Just three days after it launched, Apex Legends has already hit 10 million players, with a peak concurrent player count of more than 1 million, developer Respawn Entertainment announced Thursday.
The battle royale game launched on Monday at the same time as it was revealed by Respawn Entertainment, the developers behind Titanfall. The game is free to play and is available on PC, Xbox One, and PlayStation 4, which surely helped it reach a high number of players in such a short time — why not try a free game?
SEE ALSO: 'Apex Legends' reinvents the wheel on team play in first-person shooters
Apex Legends was inspired by other wildly popular battle royale games like Fortnite and PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds where players drop down onto an island where the playable area gets smaller and smaller as people fight to be the last survivors.
Apex Legends distinguishes itself from the competition with its unique characters, each with distinct abilities and personalities, as well as the fact that if you play your cards right you can revive your dead squadmates.
Right now it looks like Apex Legends could be going the way of Fortnite and PUBG in terms of popularity, but we'll have to see how the next few months go. If Respawn Entertainment manages to keep a steady stream of content updates coming, things could go in their favor.
For perspective, Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, one of the most popular games of 2018, sold 3 million copies after 11 days, to Apex Legends' 10 million. Of course, Smash was $60 and Apex Legends is free, so it's tough to compare them directly.
Fortnite was also a slower burn than Apex Legends, given the fact that it didn't even launch with its popular Battle Royale mode – but that mode still took two weeks to hit 10 million players.
It'll be hard for Apex Legends to beat the eventual records hit by PUBG and Fortnite, which have racked up hundreds of millions of players. But 10 million players after just 72 hours is an impressive start.
March 04, 2019 Apex Legends has hit yet another massive player count milestone.
If you’re keeping track at home, Apex Legends took eight hours to reach one million players, 24 hours to reach 2.5 million, and 72 hours to reach ten million. A week later, that number hit 25 million, with a peak concurrent player count of more than two million. But it shows no sign of stopping.
In a video published earlier today, the game’s official YouTube account announced that Respawn’s battle royale – despite having only been out for a month – now has more than 50 million registered players.
If you’d like some more stats to go along with that, then you’ve got them. Those 50 million players have used 158 million finishers, and activated their ultimates more than 1.2 billion times (which is an awful lot of ziplines and Lifeline packages). That game-changing ping system is also working out, with more than 31 billion pings placed already. There’s a whole load more stats on offer in that trailer, drawing from the game’s incredibly strong community, and it looks like the developer is happy to lean into those Mozambique memes too.
There’s no update on the game’s concurrent player count, but it’s already doing pretty well. Two million concurrents beats every single Steam record outside of PUBG’s top number, though that’s not entirely fair, since the Apex Legends also include console releases.
Last man standing: Here’s our list of the best battle royale games
A closer comparison is the Fortnite player count, which is now over 200 million and hit a peak of at least 8.9 million concurrent. As Daniel Ahmad notes on Twitter, Apex Legends is on track to get there fast – it took Fortnite 16 weeks to reach 45 million players, while Apex has beaten that total in just 4.
In the eyes of some players, however, Respawn will likely have lost marks for the simple fact that it’s not making Titanfall 3. There are also cosmetic loot boxes which aren’t likely to prove too popular, but the developer says that’s a significant part of why Apex Legends launched so quickly.
Apex Legends is a free-to-playbattle royale game developed by Respawn Entertainment and published by Electronic Arts. It was released for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One on February 4, 2019, without any prior announcement or marketing.
The gameplay of Apex fuses elements from a variety of video games, including Respawn's own Titanfall series, battle royale games, class-based shooters, and those with evolving narratives. Approximately sixty players are pitted against each other on an island in squads of three, with one player controlling where their squad lands. The squads then must scavenge for weapons and other resources to fight other squads, during which the play area gradually constricts in size until one squad remains, thus ending the match. The game also features care packages and the ability to revive your teammates within a certain amount of time. Communication with team members can be done through voice chat or through a ping system, allowing teammates to mark supplies, locations, and enemies with ease. The game features nine heroes to choose from (though three of them are locked by default), and features a microtransaction system for cosmetic items.
The concept for the game came to fruition during the development of a new Titanfall game, after EA's acquisition of Respawn in 2017. The sudden success of the battle royale genre prompted the developers to create one of their own that incorporates elements of the series, in addition to the concepts seen in games throughout the past decade. Following its release, the developers announced plans for cross-platform play.
Apex Legends received very positive reviews from critics, who praised its gameplay, progression system, and fusion of elements from various genres. Some considered it a worthy competitor to Fortnite Battle Royale, a similar game that had gained massive popularity in the previous year. The game surpassed over 25 million players by the end of its first week, and 50 million within its first month.
Apex Legends Player Count Current
Gameplay
Apex Legends is a battle royale game borrowing concepts from the hero shooter genre of games, and is set 30 years after the events of Titanfall 2 with the Militia-IMC conflict that was central to the main line Titanfall games over, leaving many Frontier worlds without a central governing and leading to the rebirth of an old bloodsport[1]. Apex Legends differs from most battle royale games by incorporating Legends, pre-defined heroes with unique abilities that fall into roles such as Offense, Defense, Support and Recon.
As with other hero shooters, players select from one of about ten pre-made Legends, each which has unique appearances and sets of passive and activated abilities with cooldown timers, along with an ultimate ability that requires charging up over the period of the match. Players are grouped into teams of three, with each player selecting a unique Legend in turn, and each match features up to twenty teams competing for a total of sixty competitors. All teams start with no equipment aside from a melee attack and their Legend's abilities and are flown over the game's map via a dropship which flies in a straight line from a random position on the edge of the map to cross to another position on the opposite side. Each team is assigned a 'Jump Master' who decides when the team will exit the craft and guide them onto any spot on the map that they can reach. The map contains a variety of locations on the map include military bunkers, watchtowers, and depots, squalid slums and prefabricated housing, industrial facilities such as a water treatment plant, or the wandering supply ships which contain high-tier loot.
Once on the ground teams scour the various structures and supply bins on the game map for weapons, ammunition, and other equipment. Weapon attachments and defensive items are tiered, indicated by their color. The progression is white < blue < purple < gold. A more 'rare' item is always better than a lower-tier item, and gold tier items give special effects such as reducing cooldowns of tactical abilities.
An orange field begins outside of the map and periodically constricts inwards, a hallmark of the battle royale genre, shrinking the playable area to create a situation which inevitably leads to the teams fighting for loot, eliminating each other to be the last team standing, all while staying within the ever-shrinking safe zone on the map.
A player can be 'downed' into a vulnerable bleed-out state. Players are able to use a 'knockdown shield' item to protect themselves while they crawl for cover or to reach a squadmate, who can then revive them. A rare item found in the arena, the legendary knockdown shield, allows a player to self-revive after a lengthy animation.
If the player bleeds out, or an opponent causes enough damage to them through gunfire or uses a finisher move on them, they are then eliminated, dropping their equipment to be looted by surviving friends or foes. The 'deathbox' also contains a banner that can only be picked up by friends. The player can potentially be respawned if their squadmates recover this banner in a limited amount of time. Once picked up, there is no time limit for the remaining teammates to take it to one of several Spawn Beacons, which are scattered on the map. Teammates can be simultaneously revived in this manner.
Apex features both built in voice-chat communication with squadmates and a highly context-sensitive single-button communication approach that allows players to ping their teammates map features like weapons, ammunition, hazards, opponents, or points of interest. Voice acted lines spoken by the Legends are specific to each weapon, ammunition type, equipment type and level, and the status of what is pinged; player characters will voice concern or anticipation when a supply bin or door is pinged when opened as this carries the implication that enemies have already passed through and looted the area.
Apex Legends is free-to-play and supported through microtransactions for cosmetic items and legends. New cosmetic items can be earned from opening Apex Packs, the game's version of loot boxes that contain a random assortment of rewards, or spending the in-game currency Crafting Materials, which are gained through Apex Packs. Apex Packs are freely earned as the player gains experience levels. Additionally, players freely gain Legend Tokens for playing matches as well as for leveling, which are used to unlock new Legends and certain cosmetic items. A final currency, Apex Coins, is bought with real-world funds and can be used to buy Apex Packs, unlock Legends, or purchase specific cosmetics.[2]
Battlepass
Respawn offered battle passes which reward players with new seasonal cosmetic items by completing in-game challenges.[3][4] The game's first battle pass, alongside its first new playable character, were released on March 19, 2019.[5] Apex Legends Season 2: Battle Charge is due to release on July 2, EA announced at E3 2019[6] with a new weapon (the L-Star, an energy weapon introduced in Titanfall 2), a new legend character (Wattson, introduced as the developer of the device which projects the damaging ring in the arena) and several gameplay changes. As per the plan released not long after Apex Legends' release, Respawn intend to release a new season for the Battle Pass approximately every quarter of the year.
So making two copies wascalled making a carbon copy. What does cc mean.
Development
Respawn Entertainment had previously created both Titanfall (2014) and its sequel Titanfall 2 (2016) while an independent studio; Electronic Arts (EA) supported the publishing of these titles, and in 2017 proceeded to acquire Respawn.[7]
While Respawn had started work on a potential Titanfall 3 game, they had been watching the landscape of gaming community around 2017, about when PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds started to take off and popularized the battle royale genre. Respawn had already tested Titanfall concepts in a survival game format that they found worked well, and started experimenting with these concepts in a battle royale framework, though realized quickly that having the pilotable Titans (large mecha) would be highly disadvantageous to those on foot in battle royale, and instead focused on creating strong character classes that fit within the Titanfall universe.[8] Additionally, Respawn wanted to pursue a game that would take advantage of the potential revenues in free to play games, and came up with the concept of Apex, putting the bulk of the studio's effort to make an initial strong release and forgoing further development of a Titanfall 3. EA had skepticism in this approach and considered it risky, according to Respawn's Drew McCoy, but the success of Fortnite Battle Royale showed that such approaches were possible.[7]
Apex Legends Player Count Today
In a unique move for EA, Respawn kept the development of Apex Legends as a secret until its release; McCoy stated they wanted players to form their own opinions of the game rather than from online forums, thus encouraging players to try the game rather than relying on marketing and other pre-release promotional content.[7]
Apex Legends is inspired by several shooters of the last decade: Bungie's Halo and Destiny which incorporated engaging combat systems with an evolving narrative, Ubisoft's Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Siege which demonstrated the use of unique classes to dynamically change an otherwise simple formula, and Blizzard Entertainment's Overwatch for refining the hero shooter concept.[7] The game is built on a modified Source engine, the same as used for the previous Titanfall games.[9] The Smart Comm system was refined by playtesting the game for a month without the use of voice chat and using randomized names to experiment how they anticipated most players would experience the game.[10] The team tested changing some of the enumerated features like map size, the number of players in a match, and squad size, and found that 60 players in squads of three on the shipping map (named 'King's Canyon') were the most fun to play, according to Respawn's CEO Vince Zampella. Respawn has not ruled out providing new maps or alternate game modes in the future.[11]
In June 2019, a new 'Elite Queue' game mode was introduced; featuring a more dangerous ring and cosmetic rewards unique to the game mode, the Elite queue is only accessible by players who have finished a game as one of the last five squads on their previous match. This also applies to Elite queue games, and players who can consecutively finish in the top five will build their Elite Queue Streak.
Prior to launch, McCoy confirmed plans to implement cross-platform play into Apex Legends in the future. While this is planned, cross-progress and cross-purchases are not possible due to hardware limitations. McCoy also stated that they would also eventually like Apex Legends to come to iOS, Android and Nintendo Switch, though it is not currently planned.[12]
Tencent has stated that they are working with Electronic Arts to bring Apex Legends to China, helping to work the game through the country's strict approval process.[13]
Within the game's map, players found at least one small plush toy of the Loch Ness Monster, nicknamed Nessy, which had been also used in various Titanfall maps, and if shot at by a player, a brief message appears in the killfeed; Respawn's community managers have acknowledged that there may be a larger secret tied to these in the game.[14]
Reception
Upon release, Apex Legends received generally favorable reviews according to the review aggregatorMetacritic.[15][16][17] Some publications, including Destructoid,[18]Game Informer,[19]GamesRadar+,[21] and PC Gamer,[24] called it one of the best takes on the battle royale genre thus far, and a worthy challenger to Fortnite Battle Royale's dominance of the genre.
Critics lauded the combat in Apex Legends. Destructoid referred to gunplay in the game as the best they had experienced in a battle royale thus far, however were let down at removed mechanics from former Titanfall entries.[18] In contrast, Javy Gwaltney of Game Informer stated that he did not miss the expelling of Titans and other removed elements from prior games, suggesting that the combat was satisfying and the gunplay felt powerful. He added that the addition of heroes can make for more exorbitant fights than other battle royales.[19]
Apex Legends Player Count Xbox
Reviewers also praised the communication system in the game. Polygon's Khee Hoon Chan opined that it 'rendered voice chat with strangers largely unnecessary', and was emblematic of Apex's accessibility and astuteness.[26]Destructoid also enjoyed the mechanic, and additionally suspected that it would become a new standard for future games in the battle royale genre.[18]
Player count and revenue
Eight hours after its launch, the game surpassed a million unique players,[27] and reached 2.5 million unique players within 24 hours.[28] In one week after release it had reached 25 million players, with over 2 million peak concurrent,[29] and by the end of its first month it reached 50 million players.[30] Within its first month available, Apex Legends earned $92 million in revenue across all platforms, which was the highest amount earned by any free-to-play game during its launch month.[31] Throughout the month of April, it earned $24 million in revenue, which was 74 percent less than the amount it earned during its launch month.[32]
We’ve covered the basics of adding a video to your web page using the element and briefly listed the element’s more advanced features in an.In this blog post, we’ll take a deeper look at 10 of those advanced features and explain with code examples how you can use them on your website in your HTML video players.We’ll cover:.Specifying multiple sources for a videoNot all browsers support all video containers and codecs. To suit all browsers you can provide multiple video files as the source for one video player.Multiple sources can be specified by using elements. Iframe controls elements aren't focusing in safari and windows 10.
Apex Legends was announced on February 4, 2019, the Monday before EA had reported its latest quarterly financial results, which did not meet expectations and caused EA's stock value to drop 13% the next day.[33] However, as news and popularity of Apex Legends spread, analysts saw the game as something to challenge the dominance of Fortnite Battle Royale, and by that Friday, February 8, 2019, EA had seen its largest growth in stock value since 2014 on the basis of Apex Legends' sudden success.[34][35]
References
External links
Retrieved from 'https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Apex_Legends&oldid=904623472'
Comments are closed.
|
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |