Apex Legends may be a far way from being the most popular game in the world, but it sure does have more buzz than any other game right now. Racking up a very impressive 10 million players in just 72 hours, the question now is: is it here to stay?
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It’s a good question, and one that’s probably too early to answer. However, while the future of the game is still up in the air, developer Respawn Entertainment is ready to commit for the long-haul.
Speaking to VG247, Respawn Entertainment’s Mackey McCandlish, who serves as design director on the project, revealed that not only is the team ready to support the game, but it’s ready to support it for a long, long time.
More specifically, according to McCandlish, the team expects/hopes the game will be around for as many as ten years.
“We want this to be a ten-year game,” said the designer. “It’s egotistical to say that; they [Bungie] said the same thing when they made Destiny. And with League of Legends, they say: ‘How do we make this something people play forever, not something that trails off a bit over the next ten years?’ There’s so much opportunity in this universe, there’s so much opportunity in this young genre, and I love playing it so much. We play the game for hours every day.”
McCandlish continued:
“I have already been playing this game in a form close enough to what it is and dying to play more since late 2017 when it started turning into the game it is today. I’m sad when the playtest ends. That’s a first for any game I’ve worked on. I’ve made a lot of games. I tended to work on the story – the campaign more so than the multiplayer until we made Titanfall – so I’ve worked on a lot of games that were about putting on a great show: something you consume. And this is the first game I’ve worked on that’s more like the multiplayer I just want to keep playing.”
As McCandlish notes, it’s pretty ambitious stuff. Bungie did indeed say the same thing about the original Destiny, and, well, we know how that turned out. It’s very, very rare for a game to stay relevant for a decade. Some have done it, but most fail. Fortnite will probably do it, but will Apex Legends? Probably not, but I appreciate the ambition. A developer and team that believes in the game is only a positive.
Apex Legends, which is free-to-play, is available for PS4, Xbox One, and PC. At the moment of publishing, there’s been no word of a Nintendo Switch port, however, Respawn Entertainment has said it would “love to” port the game to the system.
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