Christens Fair Shake

Re-Playability	5/5
Plot Design	N/A
World Design	5/5
Character Design	5/5
Graphic Design	5/5
Audio Design	4/5
Accessibility	3/5
Platform Compatibility	4/5
Developer Support	3/5
Community Vibe	2/5
Innovation In Genre	5/5
Application Security	1/5
Server Stability	3/5
Client Stability	4/5

Apex Legends recently held the Apex Legends Global Series (ALGS) Championship in March 2024. During the final rounds of this event, several top players including Imperial Hal and Genburten had their clients (on their personal machines) compromised when a group activated malicious code on the servers running the tournament. EA maintains a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy when it comes to hacking events with respect to their products, so an official statement on what went wrong as well as how it was addressed is likely never going to happen.

Analysis by several independent security experts and firms point to this attack being the result of a potential Remote Code Execution (RCE) exploit in either the Apex Server, Client, or both. There is strong evidence (though not confirmed) to suggest that Respawn has the ability to patch live Apex games as they are running, causing updates to go live on servers as well as attached clients during game play – in other words, live code injection. If this is true, this is likely a primary suspect in the events leading up to what happened at the 2024 ALGS Championship.

Respawn Entertainment has a sordid history with Remote Code Execution. Formed as a spin off from the teams at Infinity Ward that worked on the original Call of Duty: Modern Warfare franchise; the first confirmed RCE affecting that series was discovered in Modern Warfare 2 on Steam and PC where malicious users, controlling infected servers could inject code into connecting clients that in the best case modified their Modern Warfare 2 progression and set it to max, and in the worst case allowed them to take control of their computers and open programs, run code, etc… Infinity Ward did promptly respond to this, and were quick to launch a patch, but the damage had already been done. Fun fact: This RCE resurfaced in the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (2009) client on Steam last year – so for anyone still playing that, good luck!

Fast forward to today and as of the time of this writing, there is no confirmation from EA or Respawn Entertainment as to whether the attack at ALGS was the result of an RCE or not – and again, given EA policy, this likely will never be announced. Furthermore, there has been very little from Respawn other than a blanket apology and corporate assurance that their teams are looking into it. My official statement regarding this is that this is unacceptable behavior. Apex Legends is currently one of the most popular games on both Steam and Twitch and maintains an extremely large user base. Even if the attackers at ALGS claim that their reasoning was to open EA and Respawns eyes to the state of the game, the fact they were able to do so means the door is wide open for other malicious attackers, and they likely will not be so nice about it.

I can’t stress this enough – do not play this game. If this is a server issue, it can happen to console players as well and unlike PC, you can not just zero your operating system drive and reinstall it to fix the problem. Until EA or Respawn make an official statement on what exactly happened and what their resolution is/was, I recommend the best course of action is to uninstall the game from any platforms you play it on, and wait. If there is no official announcement, move onto something else. And if you are reading this because you are considering installing Apex Legends, don’t.

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Introduction

Developed by Respawn Entertainment as an experimental foray into the Battle Royal genre, Apex Legends debuted on the scene in 2019 to raving reviews and rabid fanfare. Hailed as a “Breeze of fresh air in a stale genre.” Apex Legends seemingly overnight, came to dominate the market, easily eclipsing the long-standing Players Unknown Battlegrounds, placing it head-to-head against Epic’s Fortnite. Focusing heavily on ability-based, tactical combat, Apex Legends defined a new generation of Battle Royale shooters, departing from many of the cliches of older entries in the genre. It was the first of its kind to attempt to combine hero-shooters with the high-intensity, heart-pumping game play that is definitive to the Battle Royale experience.

Apex Legends features both casual and ranked game modes as well as a thriving professional competitive scene bolstered by the classic Duos and Trios game modes, where players team up in two or three player squads to fight each other in intense sixty player matches in an ever-shrinking ring across an expanding number of maps with diverse points of interest, unique map features, and hazards. Alongside the classic experience, there is also the recently introduced Mixtape mode allowing players to rapidly iterate and improve their skills with both legends and weapons in low-risk, fast game modes such as Team Deathmatch, Control, and Gun Run. Additionally, Respawn periodically releases limited time game modes that alter the rules, such as the famous Three Strikes and Revenant Army game modes.

Legends (the term for characters in Apex) are split into four classes: Assault, Support, Skirmisher, and Controller. Each class has unique passive abilities available to each legend of that class, and overall team composition across classes combined with coordinated game play from each member of a squad greatly influences the outcome of each match. Furthermore, each legend has a predefined set of passive and active abilities, similar to Riot’s Valorant, that lend tactical advantage, create opportunities to push squads, and allow for more defensive game play. The cast is diverse and abilities are unique across legends ensuring that no two games are the same.

World Building Overview

Apex Legends takes place in the same science fiction universe that the Titanfall series takes place in. Many characters in game make reference to factions that were part of and events that took place in Titanfall 1 or 2 and much of the overall design of Apex Legends is heavily inspired by Titanfall. For a First-Person Shooter, Titanfall features rich world building and character design, and Titanfall 2 in particular is praised for its plot and how it correlates to its level design. Unfortunately, most of this is tossed out the window with respect to Apex Legends.

Because Apex Legends is a live-service game, there is far more opportunity to tell an ongoing story and develop the world as seasons are released for the game. For a while, this was what Respawn was doing. Each season they would release a hand drawn and sometimes animated comic that could be paged through in-game that would tell the story for that season. Sometime along the line, this feature was cut back and today, the story is told through dialogue prompts that the player must click through. It’s the same format, but it no longer has the hand drawn scenes or character interactions, just dialogue bubbles with notably less impact or lasting effect. The saving grace for this is that Respawn finally added weapon and legend back stories to the game. It used to be the case that only certain legends had any back story at all outside of the comics, and that was only viewable if you owned a specific legendary skin for them.

Visually, character design is on point. There is something to be said about how Respawn is able to craft skins that accentuate characters. Not just their profiles or outlines, but also their abilities and personalities. Regarding personality though, this is one area Respawn handles poorly. All legends are one-dimensional with certain character traits that Respawn locked onto, and all of the characters voice lines are about that trait. Take for example, Loba. Each of her lines are either about stealing loot, or well… something I won’t mention here. You can figure it out just by looking up her character. Characters do have in-game banter with each other, referring to events or relationships between each other. And some characters, such as Bangalore and Newcastle have lobby dialogue and other special dialogue that plays during certain events in-game such as revives or respawns.

Map design is one area where I have mixed opinions. On one hand, I feel strongly that all of the Battle Royale maps are peak examples of top-tier map design. On the other, many of the Mixtape maps have obvious high points that once one team controls, they dominate for the rest of the match. This is exacerbated by Controller legends setting up shop in said points making it near impossible to push the full team once everyone lays down their abilities. There is little incentive to continue playing in these game modes knowing ahead of time what the outcome will be and how the match will be played.

Technical Overview

Apex Legends is built using Valve’s Source engine. As such, it is DirectX 11 and features experimental support for DirectX 12 that can be manually enabled via the games configuration file. Worth mentioning is that Apex Legends neither looks nor feels like a Source engine game. Respawn Entertainment has so heavily modified the Source engine that the engine running Apex Legends and its predecessors in the Titanfall series is basically an entire separate engine from the mainline Source engine. These modifications and the fact that Valve no longer officially supports the Source engine (at least the version Apex is built on) means that Apex Legends faces a tough battle with staying technically secure, something that Respawn Entertainment famously has problems with.

Apex Legends features graphical presets for just about every system configuration available and is not an intensely demanding game when played at low settings. This makes it theoretically possible to run the game on a large number of PC platforms with the game itself officially supporting Windows and Linux, as well as the Playstation 4/5, Xbox One/Xbox One X, Nintendo Switch, and Steam Deck platforms. Respawn is not a large studio. There’s no official numbers as to the amount of hours or effort spent maintaining the game across this number of platforms, but I would wager that this contributes to the technical debt the game faces as well as the many technical problems plaguing its client and servers.

Worth mentioning regarding Apex is the term “Visual Noise”. This is simply the amount of visual clutter on the screen that the player must parse to be able to play the game. Apex has a great deal of visual clutter and sources of it. This is one of the largest complaints in the community, and is an opinion that I agree with. I started playing Apex at the end of Season 6 and stopped halfway through Season 20, so I have seen the game evolve a lot over the past few years. A common theme with this evolution is to introduce new legends with flashy, shiny abilities that when used occupy your entire screen or produce bright flashing lights. Some of these, while intended to obscure player vision, produce this as a negative side effect of just wanting to make the game be visually appealing.

The audio landscape for Apex is excellent for a Battle Royale. Each weapon has distinct sounds that allow players to pinpoint what weapon is being used just by hearing it fire. Each legend has distinct tactical and ultimate ability sounds including wind-up where applicable and deployment. So, not only is it easy to identify what weapons the player is facing, it is also fairly simple to determine what legends someone might be playing against based solely on sound design. I will state however, that similar to Visual Noise, Audio Noise is also a prevalent issue in engagements with several squads – footsteps in particular, become extremely difficult to hear. Fortunately however, there are options in the pause menu to individually set volume for the various audio channels in game. So this is not as big an issue as Visual Noise is to Apex Legends.

Matchmaking in Apex Legends has been controversial ever since Respawn introduced Skill-Based Match Making (SBMM) to the game around season 5. It is constantly being rebalanced and addressed each season, with the most recent seasons according to the community, having generally the most fair experience across the board. This is vastly improved from prior seasons, where the game was largely unplayable once the matchmaking system determines player placement. And Respawn on their part, while publicizing the intricacies of how matchmaking works, have never published how skill ranking is determined (that is an “industry secret” – as if analyzing data points is some big secret, pffh). This tends to be a major problem with competitive shooters overall, but Respawn and EA in particular stand to gain much from ensuring that their top players continuously feel like they are constantly winning and performing at their best given the cost of micro-transactions and how the game is supported.

Respawn Entertainment does fairly well at responding to player feedback, though in past seasons, there has been controversy surrounding the development team catering to the whims of Pro players and streamers. However, the general experience now is such that the team listens to players on all forums and is constantly iterating on the game. Seasonal update and balance changes are often large, touching on many elements from map bugs, legend and weapon tweaks, cross-legend interactions, and more. Glaring issues are almost always addressed by mid-season patches with Respawn placing great emphasis on ensuring a fair and consistent experience for players of all skill levels.

Accessibility is something that Apex Legends does very well. While not something to praise as this is expected, there are settings for the common forms of color blindness in the pause menu. There are also specific settings for fine tuning certain legend abilities such as Valkyries’ jet-flight being a hold to continue using, or tap to activate and use. There are settings for either toggling aim or holding aim, diddo for crouching. A neat feature that extremely improves accessibility is the way legend abilities show up on the HUD.

For tacticals and ultimates that lock-onto or otherwise emit an area of effect, players that are caught by these abilities will have clear visual indicators on their HUD for the direction of the ability. Furthermore, for applicable abilities, they will receive a message on the center of the screen indicating its usage. Abilities are well-telegraphed; not just for predicting where they are going, but also for easily spotting them. And users of abilities receive clear and concise feedback on players that are affected by them, either visually, with an audio cue from the legend using the ability, or both. There’s also the ping system, but other reviews have covered that so I won’t here.

In terms of game stability, the servers this game are hosted on may as well be an Internet-connected cluster of potatoes. Some nights, the game plays fine, other nights I receive all kinds of server warnings in game that hamper my game play – the worst part is that this just seems to happen at random. I have even run into multiple occasions where leaving a match and entering another, my ping goes from the mid 40s all the way up to the lower 200s and stays there for the duration of the match. This is actually from a persistent issue with the Apex Legends servers where between matches, players can sometimes be silently reconnected to another server on the other side of the world. It was not uncommon for me to leave a match only to find out I am somehow connected to the Tokyo, Japan server.

The client unfortunately faces similar issues. There are times where my client would just crash because of an error unpacking a resource that displays a card in the store. There are other times where my client would crash with no helpful error message at all – and in the worst case, the game would simply crash directly to desktop. Oh and don’t expect to be able to diagnose these issues yourself. The game does not produce a human readable error log to file when it crashes, instead, it prefers to produce a set of binary files you are expected to send to Respawn. Ahh yes, there’s also the issue concerning playing the game on Linux.

Official Linux support for Apex Legends was added shortly after the Steam Deck was released. This of course meant that Respawn had to add a way to get Easy Anti-Cheat to work on Linux while respecting EA’s wishes in this regard (aside: Easy Anti-Cheat has always been compatible with Linux. It is up to the Developer and Publisher to explicitly enable this support). That said, there are times where Respawn will release an update for the game that just breaks Easy Anti-Cheat support, rendering the game unplayable on Linux. And since Linux is such a small platform, it often gets triaged low on the bug list, meaning patches for these issues do not come out till at least a quarter of the way through a season.

There’s also issues with Vulkan Shaders and Apex in particular, but that stems from a bug in Valve’s Fozzilize shader cache implementation all the way back from 2020 that causes all Vulkan Shaders for all games to recompile any time Steam is launched. This is still an open issue on the Fozzilize Github, and Valve still has not addressed it! But this is a Valve problem, not a Respawn problem.

Concerned Linux users can either disable shader caching in Steam settings, or they can switch to DirectX 12 experimental using the Apex configuration file, which will force shader compilation in-game. I would opt for one of these two options because notoriously, Steam shader compilation is throttled and will only use approximately 30% of total available resources for compilation. This means that compiling shaders through Steam is always slower than doing so directly in the game engine – and for Apex, this means waiting at least several hours for shaders to compile each time you want to play the game should you compile them with Steam.

Community

Most online FPS games have toxic communities and Apex Legends is no different in that regard. I personally have been told in no-stakes, public matches that I am:

• Trash at the game.
• Terrible at the legend I am playing.
• That I should immediately uninstall the game.
• That I should give up on playing all shooters.

And I’m not even that bad at Apex Legends! The SBMM system has me playing against high Masters and Predators nearly every match. Sometimes, I even get top-100 Predators in my matches.

The crux of this problem comes down to the fact that Apex Legends and other modern shooters, are high-intensity, high-adrenaline games where their communities are fueled by the success and impact of large streamers, YouTubers, and professional gamers that make millions on playing these games. People see this success and develop a mindset where they want it as well. Unfortunately, this puts them in conflict with people like myself that just want to play and enjoy the game. There might be some truth that perhaps competitive shooters are the last genre people should turn to to relax or have fun, but it is a genre I personally enjoy and I do not want to stop playing it simply because I was having a bad day that triggered a toxic teammate.

Apex Legends epitomizes this problem. Toxicity is rampant in all of the no-stakes game modes including Mixtape mode. This is made even worse by the fact that most of the legends themselves are toxic with respect to their voice lines and emotes. This type of behavior should not be normalized by the genre, but sadly Respawn has latched onto this design theory and they seem to be clutching it like an eagle clutches its prey.

Outside of the game, there are numerous Apex subreddits where players often post clips of top performance or complaints about the game, and those generally tend to be fairly engaging. Unfortunately, just due to the nature of this game, the toxicity from within game bleeds through to these spaces as well where there is a strong case that it should not be allowed. These spaces exist to have civil discourse regarding game balance and new patches, critique game play and improve performance, and to talk about the competitive aspects of the game. And outside of the official Apex Legends forum hosted by EA, these types of spaces are often woefully under-moderated.

Monetization

Let’s talk about micro-transactions. While not as egregious as the micro-transaction update that wholly summarized the release of Overwatch 2, micro-transactions are integrated tightly into the Apex Legends ecosystem. Featuring an in-game store with promoted, on-sale items as well as targeted items based on leveraging AI to analyze player profiles and offer appropriate items at a discount. My opinion is that that Apex Legends monetization scheme is mostly appropriate for a game of this scale – it has to be supported somehow, given it is an entirely free game. Crafting credits can be earned in-game that allow players to craft all the standard Legend and weapon skins, but time limited skins can only be purchased from the store using Apex Coins that can only be purchased using real money, or earned from the premium battlepass (again, purchased with real money).

Apex Legends does not allow you to earn Apex Coins without actually spending money on at least an initial premium battlepass purchase. Furthermore, the game features limited time events where playing the game allows players to earn event skins. Most events net you a single free event skin via an event loot box, but further skins must be gambled on using even loot boxes, again purchased with real money. Recently, Respawn has introduced limited time events with sponsorships from real-life celebrity personalities or partnerships with other games where in order to acquire the unique promoted item for the event, you would need to spend the equivalent of approximately 300-400 US Dollars on loot boxes. This is vastly increased from the average spend of approximately 160 US Dollars (which was already far too much) on event specific legend heirlooms and is a major controversy for both Respawn and EA.

It’s a shame that the industry leans so heavily into gambling as their core monetization scheme – as it is conditioning a whole new generation of addicts, that instead of wasting their money on lotto (with potential real-life value), they now spend it on virtual loot boxes. This is certainly not my place to say, but this is one area that world governments need to look into placing heavy regulation on as currently, it’s a predatory mess.

Summary

Apex Legends is a constantly evolving Battle Royale shooter, with a responsive and active development team. It features highly fluid ability and gun play with strong movement mechanisms. Overall, it plays smoothly and it is easy to get caught in a dopamine loop that hooks the player into enjoying the game for hours at a time. However, this is marred by an extremely toxic community as well as glaring technical and security issues, allowing all-but-confirmed Remote Code Execution and injection into clients on arbitrary computing systems.

This is not a game I would recommend anyone to play in its current state. Once the major security issues are fixed and addressed by Respawn, along with announcements to the community that the game is safe to play, feel free to dip your toes in.