The minds at Respawn Entertainment are wizards when it comes to the action-adventure genre. Twenty-fourteen’s Titanfall and its criminally underrated followup, 2016’s Titanfall 2, challenged traditional boots-on-the-ground shooters with a heightened sense of scale and verticality, while the more recent Jedi: Fallen Order etched itself as one of the greatest Star Wars narratives told in any medium. The Los Angeles studio’s fixation with exoskeletons, Blade Runner, and visuals that bleed Wachowski and Masamune Shirow’s Ghost In The Shell is nothing new, but they are intertwined with world-building to create headier pockets of science fiction bliss.
The perfect case study of all of this being Apex Legends.
The free-to-play shooter set in the Titanfall universe first launched in February 2019. No media previews. No marketing campaigns. No extended gameplay reveals that cringe out with comms from Chad and the rest of the QA team. Instead, the tiniest leak via Michael “Shroud” Grzesiek led to more hearsay, an unexpected cinematic trailer, and a count of 1 million players in the first eight hours and over 50 million in its first month. And all while relying on microtransactions and the sales of cosmetic items to secure a profit in the same fiscal quarter as The Division 2, Metro Exodus, and BioWare’s Anthem—which launched into early access just 11 days later.
