Apex Legends is a Battle Royle game that stands out of the Battle Royle red ocean, it’s not only because the gaming mechanism is fun, but also because the built-in communication system allows players to communicate with teammates insanely efficient without saying a word. Many great articles have dissected the ping system, so I’m going to talk about other great designs that bring this game to a whole new level.
Calling dibs on your desired legend
In Apex, you will be paired with two random players if you are not playing with your friends, and a legend can only be picked once. The Apex team came up with a smart way to help you indicate what legend you are having an eye on without using voice chat.
During the hero selection, you can hover over a hero to let other players know you want to use this character. Like the example above, the third player is going to go with Bangalore.
Another nice feature is that the game will remember the legend you used from the last match, which gives you the hands-free experience during the hero selection phase for the next match.
Error prevention
Looting enemies after eliminating them is a rewarding experience. There are up to 60 people in the game, which means you could run into many death boxes, so how would you be able to tell which box is worth looting?
Apex Legends allows you to know the quality of the loot in the box without even opening it. More specifically, there are 4 tiers of armor quality in this game, from high to low: Golden > Purple > Blue > White.
The box has different colors, the highest quality of the loot in the box dictates the color of the box. For example, if there’s a purple armor shield in the box, then the box will be purple.
Another great design is that the game doesn’t allow you to downgrade your armor, which prevents you from swapping a lower quality armor for a better one you already have. This is a perfect example of “Don’t make me think”.
Spontaneous collaboration
Apex is a competitive game that requires collaboration between teammates. The more teammates survive until the end, the bigger the chance you will win the game. In Apex, there’s a mini squad view where you can see if your team is in a good shape at a glance.
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The mini view shows everyone’s armor level, health, and loadouts. So your teammate might drop a healing drone if they see you are low on health.
You will see a visual cue for firing on your teammate’s badge when they are shooting someone, so you might want to rush over to help them.
The social network
Voice-overs in Apex humanize the virtual characters in the game, which makes you feel like you are playing with real people in the real world.
The game allows you to respond to teammate’s pings. When you do so, the hero will say something like
Copy that, Ok, ect.
Also if you pick up something dropped or pinged by teammates, you will be prompted with a shortcut to express gratitude.
The two-way communication experience builds up the social network throughout the gameplay organically. So far this connection only resides in the game session, what if the player wanted to keep playing with someone after a good game?
The invite system is the last piece of the puzzle that builds the virtuous cycle for the social network for this game. I’ve received and sent out many invites after a great game with some randomly matched people, and some of them ended up becoming my friends on PlayStation Network.
Wrap-up
Even though the in-game communication system can not completely replace the voice chat. But it does reduce people yelling at each other over voice.
I have to say this is the first competitive game I ever played. But it’s not as intimidating as I imagined it would be. I believe the UX design does help flatten the learning curve for me. And I’m gearing up for the next season.
