Apex Legends is still the best first-person shooter to play with strangers

polygon.com:

It may seem odd to compare a free-to-play battle royale to an arthouse indie game, but here goes: Apex Legends is basically the Journey of first-person shooters.

The latter, which was developed by Flower creator thatgamecompany and released in 2012, is a game about traversing the desert ruins of an ancient civilization through nonverbal communication with a series of complete strangers. It’s possible to stick with the same player throughout the whole playthrough. Thus, the game’s themes of connection and trust can surpass beauty and veer into the sublime.

Apex Legends, which Titanfall developer Respawn released in 2019 as a foray into the flourishing genre dominated by PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds and Fortnite, is a game about launching canisters of noxious gas from the balcony of an apartment building before zip lining across a public park to escape the shrinking, lethal boundary of an ethereal circle. It is also, in large part, about nonverbal communication and it can also, sometimes, veer into the sublime.

With the growing ubiquity of battle royales as a free-to-play phenomenon in the late 2010s, it stood to reason that many Apex players would dip their toes in the water without a friend or two alongside them. And what with voice chat’s propensity to often suck, it also stood to reason that thousands of players might benefit from a form of nonverbal communication.

Enter: the ping system, which has long allowed FPS players to place a beacon on locations, events, and items of interest. Respawn took the idea (variations of which appeared in series like Left 4 Dead and Battlefield) and amplified it tenfold, allowing players to not only point out the location of a weapon, for instance, but also the exact type of weapon.