Games

Apex Legends Season 6

Alrighty, I’m done giving this game any praise. As far as I’m concerned, Respawn Entertainment deserves all the vitriol and hate directed their way, all that and more. Their idea of improving a live service game is to essentially keep throwing content at you to distract you from the fact that their core game experience is built upon a heaping pile of shit. You have bugs from Day fucking One, pardon my language in this post. And instead of taking their core development team and fixing those bugs, they keep adding new guns, new maps, new legends, new shiny cosmetics that’ll keep bringing in revenue. They don’t give a single care in the world as to their average player. They cater to whales that’ll spend thousands on the game. And no, EA did not choose the prices. They did that themselves, they have become the very greedy scum that left Infinity Ward to become Respawn in the first place.

Sound is the single biggest problem in the game. All the time you will not hear a player sneak up on you, or you won’t hear their gun firing, or you won’t hear abilities going off. And since this is a battle royal shooter, sound is your biggest and best asset. Knowing where the enemy is, is half the battle. Yet Respawn won’t, or seemingly can’t be bothered to fix that issue. And then to compound things further, they keep adding things to the maps that produce sound as a way to get you distracted from gaining the knowledge where your enemy is. Too bad none of it matters because hey, they’ll not produce any sound. Only some players will.

Secondly, it’s come to my attention that they hired a former Riot designer who is infamous for his wrong stance on a champion (Kayn) so much so that he got let go, then they fixed what he refused to do, and whatya know? The champion is in an infinitely better spot now. So you went and hired this incredibly stubborn individual? Yea, that’s the direction you wanna go. That’s a designer you want on your team. He fits right in, given how stubborn Respawn is with their game. You try telling them that there’s problems with the game on their official subreddit, and guess what happens? It’s infamous by now. They called users freeloaders and a whole bunch of other names. And they wonder, oh god they wonder, why they get vitriol sent their way.

Thirdly, their servers. With the amount of money they make, sorry have made, why haven’t they given it a go and acquired better or even more servers to avoid the plague of issues. Way too many server shutdowns, way too many code leafs, way too many random crashes because the game logic can’t handle you doing something simple as using a character’s ultimate ability while using a geyser. And they cannot use Covid-19 as an excuse because all these problems existed long before that ever came around. The answer is simple and ever so infuriating, they simply don’t care about the core experience as long as the whales keep bringing them revenue. That’s it. They are the furthest thing away from a consumer friendly company.

Now onto season 6. At this point, Apex legends has been around a year and a half. What did they add this season? Well you see, they made the bright decision to lower overall hp by 25 and then to add two guns that have a less than one second time to kill. A moron could see that using any other gun is a waste of time. Evenly matched, any gun vs the devotion or the volt will lose 10/10 times. A year and a half of data and this is what they come to. My favorite lie is when the developers come onto the forums and say they look at play rates, win rates, kill rates, down rates, professional play, etc. That’s a big stinking lie. And I’m tired of hearing it. They don’t, because if they did, they would have realized that those two guns are incredibly overpowered. No, what they should be saying is, “we don’t care, we do what we want. This is our game. You can stop playing at any moment.” And guess what? That’s exactly what I’m going to do. I was a top tier player. But now, Respawn, Fuck you. Sincerely.

Edit: Final thoughts; the sunken cost fallacy is why I kept enjoying the game. I had sunk too much time into it that I felt I owed myself to keep playing. But the game is like this, imagine you’re a dog and you live in total squalor. Your owner hardly ever changes your food bowl, and when he does, oh how excited you are! And you love your owner, and everytime you play fetch, it’s so much fun! We started with a tiny little stick, but now we got a large stick! This is what Respawn has done to the average player. The game is a lot of fun, but all the bugs, terrible changes and server issues are like living in squalor. Our food bowl is the LTMs and content they slowly drip out. And the stick changing is the different seasons of the game. But we stuck by them, because like a dog we are loyal. Not anymore. Time to bite the hand that feeds.

Games

Mobile Gaming Could be Great

I often find random games on android that at first, are seemingly well made and appealing. Often they’re simply clones of more popular games, and I’m curious as to how they adapted. One such game was an adaption of Slay the Spire. At first it seemed doable, but then it was painfully obvious that the game was designed to be antigamer. So many games are designed to not be fun, but that you have to pay if you want to have fun.

This is completely backwards! When did hell freeze over, when did these developers think gamers should be treated like a piece of consumer meat? I’m never going to spend a dime on a game if the game being fun is conditional entirely on spending money. I can’t even begin to comprehend the greed that goes into such a decision. It’s like a) design a fun game that people want to spend money because they enjoy it or b) design a game to leech all money and that every aspect and gameplay element hinges on whether money cam be earned.

Sure, you’ll make a couple thousand bucks, even more if you hook a whale. Some might say these developers need to design a game that way to compete with AAA mobile gaming titles, but that’s a load of nonsense. I’ve come across maybe 10 games, on mobile, that weren’t pure money sink pits, and they were some of the most fun I’ve had for days. The gameplay encouraged… Wait for it, more gameplay! Not for me to input my visa and pay for more features.

Honestly, both Google and Apple need to come up with a curated app store for games in which each game is vetted, and if there’s any transaction or money to be spent on gameplay, that game is not allowed in the store. Sorry, but your greed is not allowed. If there’s money to spent on say, cosmetics, then the game can stay. But the moment you start messing with the core mechanics to encourage spending, not only should your game not be allowed, but you should be lambasted across the entirety of the store for your greed. So that everyone and everybody can know to stay far away. End careers in game programming before they even begin. Weed out the bad roots before they take hold. I’m sick and tired of greed in my games.