I think of these characters as heels and faces. I hate some of them so much it actually intensifies the experience when I manage to defeat one of them.
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or just muting character dialog. the gun and movement feel is way better than titanfall ā yes, titanfall had weight, but apex has friction. i absolutely understand anybody not wanting to wade through the muck of its aesthetics but there is a very mechanically beautiful fps underneath the creative failings
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going to do my boomer shooter post and say like, titanfall 2 owns (and i was pleasantly surprised to see it had a decent playerbase when it showed up on steam) but the movement isnāt so much good as it is āthe least badā in the last 20 years
still surprised iām enjoying genealogy of the holy war so much, might have to do a shouzou kaga deepdive
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Iāve always been beating the āthat franchise was good basically up until they started localizing itā drum, glad to have you on board
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Ah, Iām sorry, I thought Iād just be self-effacing but I gotta
I donāt think the characters or aesthetic in general are failings.
First, I am 100% certain its characters are driven by prototyping mechanics and working backwards to make them read to players learning them and encountering them and then wrapping a paper thin story but mostly āloreā around them.
I looked at the āoperatorsā in Siege here and I donāt think I could distinguish most of them at 3 meters away.
Each Apex character is legible from 50m away and thereās a lot of care put into the legibility of abilities - portals, drones, barricades, jump pads, etc.
The broad archetypes also make them readable to new players but I appreciate that theyāre typically mashups with a novel combination. My brother the aspiring mechanical engineer plays as the mechanical engineer with the mini gun but sheās incidentally a Desi woman. She looks like this:
The same VA plays Symmetra in Overwatch:
It would have been so easy to make the heavy look like, well, The Heavy, or to make the Desi woman wear a pseudo-Sari. But instead, a jumpsuit with a bit of flair from chewing gum. Maybe she uses the gum to fix stuff. That would be funny!
Thereās only one character thatās dressed really inappropriately in Apex and thatās Loba, whoās a sort of femme fatale I donāt find jarring in context.
Re: tokenism, I think Bloodhound may have taught more people about nonbinary identity for the first time than any other piece of media primarily because FPS players have poor media diets. But itās nice because the game is aesthetically hostile to milspec sublimated cishet sexuality - those people go play CoD Warzone because Respawn is a studio that exists specifically to not make that.
And unlike Overwatchās tokenism, the characters are not just Very Special Episodes. Wattsonās bad puns and situationally inappropriate enthusiasm are keen representation for āmy people.ā
Even when it doesnāt land I donāt mind this stuff because though FPSes are my favorite games, theyāre also a cesspool of internet bigotry. I appreciate Respawn and Bungie for a āfuck emā attitude where I can have a black power fist or a rainbow on my card and the only white dude is Dr. Wario.
Maybe the quips are too much and Iām glad you can turn them off. I love camp and cheese so I may just have trash taste but itās at least better than its most obvious forbear. I literally canāt tell what makes good dialog in anything because criticism like āthatās not how people talk!ā only scans for Aaron Sorkin and Sonic Adventure 2 in my head.
The level design is impeccable top-to-bottom and Iām glad they made a game where you donāt have to speak to convey all of the information your team needs.
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I picked up Titanfall 2 near the start of the pandemic and played about 100 hours of it w/ my friend in that timespan so I think itās pretty good! Apex is good too!
Itās easier to play games when I just assume from the start that the writing in it isnāt for me.
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my two posts from the apex legends thread back in 2019. game sucked.
i like when i play the game with all of you and hear the characters say stupid bullshit for two hours straight so i just say āshut the FUCK upā as though they can hear me
yeah hey respawn i got an idea for a new character that should fit right in with āedgelord douchebag,ā āboring guy with gun,ā āboring girl with gun,ā and āguy that proves you donāt have any latinos on your development teamā check this out: eugenics liker steve. he looks like jared letoās joker, except he wears a black trenchcoat and he always drops his catchphrase, āiām gonna kick your ass with my foot up your ass!ā
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I also think Iām fundamentally not willing to learn the pacing and the dynamic of battle royale games because even when people tell me Iām playing a good one the fundamental assumptions feel like shit
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Iāve always had a hard time getting into Tetris because I just canāt suspend my disbelief far enough to believe any rational human being would ever purposefully make bricks in those shapes.
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yeah itās mostly this dynamic thatās turned me off of battle royale games in general
i just donāt feel like Iām doing anything most of the time, iām running around collecting weapons that i wonāt use for most of the round
it feels like a genre thatās much more fun to watch than it is to play and thus i only watch aka play apex
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Nah yeah this is definitely real ā it felt completely foreign and wrong to me for quite a while before I internalized the pacing and decision-making in a battle royale.
Eventually you get over that hump and it clicks, but it probably took me like 10+ hours.
i donāt disagree with a lot of what you said! and i think some of it is an issue of semantics; what you state about like, character legibility from a distance is a crucial point in which the game excels but in my mind thatās in the camp of ādesignā rather than āaestheticsā and lies much closer to a mechanic than anything.
i think that the way the game looks and the different visual styles they use (the comics, the cg trailers, etc) are universally boring and uninspired. i think that some of the characters have good concepts but a lot of the execution of their personalities leaves me annoyed. somebody on here once described many online interactions as āeveryone trying to be more clever than eachotherā and that is very much a vibe i get from respawn. still, i donāt play the game for the characters or how it looks, i play it for how good the g7 with a 3x feels! and it feels good enough that iāll smile at what i like and ignore what i donāt and enjoy my time with the game regardless.
my biggest frustration at the game is that despite the hypermasc-hostile aesthetics, the high tiers of ranked are still full of bigoted screaming bro-nerds. i would be so much more inclined to invest myself into the game if it wasnāt so full of hostile-fragile assholes sending me hatemail after they make a bad play and get punished. i do not want to 1v1 so you can try to salvage yr ego, i just want to shoot gun and feel tasty tension. i havenāt played it in weeks bc i got fed up with that and i feel mentally better for it
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The key is that like CoD4 moving the feedback to leveling and unlocks, BRs and Apex in particular are about going through an entire Prestigeās worth of kitting and decisions in 20 minutes across a dozen maps stitched together. Itās slow if youāre thinking of the setup/strategy as downtime - Iāve come in first without firing a shot because I was playing The End fight while everyone else was playing CoD.
Iām on PC so thereās no hope for me placing that high, but coming from Destiny (on Steam) I appreciate the ability to anonymize the usernames and limit someoneās ability to ruin my mood.
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apex is outstanding. Iāve played thousands of hours of it. the characters are fun and colorful. there is writing?
there IS an option to lower (even turn off!!) the character voices though. i recommend it!
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My heavy critiques of its writing aside, I want to say that I do really like the game! Iāve never enjoyed a multiplayer online FPS as much as this one. I definitely should lower the character voices. Iāve been reluctant because occasionally the characters deliver useful info about the state of the game in between their asinine quips.
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I can see how one would be extremely irritated by the voices when hearing them at their default level. they are sooo loud and overbearing. turning them down to a quiet whisper really, really improved the experience
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boring post about how making tetronimos is an extremely rational exercise in tiling
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and in the soviet union, moving bricks around was an important job. i remember hearing about one guy who started in that field, going on to be a tank commander, then working in the space program, before finally involving himself with the capitalist coup after getting disillusioned
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I wanted to play Cruelty Squad but the second (third? the neighborhood) level drops my framerate to < 15 no matter what I do. Full screen, windowed, min draw distance, max draw distance, no civilians, low resolution. Doesnāt matter. Itās unplayable.
Itās really weird! The other folks who have played it havenāt mentioned anything about this, and itās not like I have a shitty computer, yāknow? I donāt get it. I liked what I played of it but itās unplayable after the first level for me.