Among the dozens of battle royal games that have come out since PUBG made it to Esports, none have the ease of communication that allows as much efficiency in teamwork as Apex Legends. Small things like sound design, the ping system, and legend-specific callouts are all designed from an ease of communication perspective. A team of three can play silently, using nothing but these features to win the game.
The most significant feature aiding inefficiency is the ping wheel. Each type of ping is directly useful for replacing verbal instructions in voice chat. Defending, looting, watching, moving, and enemy here are all that are needed to communicate effectively. The pings are also target-specific. If you ping an open container, your legend comments that an enemy has passed through here, just as pinging an open door does. Pinging a death box, drop-ship, and cannons/jump towers are also followed up by a quick voice line by the legend doing the pinging. This allows for rapid communication of the most important features of what is being pinged that encompasses a wide variety of information.
A couple of minor but useful features of pinging is the double click to ping a red blip, warning of enemies. Though sometimes it gets abused, becoming a spam fest, it’s necessary to communicate danger as quickly as possible. The other feature is the respawn beacon ping while you are waiting for respawn. Instead of opening the map and plotting a course, the downed player can easily ping the nearest beacon as it displays to all living squamates. Though this can also be abused, becoming a passive-aggressive reminder that you still need to be revived.
There are also Legend-specific features that could be useful to communicate with your teammates that the game handles uniquely well. For example, Seer can hear the heartbeats of enemies within a sizable distance while aiming down sights, which is an important thing to communicate with your squad because that means there are enemies close enough to fight. While aiming down sights for a few seconds, a prompt allows the player to have Seer to comment on the current status of his heartbeat sensor. As soon as little orange spikes show up, Seer can voice that he senses enemies and the squad can prepare just as quickly as a team using voice chat.
Another legend that benefits from these voice lines is Wraith, who, like Seer, can sense enemies. Except Wraith knows when she is being aimed at, which also provides a prompt for the player allowing them to share the information to the team via Wraith.
One of the most important features of a battle royal is the looting, and Apex Legends has some not so obvious ways it can make it more efficient. The most important being the hand raise feature. Instead of constantly asking your teammate what attachment they need, you can rely on a small icon of a person raising their hand next to the ping button prompt when looking at an item. If a person in your squad needs or can use that item, the hand raise icon appears, making it even more useful, and efficient, than constantly sharing information on your loadout verbally.
All of these small features add up quickly to making Apex Legends a surprisingly efficient teamwork simulator. It makes it easy to get into a game with two other strangers while none of you are using voice chat and still be a compelling enough team to win.
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Matthew has been a lifelong lover of video games since he could first hold a controller, and among his favorites are narrative-heavy, singleplayer games like; Divinity: Original Sin 2, Elden Ring, Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice and Hollow Knight. Matthew also plays tabletop games like Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder and Call of Cthulu. He graduated from the University of North Texas with a bachelor’s in Sociology and minored in English.
