Apex Leg­ends Com­ing to Nin­tendo Switch

MISHAWAKA--One game that has taken up the most of my time with my com­puter is a lit­tle ditty called Apex Leg­ends. It’s a free-to-play bat­tle-royale video game fea­tur­ing a di­verse set of char­ac­ters. The game is con­stantly re­ceiv­ing new up­dates, char­ac­ters, weapons, lo­ca­tions, and cos­metic items. The game went live in early 2019 on Xbox One, PS4 and PC, with cross-play unit­ing the three on Oct. 1, 2020.  

Cross-play al­lows any player to con­nect to any other player, re­gard­less of the sys­tem they are on. Respawn, the game’s de­vel­oper, han­dled it in a very in­ter­est­ing way: in­stead of just throw­ing every Apex player into the same lobby, con­sole play­ers are kept in their re­spec­tive lob­bies, as are PC play­ers. Any­one in a cross-play party, though, gets put in a lobby with other con­sole par­ties. That is to say, if you are play­ing on PC, and you have a friend with an Xbox One who wants to play with you, you can form a party, and you will be placed in a lobby with other PC-con­sole par­ties, mak­ing sure that no one is at a dis­ad­van­tage due to their hard­ware. 

The rea­son I men­tion cross-play is be­cause the Nin­tendo Switch has just been added to the list of con­soles with Apex Leg­ends on it. Switch own­ers can now visit the eS­hop and down­load Apex Leg­ends for free and play with oth­ers on the go, should they so choose, pro­vided they have a sta­ble net­work con­nec­tion. The new ver­sion comes with an ex­clu­sive, lim­ited-time, Switch-themed skin for one of the char­ac­ters. Pathfinder, a ro­botic scout with a grap­pling-hook and a won­der­ful per­son­al­ity, will be get­ting a red and white skin en­ti­tled P.A.T.H., which changes his usual chunky frame to a sleek, aero­dy­namic chas­sis, a per­fect match for the portable and mo­bile Switch. 

The one con­cern play­ers have raised with the Switch ver­sion is how well the game will ac­tu­ally run. Though the Switch is a pow­er­ful and ver­sa­tile con­sole, it is not as me­chan­i­cally strong as a PS4 or Xbox One and nowhere near as pow­er­ful as the PS5 and Xbox Se­ries X, since Apex is back­wards-com­pat­i­ble with those sys­tems. Switch-own­ing Apex fans are hes­i­tant about the fram­er­ate, res­o­lu­tion and con­nec­tiv­ity. Any of these would neg­a­tively im­pact an ex­pe­ri­ence with the game, but if all three are poor and pre­sent a con­sis­tent is­sue, not a sim­ple spike of un­der­per­for­mance, the Switch ver­sion might not draw as many play­ers as Respawn likely ex­pects. 

Ir­re­spec­tive of the game’s per­for­mance, Nin­tendo and Respawn are both heav­ily aware of the de­mand for the game and clearly in­tend to bring it to as wide an au­di­ence as pos­si­ble. I also share the con­cern for the tech­ni­cal is­sues, but I am just ec­sta­tic that Apex will be get­ting more play­ers and more at­ten­tion. The longer peo­ple sup­port the game, the more Respawn will do with it, lead­ing to more con­tent for play­ers to en­joy, caus­ing them to sup­port it even more. A good game’s lifes­pan is a won­der­ful cy­cle of new play­ers and new con­tent, and I hope for noth­ing less for Apex.