How We Reached the Apex
Apex Legends, it's the game everyone and their grandmother is playing these day's it seems. EA and Respawn Entetainment's newest Battle Royale shooter has come to take the world by storm and take on Fortnite while Tetris 99 sits in the background, waiting. Personally I like Apex, play it once a day; I like the emphasis on teamwork, the colorful cast (I'm a Gibraltar main, how about you?), the solid movement mechanics, and the gunplay. Now I won't go into how Apex tapped into a cultural zeitgeist to go at Fortnite's jugular. But I wanna go over how we got to Apex, what lead to it, and how rich Apex's legacy truly is.
Now, many people know that Apex is a semi-sequel/spinoff to Titanfall but what some might not know is the legacy goes even further than two bitchin mecha shooters from 2014 and 2016. Indeed Apex inherited a rich legacy from all the way back in 90's. Around that time, the people who would go onto found Respawn, Jason West and Vince Zampella (though West would leave not long after Titanfall), joined up with 2015 Studios working on their Electronic Arts' newest World War 2 shooter, Medal of Honor: Allied Assault. Now this is a game I've personally never played but Medal of Honor: Frontline came out around that time which I did play, and from what I've heard that was based on Allied Assault so chances are Allied Assault would have been my cup of tea.
Allied Assault was a critic and financial success for EA but West and Zampella weren't satisfied and decided to make their own studio, Infinity Ward, and make their own World War 2 shooter, with blackjack, and hookers. Okay they didn't do the last two (cool as that would have been) but they did make Call of Duty, nowadays the butt of the zombie franchise joke in that it has a Zombie mode and it is kept alive long past death (ie: Ghosts). But at the time COD was fresh, where most shooters were all about Americans shoving their guns up Nazi asses till they tasted metal and then smooching french chicks; COD took players to three different factions in the war, America, Russia and Britain.
COD wasn't afraid to be brutal either, the first mission has you play a scared and alone American dropped behind enemy lines until you can find a unit and the first Russian level just gives you some bullets and tells you to run. The only time over-the top heroics were indulged is I wanna say the ending of the American and British campaigns when you do secret agent stuff. Beyond that it was a very thrilling and diverse game, giving the WWII genre another three to four years of life.
After that comes the natural follow up Call of Duty 2, released on both the PC and Xbox 360 and honestly this is one of my Top 5 COD games. It takes everything COD 1 did but makes it better, very little of the over the top shenanigans that dragged COD 1 down, tighter gunplay, and more thrilling levels. It's here where we definitely see the more cinematic side of West and Zampella begin as well, with more movie style sequences that wouldn't be out of place in Saving Private Ryan or Enemy At The Gates. Combined with more unique set pieces like North Africa and a great final level, COD 2 is one of my favorites in the COD series.
However by this point, West and Zampella were bored of World War II and moved Infinity Ward to make their next COD game, COD 4 (don't ask why they didn't make 3), set in the modern day and I think you all know where this is going.
Naturally a follow up to COD 4 was inevitable, Modern Warfare 2, a game I think was both better and worse than COD 4. MW2 had a better class system than COD 4 but was also easy to snap in half, what with One Man Army, Commando Pro, and the Harrier/Chopper Gunner/Nuke Combo. And while campaign had more thrills it also lost some of that edge, unless you count that No Russian level which could have happened off screen and, given that they give the option to skip it, it clearly wasn't that vital. MW2 felt like a Bond film intercut with scenes from the opening of Red Dawn. Although it did give us one of the most badass protagonist upgrades as the silent and faceless protagonist of COD 4 became a Scottish mohawked badass, so that's a plus.
However, after making MW2, West and Zampella were just straight up fired by Infinity Ward's publisher/their boss, Activision, run by a man with no soul, Bobby Kotick. Kotick is a man who's doesn't see video games as an artform that requires free expression, but rather as a money making machine that can be exploited, he's effectively said that himself. Sadly the why of West and Zampella's firing is unknown, but the end result is they struck out on their own again and made a new studio.
And this is where Respawn comes into play, they chose EA as a publisher and put out Titanfall, a game that Modern Warfare 2 was clearly building up to. With it's emphasis on cinematic style wallrunning, sliding and sublime maneuverability, it feels like it took a lot of it's DNA from MW2 but in a good way because while MW2 stuck you in the middle of a path, Titanfall gave you the ultimate freedom to move wherever and however you want. It was a breath of fresh air in a crowded market, shame about the story.
Yes, around this time publishers tried to nickel and dime consumers by not having single player in their games in order to force multiplayer down on us. Luckily it faded but Titanfall was a casualty of this as the "story" was relegated to audio logs in designated multiplayer matches. While the story was well written I couldn't notice because I was being shot from all around me, people were dying, mechs were dropping from the sky, I don't have time for this radio drama BS.
Evidently though Respawn took that into consideration for their follow up, Titanfall 2, released two years later. Here just about everything wrong with Titanfall 1 was fixed with 2, a contrast of COD 4 to MW2. There was an actual story first off and while the story is a bit generic, a buddy cop movie essentially, the levels were well built and the characters were likeable enough that, by the end, I was on board with it. The class system was expanded, something that didn't really happen with TF1, new game modes were added, and there was even a cool horde mode. It felt like a shooter from the late 2000's transferred to 2016, and it felt great. I personally loved Titanfall 2, but it came out against the worse but more popular COD: Infinite Warfare, developed by West and Zampella's old studio Infinity Ward; and Battlefield 1, developed by their current publisher EA all this combined with poor marketing, TF2 flopped.
After this things get murky, Respawn was acquired by EA and many fans feared for Titanfall's future because EA is about as bad as Activision when it comes to killing things people like but don't make all of the money that can be made. And with news of Respawn making a Star Wars game, fans of Titanfall assumed the worst because EA makes the worst Star Wars games so bad that Disney had to call EA to tell them to knock it off (though Battlefront 2 has come back into a better product these days). But the death of Star Wars games is a topic for another time, back to Respawn.
After 2 and a half years we finally got news on a new game from Respawn, Apex Legends, and my first reaction was ew. A Battle Royale featuring selectable heroes? That's like PUBG and Overwatch had a horrific love child and everyone at first assumed EA was to blame, as they owned Respawn and again, are just as bad as Activision when it comes to trends. But I gave it a shot and shockingly, tying back into the intro, I liked it, a lot. The emphasis on team work is what saved it with it's forced team mechanics and ping ability.
But yeah, that was the story of how two men and a early 2000's World War II shooter gave us the most currently popular Battle Royale with Robots, Ninja's, and Maui from Disney's Moana. Isn't gaming fun? Next time we'll talk about how a game about futuristic space marines gave us an anime about teenage girls battling monsters with over the top guns, maybe.
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