i'm looking at

Both of my teammates were downed and it was 2 against 1.

Rjcc knows how much of a feat this was for me because he's seen how trash I am at FPS.

1 dude took out all three of us ftw.

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Basically I entered the game with no Squadmates. I don't know if they dropped off or there was a matching error, but I was the only person in the character selection screen and I dropped from the ship by myself.

Realizing there was no way I was going to win playing by myself, I just decided to make my way to the next ring and hide out. I did this for all the rounds until it was me and the last team.

I scouted the area in the last wing and couldn't make their positions. I was hiding in some brush near the middle. Soon after two guys got the drop on me and took me out to win the match.

The entire game, I didn't kill anyone and didn't fire my weapon until the last round. I'm surprised to see I was able to get that far. I really didn't see many other players the entire match, until the end.

if you're careful you can avoid conflict, but you're going to get murdered at the end by someone with full shields and the guns they want
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I found a supply ship that nobody came to. So I stocked up real quick on some weapons. I also found a helmet and body shield along the way. Didn't help much as I got murked pretty quickly.

If you drop far from the conflicts the rest of the squads and follow gunfire without ever getting too close and purposefully staying behind the ring, you can turtle up and build a respectable kit out of other players' spare parts. If the game goes long enough that you're getting into Round 5 or 6 and have a Pathfinder on the team, drop a zipline to a high up spot and watch for the other team(s) to come out, or if you have a Caustic turtle up in a small building with traps. If you can spot the other two teams great, but all you really need to hear is the amount of gunfire that signals a firefight between two teams, get in position to scout the fight and swoop in right when the gunfire stops. Usually the other guys are reviving, boosting shields/health or otherwise totally weakened and unable to survive a direct attack from a fully healthy squad, even if your gear is weaker.


It's kind of a lame strategy but it's undoubtedly effective. I've won two games this way where my team did maybe 50 damage total and didn't even have three total kills.


~~~~~~~~~
"This is the streets, and I am the trap." � Jay Bilas
http://www.popmatters.com/pm/archive/contributor/517
Hip Hop Handbook: http://tinyurl.com/ll4kzz

lifeline's health drone gets murked immediately
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as soon as ring 2, it used to take until ring 4 for me to get truly nervous.

I appreciate the rounds ending faster too, round 1 always seemed too long.

~~~~~~~~~
"This is the streets, and I am the trap." � Jay Bilas
http://www.popmatters.com/pm/archive/contributor/517
Hip Hop Handbook: http://tinyurl.com/ll4kzz

but I can't argue with the fact that it has sped up the game seriously.

instead of getting into the third round with 15 teams left and getting endlessly third partied by people coming out of the storm with full health and gold armor, everyone is moving and bodies are dropping.

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...wish they had some straight up TDM games

Should be about 10 bucks.

I stopped playing once the pack drip went every two levels and all I needed to get back in heavy was leveling up offering new stuff even if I didn't care much about the new stuff, I'm simple like that. But if you're expecting a lot of cool new stuff, a lot of it is basically jungle camo themed, and it takes about an hour and a half of solid gameplay to hit a new level. A Reddit user broke it down pretty thoroughly:

https://www.reddit.com/r/apexlegends/comments/b351ph/did_a_basic_math_breakdown_of_the_time_itll_take/

In summary it's going to take quite a bit of playing to get everything the BP has to offer, though it has XP boosts distributed throughout the pass so the start is actually slower than the end, and you have three months to get it in, but you're looking at a LOT of hours to get to the end. I'm not sure if they mention the bonuses and factor that into their math or not, I read the post a few hours ago, but you can earn 225,000 bonus XP per week if you have all 9 legends unlocked and an additional 31,500 bonus XP per week if you were to get a kill with all 9 characters per day (I don't have Mirage or Octane, and honestly kind of wish I'd bought Octane over the BP after seeing a couple teammates have a ton of fun with him)

If you don't play this game a lot I'd say it'd be smarter to just hold off on the BP until it's closer to the end of the season and see how many rewards you've earned (the game will still track this for you even if you don't buy it) then decide if it's worth it to you at that point. Again, I'm fine with most of the cosmetics being not my cup of tea, I just want the dopamine hit of a new thing to push me along and a way to support Respawn that isn't just gambling on packs, but in the grand scheme of things this first season/battle pass is neither a game changer nor IMO worth the money on its own merits.


~~~~~~~~~
"This is the streets, and I am the trap." � Jay Bilas
http://www.popmatters.com/pm/archive/contributor/517
Hip Hop Handbook: http://tinyurl.com/ll4kzz

Things I've notice.

They can go 20mins and not see another soul and die in 5secs when they finally run up on someone wearing purple vest and helmet.

If it aint a head shot, you aint winning that battle.

3 to 5 shots from a distance will put a person down, not so much at close range

Also, use your arcstar more.
Even the best player cant withstand an arcstar and a few shots.
I arcstar, prowler and r-99 as my kill combo.

I don't know what happened after the update but I played like 25 games yesterday and I was the kill leader in about 10 of them.
I definitely was doing number but they may have tweaked the time to kill.

Loving the new content so far. They are going in the right direction.

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Caustic and Gibraltar have even more defense buff than before while Lifeline, Pathfinder and Bangalore all take increased damage. Several weapons got a small tick up in damage, the Alternator shreds shields now and if you have the right round hop ups the P2020 is viable early and end game as a secondary.

Overall TTK feels pretty dramatically different, as a body shot guy not so much for me but when I'm lucky and get some headshots in I feel like people drop immediately.

~~~~~~~~~
"This is the streets, and I am the trap." � Jay Bilas
http://www.popmatters.com/pm/archive/contributor/517
Hip Hop Handbook: http://tinyurl.com/ll4kzz

They basically made aggressive play style the META.
Probably why Wattson exists.

but with the ring changes you either get to it or you get left

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Man, this new map is wild, totally different from King's Landing. Big sprawling city locations, lots of environmental distractions, huge tweaks to guns and hero perks.

Season 2 was already a huge step up from Season 1, so I'm really looking forward to getting used to this new map. In my brief time with it yesterday it felt like a brand new game almost, and the new hero Crypto almost immediately feels like a must-play with his scout drone, at least until people get familiar/comfortable with the layout of the new map's locations and where people tend to move through.

It's crazy how tense it can feel when you're in one of those large towns and start noticing doors have been opened but otherwise see no signs of an enemy; it's like a trip through Slum Lakes or Skull Town on steroids because the spaces are both fairly dense and yet pretty sparse and barren overall giving a lot of the areas a weird sense of sprawl that just keeps you uncomfortable.


~~~~~~~~~
"This is the streets, and I am the trap." � Jay Bilas
http://www.popmatters.com/pm/archive/contributor/517
Hip Hop Handbook: http://tinyurl.com/ll4kzz

M0use Alexander

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