The Scientific Gamer

472 hours. That’s how long I spent playing PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds in 2017. The game which kicked off the whole battle royale craze had its hooks in me for a good long time with its mix of small-unit tactics, orienteering, emphasis on making an intelligent choice between stealth and confrontation — it turns out that I really really like the battle royale concept, and PUBG was doing it well enough that it became my second most-played game on Steam. However, PUBG was buggy and poorly optimised and its evolution was driven by a series of hacky feature implementations and kneejerk design decisions that were tolerable while the game was in Early Access — that’s the devil’s bargain you make when playing an EA game — but which became greatly less so when PUBG hit 1.0 in December 2017; the game eventually diverged from what I enjoyed about it, and I fell out of it soon afterwards.

Most new BRs released since then have been me-too attempts to cash in by repurposing forks of existing projects, or setting out along the same Early Access path that PUBG did. None of them have the level of polish or design focus that my soured experience with PUBG made me crave, and so there’s a huge gap in the market for an established FPS developer to make something that’s designed from the ground up to be a dedicated battle royale title — something that doesn’t crash, and which has good performance, and which doesn’t waste your time with pointless make-work such as waiting in an in-game lobby for the game to start or fiddly inventory management that leads to you getting shot in the head while you’ve got it stuck inside your backpack. In other words, I’m ready for a battle royale made by somebody who actually knows what they’re doing.

Apex Legends may be that game.

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