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Apex Legends’ fantastic new control mode has a fatal problem
Here’s the deal: I really like Apex Legends’ new 9v9 control limited-time mode.Within a week of its release, everything I said in the preview was true: it was Cold, low-risk casual shootout Apex is always needed, and as a warm-up before I get into the qualifying halls, it’s been a good fit for my rotation. I can finally get into this mode with friends who haven’t played the game in months without them being tragically overtaken.
But almost as soon as it arrived, after I stopped playing with invite-only streamers and started playing with the rest of you when Season 12 released, it became clear that Control had a big, unavoidable problem .
You guys can’t seem to stop quitting mid-game.
Control is as fun as I’ve experienced in those closed previews since its release. The game was chaotic, fast, and surprisingly tense. Comebacks are frequent, and wins tend to drop to a few percent. However, with preview players barely quitting the extremely limited Early Access event, the average player has proven to be more than happy to bounce back from a game that didn’t go well.
The problem is that once someone quits, Apex has no way to replenish the team – once someone thinks they’ve had enough and the game starts to tilt too much in one direction, the losing team will gradually drain until there’s only one player left. two. In Halo Infinite, an unbalanced match will be filled with bots until new players can be pulled in. In Team Fortress 2, the game will swap some players on the winning team to level the playing field.
Apex does not have any of these systems. Adding them is also not an easy task. As a battle royale game, Apex is fundamentally built on the idea that once the game starts, no one else enters. The mode itself already had to cobble together nine-man teams and get out of the hard constraints of three-man squads — an act that brought its own small setbacks. Team-wide communication is limited, kill assists done outside of your trio don’t count, and Apex is basically built around the idea of a trio, which means we may never line up in one The full nine.
Adding backfill would be a huge effort, but perhaps it would be easier to justify it if control wasn’t such a short-lived thing at the moment.At the moment, the mode is a novelty – a well-structured and very interesting novelty, of course, I played with an Imogen on PC Gamer Twitch Channel last week. But it’s still a distraction, only for the first three weeks or so of the season.
Did you know that the PC Gamer team is streaming now? Imogen: I’m really bad at Apex Legends Also Imogen: pic.twitter.com/08UC0wIvz9February 11, 2022
In that press preview, Respawn told us it wanted to test the waters because of how much jump control is in the traditional Apex experience. However, the fact that Control is not a permanent fixture means that resources may not have been allocated to solve its most basic problems. After all, why bother to overhaul the game’s matchmaking system if you’re worried that Control may never return after February?
Respawn noted that Control could return, either in the future as an LTM or as a permanent mode alongside Battle Royale and Arenas. I’m hopeful for the latter, but once the three-week trial is over, I could also get Control to take some time out of the rotation for a real overhaul.
As an experimental new mode, Control is a great addition to the Apex lineup. But it deserves a little more love and makes it a truly excellent alternative – a better team communication, more brawl locations, and most importantly, a mode I can play without worrying about being trapped in my loneliness live.