After four years, Team Deathmatch has finally made its way to Apex Legends. With a history in series likeCall of DutyandTitanfall, you’d think the developers at Respawn would have included such an essential shooter mode right from the start, butApex Legendswas fundamentally built for Battle Royale. Every little detail - from traversal, to defensive and scanning abilities, to the map designs - was designed with an eye to making it the most well-crafted BR experience out there, and plenty would argue that they succeeded at that.
Unfortunately, you can’t just migrate those mechanics into a Team Deathmatch mode and expect it all to justclick.
To be clear, TDM in Apex is mostly fun. The gunplay and characters are just too good in this game for it not to be. The weapons are snappy and hit hard, but also skillful. Kill times are slow enough to make it satisfying to drop an opponent in one clip, but aren’t so long that you feel like you’re firing blanks. There’s opportunity to bob and weave around your enemy’s shots, and aiming for the head is essential. Apex may not be the game for those who would rather be able to drop an opponent the second they’re spotted, but for those of us who are fans of Halo-style gun duel, Apex is masterful.
The problem is that the gunplay alone is what carries Team Deathmatch in Apex. There isn’t a lot else to get excited about (and they’vealready had to make changes).
It starts with the maps, most of which were built and balanced for the sunset Arenas mode. They have spawn rooms at each end of the map, but in TDM people are spawning all over the place. The placement of the spawns feels incredibly random, and often enemies will appear seemingly out of nowhere to gun you down even though you cleared your back just moments earlier. There’s rarely any warning at all that an enemy is approaching, because Apex’s method of keeping track of opponents is through notoriously unreliable audio queues. This is fine in BR where you have long stretches of silence, but in TDM, the audio is chaos.
Contrast this with an FPS game built for TDM:Halo. Anyone that’s played a match of Halo online has played Slayer. Every multiplayer map in a Halo game is built with Slayer in mind, so the map size and geometry allow you to spawn away from enemies, but get back into combat quickly. Usually, it’s easy to tell what direction enemies are coming from too, because there are dedicated spawn points you’re able to influence by how you position your team. And if you’re still worried about enemies sneaking up on you, fret not! Most Slayer matches support Halo’s motion tracker (or radar) so unless an enemy is moving slow and deliberately being sneaky, chances are good that you’ll know they’re coming. Unlessthey’re using a sniper rifle, that is.
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The next issue I encountered with TDM in Apex Legends was the apparent lack of balanced matchmaking. It’s extremely common for matches to be complete blowouts because one team is stacked with highly-skilled players, while the other is a bunch of noobs. In a recent match I played, my team was absolutely dominating, so players on the other team started rage-quitting (of course).
Since Apex was built for BR, there’s no backfill in the mode, so before long the only player left on the other side was an AFK. And there’s no timer on matches, so we spent about five minutes running around looking for them. The only alternative for us was to quit and give up whatever rewards progress we had gained during the match. Luckily, that player finally left and we “won” 46 to 6.
Compare this to the matchmaking in a game likeGears of War. The most recent entry,Gears 5, uses a system called TrueMatch which uses machine learning to put you in a lobby with players of comparable skill, latency and playtime. No game is perfect, but in Gears it’s usually a good bet that you will play matches against people who are at your skill level, and if somebody drops out of the match for whatever reason, the matchmaker is quick to backfill (except in ranked modes, of course).
Lastly, Apex’s Battle Royale framework means that you have to deal with a bunch of annoying little things that aren’t in other TDM modes. Things like hearing the same kill quip every time you die to the same player doesn’t really matter in Battle Royal, where you only (usually) die once. But in TDM, you might get killed by the same Octane five times in a row and keep having to hear, “A piece of advice: you’d be tougher to kill if you weren’t so boring”every single time.
Couple this with not being able to see your death recap because the animation takes too long before you respawn, and the fact that you have to quit every match manually before getting into the next one, and you keep being reminded that Apex just wasn’t built as a TDM game.
The shooter I really want to compare this to is (ironically) Apex’s predecessor, Titanfall. Before Respawn was all about Battle Royale, they created an incredibly unique shooter that had one of the best Team Deathmatch modes out there, known as Attrition.
Somehow this mode balanced the fact that regular-ish soldiers and massive titan mechs were all in the same match fighting each other. Everything in Attrition flowed together in this crazy dance of explosions, wall-running, aerial battles, and yes, titans falling from the sky. Killcams made sure you always knew exactly how you died, and each match ended with the losing team getting a chance to extract before heading right into the next match to go again. Titanfall didn’t have all the fluff of modern free-to-play games. No kill quips, no emotes, no skytrails. Just good wholesome Team Deathmatch.
Maybe that’s what I find so frustrating about the TDM in Apex. I know for a fact that Respawn can do it, and Apex has the gunplay for it to be stellar. But what we’ve got isn’t living up to that potential. Had they launched with the mode instead of adding it on years later, maybe we would have had maps, matchmaking and mechanics to make it feel as good as, or even better than, its predecessor. Maybe we’ll never know how excellent Apex Legends could be as a Team Deathmatch game. And if not, I guess I’ll keepholding my breath for Titanfall 3.
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