User Experience Design In Apex Legends
Note: I don’t work on Apex Legends or at Respawn Entertainment. These are just some of my thoughts and opinions!
In February 2019, Apex Legends launched out of nowhere to, what we all thought was, an impenetrable Battle Royale market. With Fortnite still sustaining an unimaginable amount of players, PUBG capturing players interested in a more sim-based, methodical experience, and Call of Duty adding an underrated Battle Royale mode to Black Ops 4 with its modern-military, fast-paced gameplay how could a new Battle Royale release and find a player base? Well, Apex Legends did just that with a lot of really smart design decisions. The ones I want to focus on center around user experience. User experience is often thought of as quality-of-life improvements to an existing design. But to me, Apex Legends is a game designed with user experience as its driving motivation and identity.
The most frustrating experience in a Battle Royale, for me, is what I call the “Looting Simulator.” Playing Looting Simulator is when you land on the outskirts of the map and loot for your ideal loadout for 10-15 mins before getting absolutely destroyed in your first encounter with enemy players. But I get it. I don’t want to drop hot either and get lit up by an opposing 13-year-old who’s training to become the next pro esports player in the first 30 seconds of the game either. Looting is a tedious but necessary component of the Battle Royale formula. Despite Apex having an in-depth equipment system with all kinds of barrel add-ons, clip modifications, and more—it has the most streamlined looting experience. See a barrel on the ground that can go on your secondary weapon, but not the current weapon you’re holding? Don’t worry it just auto-equips to whatever gun it can. And if it can’t it just goes into your inventory. Do you have a fully kitted weapon, but want to swap it for a different one on the ground? Apex removes all the components off the weapon you’re dropping and applies any attachments that are applicable to the new weapon you’re picking up.
It’s a game that prioritizes being in the world instead of spending time in the menus organizing your inventory. This is most critical when you take out an opponent and they drop all their inventory into a crate on the ground. The crate automatically gets highlighted with the color of the highest rarity item in it. So if the box doesn’t highlight at all or only highlights blue, you may know you don’t even need to go into the box. This is so important in a game like Apex Legends—or any Battle Royale—where the next team, who just heard your fight finish, is right on your tail. Now you can spend more time surviving and less time managing your inventory.
Recently they redesigned the loot box menu to streamline it even further. Previously everything existed in one big list, but now there’s permanent spots for guns and ammo types. A character can only ever carry two guns, so they dedicated the first two spaces to those, followed by the small amount of ammo types. Now when someone goes to loot a box, if they know they’re looking for a new gun, or maybe they need a specific ammo type, they know exactly where that will be in the loot menu. All the gun mods, throwables, and armor will still follow in a big list, but now the guns and ammo have permanent real estate in the menu and the player can know where they need to click before even opening the menu—allowing them to get back into the fight quicker.
The second most frustrating experience in a Battle Royale is when your squad kills another team, but you die in the process. Despite being a team game, you’re now stuck spectating for what could be upwards of 20 minutes while your team plays out the rest of the game even though your team won that fight. Enter reboot cards. A reboot card appears in your inventory box that your team can pick up. So if your team wins, or if your teammate can escape with it, there’s a chance your team can revive you at pre-defined locations on the map. But be careful, you’ll be spawning in with no weapons on a ship that everyone can hear and see. It’s an excellently designed mechanic that keeps spectating players invested in the game still with another chance to redeem themselves. I’ve won games before where I’ve been rebooted several times and honestly they’re some of the most satisfying wins you can get because you and your team are just scraping by, winning intense fights, and competing against all odds. This feature was so revered that Fortnite ended up co-opting it as a permanent staple and re-branded it as Reboot Cards.
Apex Legends is a team game. There are no permanent modes outside of the teams of three (and now two!) Battle Royale. So if you want to play, but your friends aren’t around, you’re going to have to play with strangers. Normally this would be daunting because communication is essential in a mode where information is king. But Apex Legends introduced the most streamlined ping system I’ve used to date.
There have been ping systems in games for years, but never as comprehensive or as effective as Apex’s because of the automatic context the game provides with each ping. With the same button press, you could ping a closed container and your character will tell your team you’re going to loot it. Ping an open container and your character will warn your team that someone has already been in the area. Ping an enemy and it marks their location with a red reticle different from the icon used for the open and closed bin pings. If you want to override the game’s automatic context, just hold down the ping button and it’ll pop open a radial menu where you can select any one of the game’s eight ping options--all with their own unique icon and voice lines to be communicated to your team. This system is so useful, that even if I’m playing with friends where we’re all in voice chat together, it’s easier and faster to relay information using pings. They’re clear and concise so it never muddles the communication in a heated battle. Now, when playing other shooters, even if they’re not Battle Royales, I lament about not having Apex’s ping system in a crucial moment where all I could mutter in a panic was “enemy over there!” to which my team has no clue where “over there” is. With that being said, there is an art to competitive multiplayer voice communication and I’m curious to see whether this feature becomes an expected staple or a conscious design choice from developers.
It’s clear that when Respawn was designing Apex Legends that User Experience design wasn’t an afterthought or secluded to menu design. Respawn took the idea of streamlining the Battle Royale experience and made it the center of their design philosophy by prioritizing User Experience. This has made Apex Legends a staple in the Battle Royale genre—even when there was “no room left in the genre.”
