Micro transactions is mostly a double edged sword for me, and generally companies like EA and others make the experience pretty bad. I have cited Riot Games in my previous post because I felt like their micro transactions made you feel validation for buying that Legendary Championship Riven skin, then getting all future iterations of the championship skin. It was great. They are now not the only ones on that list. In a surprising move, Activision is the next developer to make consumer friendly micro transaction decisions. This is shocking to me since they spent years making their money generating franchise (Call of Duty) filled with devious and downright unethical means to sell sell sell. The most egregious of those being the fact that weapons were hidden behind loot boxes. Black Ops 4 drove me insane with this because I would be so mad that I would be killed with weapons that are very unbalanced and the only way I can get the same weapon is to invest alot of money to roll the dice for it (They have changed this since Modern Warfare was released so that now you only need to grind the game to unlock a previously DLC weapon). Seeing the shitshow Black ops 4 was, you would think Modern Warfare would be an evolution in this. But that’s far from the truth. In fact, I want to throw obscene amounts of money at Activision despite the shaky launch of the game. This is because of the value that their transactions give. The battle pass is very friendly to consumers, providing enough Cod Points to buy it over and over. In addition, the guns which previously were grindfests to get or subject to loot box spam are included as part of the battle pass and one does not even need to play much to get it. To top this off, the items inside of the shop, unlike basically every other game, are bundles. This is important because it allows for cute themes to be applied (like outback relief bundle, or Notice me bundle, as a couple of examples) which promote more buying because you can really customize your entire playing experience to fit a particular theme you want. It also makes it justifiable to put $30 skins on the store because you’re getting more than one thing (with the higher priced bundles, you can get as many as 10 different items (cite)). Overall, the experience is very relieving after my experiences with eariler cods, Fortnite, and of course, Apex. I hope that this becomes the model for future content going forward and becomes sustainable enough to the point where we can get games either for lower prices or for free because the store generates the revenue to tell the exec that this game is worth investing time into making great gameplay wise.
(Old post) About those Apex Packs Part 2: EA finally infects Apex with its micro-transaction disease
Anyone that has paid attention to anything during the past 15 years of gaming knows that there are a handful of gaming publishers and developers that have, at the very least, exploited and manipulated their player-bases solely for profit and in most cases deliver a product that is half-finished at best and “early access” at worst. Today I want to focus on EA, as they have a long history of screwing over franchises and doing the absolute most to make ads much money as they can off of an IP even if it means alienating the fanbases that made their IP popular in the first place. When Apex was released, I was cynical because I thought this was just an excuse to allow Respawn to keep the Titanfall universe fresh while adapting it to the growing Free-To-Play Battle Royale genre. When I saw that this game has potential, my next thought was “how is EA going to destroy this game in their quest to make more money?” EA and free to play usually means massive and expansive microtransactions. As I went over in my last post, the Crafting Material/Legend Token/Apex Coin system is a nice balance of free grinding and pay to skin action and while I do have an issue with the grinding for pointless currency but hey, they have to make money somehow right? With Season 2 they made the battle pass a great value in terms of having a wide selection of what item you can get with the free tokens and crafting materials it gave you.
I give all this background to get into the Apex Iron Crown event. Unlike the event that occurred during the last season, there is a new component that has been added: (special) Apex Packs! To not explain what you can read in more detail in other places, Essentially, the Iron crown even contains its special Apex Packs, which can give u either one of 24 different cosmetic items as part of the collection, or crowns, which are essentially a rebranded crafting material for the event item shop which turns into crafting material at the end of the event. In addition to the item shop and Apex Packs, there is a special heirloom set for bloodhound (citation) that can only be unlocked if you unlock all 24 items as part of the event then pay 3700 legend tokens to purchase it.
It should go without saying that paying for all the apex packs needed to get all the items on top of the 37 bucks to buy the set is an exercise in incredibly irresponsible purchasing. The only people that feasibly will spend that much are people who either have more money than sense (or a parent with good credit) or content creators. For the latter, the content pays for the expense of buying the micro-transactions but is free guaranteed income for the developer. It makes me wonder sometimes if this ridiculous paid cosmetic content isn’t even meant for normal people to buy: it's a signal to the top purchasers to spend spend spend. The funny thing is that unlike Fortnite where the spending populations are kids and teenagers with their parent's finances at their disposal, the Apex player base is more mature and more averse to making silly purchases. I hope that EA has seen that if you want to get people to give you ROI on a free game, you must make it worth it for people to open up their digital wallets for you.*
Since I originally wrote this post, apex has had a couple of events and they have not been a complete money grab compared to the first event. I have every reason to believe that this is because so many people voted with their wallets (myself included) and did not purchase any iron crown packs. I think that although EA is still a money-hungry, developer killing game publisher, they are allowing Respawn to take feedback and apply it to the game (sorta). I commend Respawn for recently adding a dev tracker so we can work closely with the developers to keep improving apex. Also, charms are the shit, In my next post I want to shift focus to Modern Warfare, which has a pretty interesting take on giving microtransactions
Solo mode in Apex legends (old post)
**Editors note:
Getting back into the heat of things! Now that I have some free time to write I want to finish a couple of articles that I wanted to release months ago but simply didn’t have the time. Expect to see a couple of posts about past topics then it's back to the regularly scheduled program of blog posts.**
With the Iron Crown event bought a first for apex legends: solo mode. Respawn has been very adamant about (rightfully) claiming that apex is a team-first Battle Royale game. Other BR games have squad options, but the trio squads for apex means that to be successful at the game, there must be constant teamwork and communication. The release of Wattson emphasizes this and sets the stage for more support legends in the game. Even so, the entire community fantasized about what an Apex solo mode would entail. Can the map sustain 60 Individual people instead of 20 3-man teams? Will some legends become useless? Will some become godlike? Here's my take on the event
1. there should be more people on the map.
The ring structure in solo mode means you don't have much time before you're forced into the circle with the rest of the survivors. I've noticed most people just go to the circle so they don't have to run, which means A LOT of people die within the first 180 seconds of a round.this also means 3/4 of the map is empty. Bumping up the player count from 60 to 80 or even 100 would mean there would be active all over the map no matter where you land, which is probably the only time I ever want to land at a location with people due to looting RNG.
2. Some legends may need mode-specific changes
This is just the nature of a game designed around team synergy. Watson is beyond terrible in this mode (Wattson is just a terrible legend at the moment, but that's another story for another time). On the other hand, Legends like Caustic and Gibby become bullet sponges due to their passives which make for a lot of annoying situations once people realized the damage reduction and abuse it.
3. This mode should come out permanently in a couple more seasons.
With the limited character pool offered thus far, there's not a lot of variation of who you can play with right now and in solos, you saw massive amounts of Lifeline/Wraith/Octane/Pathfinder players, with some Caustic and Gibby as well. More playable characters would distribute this power balance, but that's going to take some time with the current release schedule for legends.
4. Solo engagements expose a skill gap between regular players and casual tryhards.
A lot of what I said in my post about why most Apex players suck is shown in a game mode like this. Without teammates to watch someone's back or to help kill an enemy, most players simply cannot handle the pressure of mano-y-mano engagements against a single player. There is a certain level of finesse needed as you need to account for whatever moves he may make or how they may use their legend abilities to get the upper hand on you. I had some of my most intense fights in this game mode due to this and no matter if I died or not, I enjoyed it.
Overall I was surprised by how much I ended up liking this game mode. It was a nice distraction from the normal rage-inducing, third party heavy gameplay of Play Apex and Ranked. Seeing that the map has changed for season 3 and Respawn has said that they want to bring kings canyon bak into the mix, I think that kings canyon (with some tweaks) would be a perfect candidate for hosting solo mode permanently.