Hot Drop: Apex Legends' Story Shouldn't Be About Its Heroes
Hot Drop is GameSpot's weekly Apex Legends column, in which Jordan Ramée takes a closer look at Respawn's battle royale to provide additional insight into the game's evolution, as well as dive deeper into its episodic storytelling and characters.
As more and more developers cleverly adopt the episodic storytelling of TV to create interesting storylines for their service games, it's becoming ever more clear that the differing media don't quite translate when it comes to hero shooters. As this is an Apex Legends column, I'm going to be talking about this topic within the context of Respawn's battle royale game, but it's important to note that this issue persists in pretty much every service game that uses hero characters.
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The issue in question is the inherent immortality of the main characters for hero-focused service games. The structure of a service game is designed with longevity in mind--these are experiences that are meant to be played for years after release. As such, the stories for these games need to be written in a way that allows them to continue for years without drastic changes that would change how the games play.
That also means that the main characters of these stories typically have to exist in some sort of narrative rut. This structure would work if Apex Legends was a comedy--comedy-focused television series can get away with this structure, as it creates an established starting point for setting up skits or jokes in future episodes--but it
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