作者彙整: Javy Gwaltney

A lot of games are released every year, especially in the indie scene. In 2017, Steam launched nearly 8,000 games alone, and the numbers have only gone up since then. It’s easy for special games to become forgotten in the never-ending flow of titles. I try to take the critic capacity of my job seriously, endeavoring to shine a light on smaller games I believe deserve to stand the test of time. One of those titles is called The Yawhg. Born as a small jam game developed by Damian Sommer and artist Emily Carroll, The Yawhg centers on four characters in a magical kingdom. As a devastating storm (the eponymous Yawhg) approaches, our would-be heroes live their lives blissfully unaware until the moment everything comes undone.

Up to four players can play, with each taking on a role of one of the characters (or one player can play all of them) making choices about what each one is doing up until the events of The Yawhg. Are they getting drunk at the bar? Studying potion-making? Flirting with nobles at the ball? Every choice a character makes can affect their stats (Mind, Physique, Magic, Wealth, etc) so there’s a bit of luck involved. Exploring a nearby forest might lead you to a little more coin for your pocket but you can also run into a terrible beast that scars you with trauma, damaging your Mind stat. Every character gets a turn in a round, with a round being equal to a week. When six weeks are up, The Yawhg arrives, devastating everything in the kingdom. People die. Homes are tarnished. Trauma is inflicted. The future is bleak and, at best, uncertain.

But that game isn’t over. The rest of the story plays out, taking the choices you made earlier into effect with a new one. You must assign the characters you played in the game with roles in the efforts to rebuild the kingdom. Who’s going to be the leader? Who will be the doctor? Maybe you don’t want your character to help out. Maybe you want to cause chaos. You can do that too, assigning your character the role of looter or even despairing drunk.

From here, your decisions lead into the real endings of the game. There are over 50, and each of them really makes your choices feel like they matter. Did your character make noble choices in the weeks before The Yawhg? Did they fight in the arena? Did they help out those in need? If your group ends up saving the city, there’s a chance this character becomes a crime-fighter, saving the downtrodden in the slums from predators in the years following the city’s recovery. They could also die in despair if your group fails to rebuild the kingdom.  Nobility, tragedy, and interactivity intertwine in The Yawhg in a fascinating way.

I think what I love most about Sommer and Carroll’s creation is that it really channels the struggle between hope and despair into an interactive medium without being pandering or obnoxious about it. This is, at heart, a party game, after all.  The boardgame presentation, in both art and design, makes these characters fun to inhabit and the outcomes of the story you’re building with friends feel like the direct result of your collective choices. To save the world, the community has to come together because salvation isn’t a given. It’s an act, something that comes from genuine and vigilant effort, especially in desperate times. The game cleverly puts the power to shape the future in its player’s hands in a way that’s devilishly clever. To make the push and pull between hope and despair so enjoyable, so lovely, and enthralling is quite frankly magic.

As you might have guessed by now, I adore The Yawhg. I think it’s a special game. It deserves more attention than it has received since it debuted in 2013. If you’re looking for something to play with friends, or are just in search of a great narrative-focused game that doesn’t take long to play, you owe it to yourself to check out this gem.

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Titanfall spin-off Apex Legends has been out for a little over a week and we’re enamored with the novelties and twists it brings to battle royale as well as Respawn’s superb combat. Our admiration doesn’t mean it’s a perfect game, though. From maps to our undying hopes for titans to make an appearance, here are some changes we’d really like to see come to Apex Legends as the game evolves.

A Better-Looking Map
Kings Canyon is a fun and lively place. From a design standpoint, the map is one of the most varied for battle royale out there, with lots of interiors to hide in, many rolling hills, and enclosed spaces to prevent snipers from dominating the game. However, it’s a bit of an eyesore. We’d really like to see Kings Canyon, currently comprised of little more than swamplands and military bases, get a dose of color and more distinct areas. Or, y’know, an entirely new map to go to war on would be rad too.

Adjusted Loot Algorithms
It sucks when you land in a zone and find yourself surrounded by only auto shotguns or grenades. Yes, part of battle royale is scavenging for supplies but sometimes Apex’s weapon/armor placements are strange as hell. Turn those dials, Respawn, and place things a little more evenly across the map.

More Battle Royale Modes
Yeah, yeah, we know. As executive drew producer Drew McCoy discussed in this interview, the team-based powers of Apex’s characters would make certain characters absolutely broken or useless in a free-for-all mode. But we’re not convinced there aren’t workarounds. Why not just have players only capable of controlling non-powered-up soldiers if they want to play solo or in duos?

Non-Battle Royale Modes
As great as Apex’s character roster is, we’d love to see how characters’ powers function in team deathmatch or capture the flag modes. Such modes would also probably bring in more battle royale-wary players too.

More Trap Characters
Apex’s roster has several characters dedicated to specific play styles. Wraith and Mirage, for example, are great trickster characters who excel at getting one up over on foes with decoys and disappearing tricks. Bangalore and Gibraltar are fantastic at bull rushing foes and taking them down with offense-focused abilities. However, the game currently only has one character dedicated to laying traps: Caustic. It’d be nice to have another character for tricking foes into running headlong into their doom.

A Better Training Course
Apex’s weapons and powers take some getting used to, especially when it comes to getting used to bullet drop. The current training course could use some improvements, maybe even some bots to fight against.

Put In Some Vehicles
Ok, maybe titans would disrupt the balance of Legends’ carefully calibrated team gameplay. That’s fine and we are not bitter about it at all in the slightest. But, maybe give us a few vehicles as a consolation? A hovertank roaming around the forests and swamps would be rad.

Fleshed Out Post-Death Details
When Bloodhound nails you with a headshot from across the valley, you just want to know (out of morbid curiosity or outrage) what he killed you with. Give players a few more details in regards to the weapons that killed them and how much damage they inflicted on a foe before they were outdone.

Tinker With Characters’ Abilities
Apex Legends’ initial launch and roster of characters is pretty strong. However, some of them could use buffs. It’d be nice if Bloodhound’s ability to detect nearby foes had a bit more reach and the bright tails following Mirage’s decoys could be toned down a bit to make them not so obvious.

Better Skins
Legends already has a lot of great skins. Some of them are fantastic (like all the legendary ones). Others…not so much. In the coming months, we hope we see skins for characters and weapons that are more top-tier.

A Limited Titan Event
Come onnnnnnn, Respawn. Just break your game for a week and let us beat the gears out of each other in giant robots. Nobody will be angry. It’ll be fun. We can all get it out of our systems and go back to Apexing. Please.

More Opportunities For Earning Experience
Legends is already a notable battle royale for the ways it gives players EXP to level up, providing bonuses to players for things like the time you’ve survived in a match and how much damage you’ve dealt. However, it’d be nice if the game had quests and feats (like killing a certain number of players in a match or traveling a certain amount of distance) that gave you perks or exclusive skins for completing them.

For more on Apex Legends, check out our review as well as our guide for making the best squads in the game.

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Respawn’s newest game is (surprise!) out today. Apex Legends is a battle royale set in Titanfall’s universe with more than a few tricks up its sleeve to make it stand out from the crowd. We got to play a lot of matches recently and have a few tips to help you understand the twists Legends brings to battle royale and how to use them to get ahead.

Play With Friends

As with most team-based modes in battle royale games, communication is key to success in Apex Legends. Arguably moreso given there’s no solo play option, which means having two other buds you know well and have on voice chat will do wonders for your planning. However, not all is lost if you end up playing with randos….

Use The Ping System Like Your Life Depends On It (Because It Does)

One of Apex Legends’ innovations in the battle royale genre is its ping/marking system. Similar to Battlefield’s marking system, you have a ping button you can use to note areas of interest, including bins to loot, signs of enemy activity (like open doors and looted canisters), and even temporarily mark foes for your teammates to see. It’s a simple, easy-to-use system that will probably save your team’s hide on more than one occasion.

Pick Your Character Carefully

Apex Legends is a character-focused experience as well as a battle royale, with every player in a squad able to pick characters (called legends) with powers. Using these powers in combination with one another can often be what leads your squad to victory, so communicate with your team during the legend select screen. Think of your squad as less of a group of commandos and more like characters in an RPG party.

It’s useful to have Wraith, who can dash around cloaked in invisibility and leave portals for teammates to instantly travel through, but is she worth having if it means giving up Lifeline the medic or Pathfinder, who can chart where the circle will close next? The calculated choices you make in that character select screen are just as important as the twitch-based ones you make once the guns start blazing.

In Case Of Emergency….

Apex Legends has an interesting drop system where one person decides where the squad is dropping and then handles piloting them to that spot. It’s usually in your best interest to stay together, but if you’re playing with randos and see your leader is foolishly steering you toward a place packed with danger,  you can always break away with the tap of a button. This means taking on the rest of the opposing squads on your own, but it’s better than foolishly landing in the middle of a no-win scenario.

A Sniper Rifle Is Not Your Best Friend

A lot of battle royale matches ultimately come down to two figures on some plains armed with a sniper rifle, with the victor often being whoever has the best aim. Apex Legends’ map is much more interior-focused than Fortnite, Blackout, and PUBG. Flat, open space is surprisingly minimal, with most of the real estate dedicated to caverns, cliffs, apartment buildings, and complexes to hide you from sniper fire. That isn’t to say there are areas where sniper rifles aren’t handy, but don’t expect to dominate the match just because you come across one.

Defying Gravity

There is no fall damage. So if you need to make a quick getaway and the only escape is off a mountain cliff, go for it. There are no consequences.

Don’t Panic If No Weapons Are Around

Bad drops happen. However, Apex Legends is a bit more forgiving than your standard battle royale if you land in a location filled with no armor and weapons. The fewer number of players and squad focus, mean you usually have time to hit another locale or two to scrounge for weapons before an opposing team or the circle of doom descend.

Death Is (Maybe) Not The End

If you die in Apex Legends, there’s a slim chance you can come back. When a player perishes, a squadmate can grab their banner card and find one of the respawn vending machines littered throughout the map to bring them back. A couple of caveats to keep in mind: the dead player comes back into the game with no weapons or items, these respawn vending machines are often out in open, easy-to-see places, and it takes a whole five seconds of holding down a button to bring a player back. The five seconds is particularly brutal because it leaves you open to all sorts of nastiness, so you’ll need to make tough judgement calls from time to time about whether or not it’s worth the risk to revive a pal.

That’s A Nice Crown, Bud

At the beginning of every match, one player is shown off as the “champion,” usually a player who won the last match. Killing them will net you a nice bonus of 500 XP in the game’s cosmetic-driven progression system.

Forget About Foliage

A common tactic in battle royale is for players to go prone and hide amongst high grass as other players kill each other, slowly moving toward the center of wherever the circle is as the game goes on. While there is technically foliage in Apex Legends, it won’t save you. There’s no way to go prone, classes like Bloodhound can sniff you out, and certain gun optics can highlight your figure. You’re better off hiding in buildings or in caverns if you want to be sneaky.

For more on Apex Legends, check out our impressions and interview with Respawn.

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This week is off to quite a start. Respawn Entertainment just revealed and released its new Titanfall game, a free-to-play battle-royale spin-off called Apex Legends. While a number of words in that sentence may be discouraging to Titanfall fans, rest assured, we’ve played the game for hours and it’s a pretty great time. We’re not ready to hand down a review verdict quite yet; we want to see how it performs on live servers, and how the cosmetic-driven progression systems plays out.

However, in terms of how Apex Legends plays and what it brings to the battle-royale table, there’s a lot to like. While the ultimate goal of Apex Legends remains the same as subgenre siblings (be the last team standing), this title varies things up by letting players choose characters equipped with special powers (like going invisible for a brief period of time, or seeing where the circle will close next) that makes your squad feel more like an RPG party as opposed to a group of commandos picking each other off. The result is surprisingly deep strategic gameplay that leads to exciting and memorable moments involving artillery fire raining down, smoke bombs going off, and holograms of players rushing around all at once.

Apex Legends feel novel, and it has a different kind of flavor from the other big battle royales out right now. I like being able to quickly mark areas of interest or foes for the team to see, and having one player control where the squad will drop on the map. The varied landscape, along with the lack of foliage and prone movement, reduces snipers’ domination of matches.

The gunplay and movement, carried over largely from Titanfall 2, also makes moment-to-moment combat and traversal a blast, without the slightest hint of clunkiness in those departments.

As you can probably tell, I’m pretty enthusiastic about Apex Legends right now. That could change depending on how intrusive (if at all) the game’s microtransactions are or if there are significant technical issues now that the game is out in public. However, as it stands, Respawn’s foray into battle royale is shaping up to be my favorite take on the popular subgenre.

Check back soon for our full review. In the meantime, here are 10 tips to help you climb up the leaderboard as well as an interview with Respawn about developing the game.

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Wait, what? Respawn has a new game?

Yep. The company revealed and released Apex Legends this morning.

Is it a new Titanfall?

Kind of. It’s a battle royale game set in Titanfall’s universe. The action takes place 30 years after Titanfall 2 and focuses on mercenaries competing with one another in a huge arena.

Are there titans?

No. But don’t go! Apex Legends is pretty good even without them, and there’s a good reason for not having them in there that you can read about here. Also, the game’s free.

Free?

Free-to-play, yes.

What makes it different than the other battle royales?

Apex Legends is a character-focused battle royale, which means you play as legends as opposed to just commandos running around the map. Think of them as analogous to Rainbow Six Siege’s specialists or Overwatch’s heroes. Every one of your characters has a special set of powers that can benefit your squad. Lifeline, for example, is the medic of the group. She can summon a little droid to heal you and can even pop a massive shield to guard you and her while she revives you once you go down in battle. Meanwhile, Gibraltar is a tank who can pop a massive dome shield to give you cover, while Wraith can zip around invisibly to ambush enemies.

Legends bring a surprising amount of streamlined innovations to the battle royale genre. A pinging system, similar to Battlefield’s marking system, makes playing and communicating with random players much less of a hassle. The jumpmaster system also means there’s one player at the beginning of each map who controls the drop-in, guiding all three of you toward a destination. However, if you’re worried that your jumpmaster is leading you into certain doom, you can also break away from the squad and fly elsewhere.

So all of these character abilities are going off… during a battle royale game?

Yep.

That sounds like chaos. How many players are in a match?

60 players at launch, split in 20 squads of three. Respawn has said the player count might go up.

What’s the map like?

Very interior-focused, which I think is a good thing. There are tons of apartments to hide in, caverns as well. The map doesn’t have a lot of open spaces like plains, so snipers aren’t going to dominate this game like they sometimes do other battle royales, especially since a number of character abilities can help sniff them out/bypass them.

Any solo play?

Right now Apex Legends has no solo mode. You can break away from your squad if you really want to tough it out against everyone else’s squads on your own, but it’s not recommended.

But seriously, no titans? Why?

No titans. No pilots. As for why, Respawn explains in-depth here how prototypes with those two units just didn’t work well in the battle royale setting.

…Parkour?

No parkour. Basically, the qualities that are retained from Titanfall 2 are the gunplay and speedy movement. One character, Pathfinder, can use a grappling hook and set up ziplines, but yeah, no parkour.

Is it still fun?

I’ve played about five hours of the game and love it so far, without titans or parkour. I don’t think it needs them, to be honest. You can read my impressions right here and we’ll have a review later in the week.

How many characters are there?

Six at startup, with two you can unlock by making your way through the progression system and acquiring currency, so eight in total. All of them have abilities that compliment one another and make up for interesting squads. Respawn plans to roll out new characters as the game grows and evolves.

What do you unlock in progression besides those characters?

All the unlocks are cosmetic weapon and character skins. There’s also a banner card you get to decorate with statistics like “foes killed” and “matches won.” You acquire these skins by loot boxes or buying them outright with in-game currency.

Ugh, loot boxes?

Yes, Apex Legends has loot boxes. However, the algorithms for them are set up so that every box you get that doesn’t have a legendary or rare item means that it’s more likely the next one will. You will also never get a duplicate, according to Respawn.

Is the progression system predatory?

One of the reasons we’re holding off on reviewing the game is because I need some more time with the progression system to see how it plays out over long term. What Respawn has said about the progression system, and what little I’ve seen of it, seems like it’s tilted in the favor of the player though.

Should I play this?

Do you like Titanfall 2? Do you like battle royale?  Apex Legends is free, so there’s no harm in trying it out even if you’re skeptical. You can watch our episode of New Gameplay Today below to see if the game seems up your alley!

Click here to watch embedded media

For more on Apex Legends, check out our impressions and tips. You can also read our interview with Respawn about the game’s development and its relationship to EA here.

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Today Respawn revealed and released its foray into battle royale, Apex Legends, a game set 30 years after Titanfall 2. We played hours of the game behind closed doors and chatted with Respawn executive producer Drew McCoy about Legends’ development and combatting free-to-play skepticism. We also talked about Respawn’s company culture under EA and what we can expect from the Apex Legends and the Titanfall universe in the months ahead.

How long have you guys been working on Apex Legends?

Since the spring of 2017.

Why the surprise release?

Our goal for this game and our community is to be very transparent with them. To be completely honest, we know this game has skepticism around it. It’s not Titanfall 3. It’s a very different game than everyone excepted. It’s battle royale, which for some people is a fad right now. Instead of trying to convince a skeptical audience over a period of time with marketing and interviews, why not just let the game speak for itself? The best antidote for any skepticism is to see and hopefully believe.

How do you respond to players who say that EA is making you put loot boxes in your game or forcing you to be trend chasers?

The response is play the game, check it out, and form your own opinion. But also, we decided to make this game. Not to be throwing EA under the bus, but this wasn’t the game they were expecting. I had to go to executives, show it to them, and explain it and…not convince but more, “Hey, trust us! This is the thing you want out of us.”

As a corporation, they can only quantify based on past data and they’ve never done anything like this before. There’s a giant rainbow question mark over revenue projections for this game. They’re like, “We don’t know! We can’t predict.” This is a game where we had to say, “This is what we want to do. Help us get there.”

They had no hand in development or anything about this game.

One of the goals for Apex Legends is to flesh out Titanfall’s universe. Just how much are you fleshing it out within the context of this game?

We have at least a year in plans right now for development. Like I said, we’re going to be doing both in-game and out of game [storytelling]. Not that I think we could match them in any stretch of the imagination since they have a lot of experience in doing it, but the Overwatch CG videos are a good example of storytelling and deepening of the world outside of the game. For us, it’s the start of telling more stories in this world. There’s a lot we’re going to do with it. Apex Legends is a battle royale game but that’s the start.

I think a lot of players are going to greet the news that there are no titans in Apex Legends with surprise. Can you talk about that decision a little bit?

We started with the base of Titanfall 2, so the very first prototypes were Titanfall pilots and titans coming in and stuff. But when we sat down to figure out the goals for this game from a design and mechanical standpoint, it was really simple. We wanted a masterful, deep, and strategic team game. That’s the lens for which we were looking through for all the things [in Apex Legends] we were making. Stuff like pilot mobility and wall-running, double-jumping ended up being incomprehensible, which made it not strategic or learnable. It’s really fun when you’re the one doing it but when you die to someone who’s going a thousand miles a minute and you didn’t see them, that’s not a learnable moment. You can’t master that. That’s someone else affecting you and you have no control over, so that’s why that stuff got cut.

As for the titans themselves, they were just an incredibly unbalancing force on the game. We tried a thousand iterations on them and that really speaks to what Titanfall and Titanfall 2 were trying to do. They were just power fantasies where you get to power up and stomp around and squish guys and go back to being a pilot — and those are just sort of opposed goals to this game. Just because it’s cool in that game and they’re both in the same universe doesn’t mean that element fits here. When we were prototyping it all, we tried a bunch of versions where the titans were weaker or harder to get or there’s only one on the map. The problem with that is once you get them balance and they’re not destroying the integrity of the of game, they’re no fun. You don’t get that power fantasy. You’re driving around in a papier-mâché titan. What’s the point of that? That was actually a really big contentious point of development early on. We try not to be beholden to any preconceived notions about what we should be making. We let ourselves find the fun and that’s where a lot of our decisions come from.

How long did it take to develop the characters you can play as in Apex Legends?

We’ve been playing with these guys for about a year and a half now in various forms. We playtest every day for an hour or two, which is a huge time investment. That’s an hour or two across a hundred people — you could be developing during that time. However, playtesting is probably the most important part of development. It’s crucial. The reality is that we didn’t just say, “These are the eight characters we want. This is them.”  We prototyped two dozen or something. Sometimes this character was broken in one way but their ability was really cool so we’d put it with another character [and so on]. This is all before we had character names or personalities or even visuals. It’s just figuring it out, basically.

We’ve got incredibly talented designers who can think about the game in terms of player mentalities so it’s not just “is this mechanic cool?” But it starts before that, with the mentality of a player who wants to be like…a monster in the fog. That’s where [the character] Caustic comes from. It doesn’t just have an impact on their abilities but also on their personality and their voice actor and the dialogue we write for them and all these things because it’s the mindset of, “I want to be the scary guy setting traps.” So that character is not just a villain. He’s deliciously evil. 

That’s where a lot of it comes from. It’s not from any one department or person. These characters are the star of the show and we treat them the way we would treat a Titanfall 2 single-player level. They get that much effort and care and iteration from all the departments from within the team.

Apex Legends is team-focused. Other battle royale games have solo modes for those who want to test their mettle alone against other players. Does the team have any plans for modes that cater to that sort of solo experience?

A while back we nailed down that we wanted this to be a team game. We’ve actually struggled with that internally because we have a lot of people in the office who have played hundreds of hours in PUBG, Fornite, and Blackout and they never play in parties. And yeah, I mean, we have to make choices to go deep, and if you’re making both a solo and a squad game, you’re not going to do things like the ping system or the jumpmaster system or even characters the way they are. Because we would make them singularly more powerful. Certain characters would be completely useless in a solo game.

We hear that players want that stuff and we’re not shutting the door for all of eternity on that kind of experience, but at the same time it’s like, “Why isn’t there a 1v1 mode in Rainbow Six Siege?” Because it’s a team game and that’s what all the mechanics are designed around.

Speaking of Rainbow Six Siege, you have characters locked behind progression walls in a similar fashion. Why’s that?

That speaks to both the free-to-play nature of the game and progression. Since we’re releasing Legends as a live service, that’s going to be one of those things for people to chase. That’s part of the progress as a player because once you get that character, it’s a new thing to master. It’s a new progression avenue for skins and banner cards and such. For us, it’s not entirely a business decision. There are design decisions in play there.

What’s ahead content-wise for Apex Legends?

I can’t talk about much. I can say that in March we’re starting our first season, so that’s going to include new weapons, legends, and functional things as well as new cosmetics. We have a lot planned for the next year that you won’t be seeing for months and months and months. We don’t have the same mindset as Fortnite, with Epic doing big things and little things. We care a lot about the competitive integrity of the game so we wouldn’t put something in that’s incredibly unbalanced just because it’s cool. It has to bake in the oven for a long time and be balanced.

It feels like these games live or die by the service that comes after their release. Are you worried that without the constant little changes that people will drop out?

We do plan on having constant updates to the game, but not in the sense of “Here’s a new gun that does double damage” or something like that. I think Rainbow Six Siege is an example of a game that had a great foundation at launch but everything was broken around it and it had this core group of players who were like “You have something magical here. Fix it.” The game continues to grow today. I don’t think we have to make giant, meaningful changes to the game every week. Honestly, that’d be ideal but this is our first live game. We’re going to be learning for the first six months on how to do it right and we’ve put an enormous amount of planning for our first year of post-launch content.

Are you worried about server issues at launch?

With Anthem’s demo last weekend, that’s definitely been on our minds and we’ve been digging into that. A certain set of core EA tech is in all their games like telemetry, authentication, purchasing. Those were the systems that were falling down during that demo as far as I’m aware, so we’ve been doing investigations into whether or not it was Anthem’s limitation of that telemetry feature or is it the limitation of the Frostbite engine. Since we’re not on Frostbite we have to do things differently. We’ve been trying to figure out in why that was falling over and how confident are we. We’ve done a lot of load-testing because with a game like this there’s no way to tell how many people will show up. Could be a thousand people. Could be five million. So we’ve had to prepare for wor…well, best case scenario, which would be millions of players. Titanfall 1 and 2 launched with barely any hiccups. We don’t expect any road bumps next week.

Is Apex Legends running on a modified version of Source still?

Yeah, it’s an evolution of what we used on Titanfall 1 and 2.

Are you worried about competing with other battle royale games?

There’s a common Reddit mentality that the world is filled with battle royale games. I don’t think that’s actually true. There’s been a lot of games that have tried and died unfortunately but there’s really only three: Blackout, PUBG, and Fortnite. I’ve lived through a lot of eras of games in my time when there were a lot more than three that were active at one time. It doesn’t feel like battle royale is oversaturated at this time.

We have put such firepower behind this game. This is the biggest team we’ve ever had. Titanfall 2 had 85 developers, now we’re about 115. Aside from Fortnite, there is no AAA battle royale game. They’re all modes. They’re all side-dishes or they’ve died. Our goals for this game are very different than a Fortnite and how we’re trying to achieve them is very different from a PUBG or Fortnite. We’ve had a lot of people in the office who have played hundreds of hours of Blackout. I’ll ask ’em, “Are you going to stop playing Blackout when Apex Legends comes out” and they’re all, “No, I’ll just split my time between the two. They scratch different itches.”

I think going back to your question about surprising everyone, that’s one of those things. If you hear this is a battle royale game, you’ll just shut your mind off to it completely. But if you hear it’s free-to-play and then you’ll find it compliments what you’re already playing or it’s not for you, and that’s a big reason for free-to-play.

Is Apex Legends indicative of a new approach to Titanfall? Will we see other Titanfall games in different genres?

There have been an untold number of pitches for other types of games in the Titanfall universe. We operate in a way that’s different from most studios in that we do just go, “What’s striking our fancy right now?” After we started Respawn, people were clamoring for another Modern Warfare-killer. We showed up with a multiplayer-only, with story in multiplayer game, with giant robots. No one expected that because that’s where our noses led us to. Same thing with this game. Could have gone in any number of directions. We prototyped a ton of random stuff.  This was the most popular.

For more on Apex Legends, check out our tips and impressions of the game.

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I liked Mark Of The Ninja a lot when it was originally released back in 2012. I didn’t finish it, mostly because I was starting grad school, but I loved its approach to marrying platforming to the flexible stealth systems. I’ve been revisiting the remastered version of the game on Switch to finish it up while traveling, and have been having just as much fun as I did back on the original release, if not more. I also know I’ll dive back in for a second playthrough, but this time I’ll attempt a non-lethal run where I don’t kill anyone (except two characters you have to kill for story purposes). That awareness has gotten me thinking about why some of my favorite games I’ve ever played are immersive sims that give you the ability to proceed through their campaigns by non-violent means.

I’m not a pacifist by nature when it comes to games. If you ask anyone in the Game Informer office who’s had the misfortune delight of playing multiplayer games with me, you’ll probably hear that I enjoy a good dollop of carnage. One time I coaxed fellow editor Kyle Hilliard into a car in Ghost Recon Wildlands and then blew him to smithereens for the heck of it. There was another time in Red Dead Online where I shot a box of dynamite that another colleague of mine was standing next to. I like violence and chaos in games. For me, nailing gory headshots in Resident Evil 2 is fantastic, as is dropping chandeliers on targets in Hitman. So what is it about pacifistic playthroughs in immersive sims that’s so appealing?

The appeal isn’t rooted in demonstrations upholding moral standards, but instead in understanding a game’s tools in a specialized way, to the point that you know how to create challenges for yourself by limiting said tools. Ultimately, I like to come away from games that emphasize player choice knowing that I’ve mastered those titles’ mechanics and systems. For immersive sims, that often means getting through the game without killing a soul.

Take Dishonored. It’s easy to complete that game as a whirlwind of murder and chaos, summoning plague rats to feast on foes or slowing down time to blast three enemies with your flintlock pistol before they react. However, Dishonored is at its best when it convinces you to create your own rules for your playthrough, to inhabit a particular mindset for your character and stick to it.

I love my nonlethal runs (yes, plural) through Dunwall because Dishonored’s systems are enjoyable enough that making rules for myself (like not killing guards or being spotted by them) created exciting challenges to overcome. For example, knowing how to get past all of the guards in the level where you return to Dunwall tower is extremely difficult when you only allow yourself to use the game’s teleportation power, blink, to do so. These restrictions force you to learn the game by heart, knowing where foes will patrol, how long you have to react if they turn their head in your direction, and where the safest places to hide out are.

I still return to the original Dishonored quite frequently because it’s one of those games I’ve spent so long playing that the familiarity makes dreary Dunwall feel a bit like home. However, its systems are robust and lively enough that I create some new fantastic emergent story every time I play, like how I managed to infiltrate Lady Boyle’s estate in my last game by possessing a fish. Sure, tearing foes to bits with your ridiculous array of powers is fun, but it’s nowhere near as entertaining to me as leaping from rooftop to rooftop and vanishing without a trace just before an enemy’s eyes find you.

While Dishonored’s systematic flexibility still makes it the game I play the most non-lethally, I’ve started approaching other titles in a similar manner. Obviously, Hitman requires you to kill one or multiple targets to complete a mission. However, while I could stomach a couple of extra casualties in earlier entries like Blood Money and Silent Assassin to complete a mission, killing an unintended NPC in the last two games feels like a massive error (due in large part to how strongly they punish your performance rating). I always restart or reload an earlier save until I can pull off the contract like a true professional.

With Mark Of The Ninja, I’m currently slashing people from the shadows left and right, mostly because I’m still getting a good sense of what the gadgets can do. However, as bloody as this playthrough is, I’m still jotting down notes for tactics to use in the next run, like how combining smoke bombs and firecrackers in crowded rooms makes for a great distraction. I imagine Mark Of The Ninja is going to be hard as hell to pull off a pacifist playthrough given the savvy A.I. of the enemies, but I’m looking forward to my non-lethal run to test my understanding of the game and see if I can truly be the best ninja around.

What about you folks? Any games you love to do non-lethal runs with? Any games you hate to do ’em with? Sound off in the comments below!

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