Apex Legends

OS: Win 10/11 64-bit
CPU: Intel Core i3-6300, AMD FX-4350 or equivalent (requires SSSE3 & POPCNT)
RAM: 6 GB (8GB recommended)
GPU: Nvidia GeForce GT 640/AMD Radeon HD 7730 with 2GB RAM (Direct3D 11 capable)
Network: Internet connection required
Storage: 75 GB available space (~3.8GB for 1 localized language)

Steam Deck compatbility

Unsupported
This game is unsupported on Steam Deck due to use of an unsupported anti-cheat

Distribution

Steam, EA App (formerly Origin), Microsoft Store (Xbox, PC), PlayStation Store

Official website

Official Website

Links

Apex Legends on Steam
Apex Legends on EA App

Apex Legends on EGS

Xbox

PlayStation Store (PS4)

PlayStation Store (PS5)

Nintendo Store

Previous game

Titanfall 2

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Apex Legends is the award-winning, free-to-play Hero Shooter from Respawn Entertainment. Master an ever-growing roster of legendary characters with powerful abilities, and experience strategic squad play and innovative gameplay in the next evolution of Hero Shooter and Battle Royale. The game is a spinoff title of Titanfall series, and was set in the Titanfall universe.

Like Titanfall and Titanfall 2, Apex Legends also used the heavily modified version of the Source engine under the Titanfall branch, but the engine has been improved to allow higher draw distances and a larger game map, this apparently pushed the engine to its limit and as a result, the game has compromises on dynamic display resolution, and this led to the console ports and low end PCs suffering from lower image quality & framerate. Apex Legends also made massive modifications to the engine and removed several files which are present in many Source games, such as vphysics.dll, vgui2.dll, gameinfo.txt and other files.

The game also drops support for HBAO+ ambient occlusion (which are technically superior to SSAO) and MSAA (removed due to issues and downsides with deferred renderer), replacing it with SSAO and post-processing TAA respectively. This is also the only Source engine game to support DirectX 12 by using -anticheat_settings=SettingsDX12.json launch option. Furthermore, since around Aug 2023, Respawn removed all remaining VPK files and moved it to the proprietary RPAK format^[1].

There was also a mobile port of this game, which is no longer available and its servers have been shut down. These versions used Unreal Engine 4 instead of the Source engine.

Features

Renderer

Direct3D 12 (DX12) renderer: Currently the only Source engine game to support DX12. Can be enabled using "-anticheat_settings=SettingsDX12.json" command line.
Screen Space Ambient Occlusion (SSAO): Replaces HBAO+ ambient occlusion.

Networking

Cross-play support^[2]: Apex Legends can connect to other platforms/consoles.; Cross play is supported on the following platforms: PC (EA App & Steam), PlayStation, Xbox, Nintendo Switch.

Easy Anti-Cheat

Instead of using VAC like most Multiplayer GoldSrc, Source & Source 2 games, and few other titles using other engines, Respawn Entertainment opted to use Easy Anti-Cheat, made by Epic Games and the same Anti-Cheat used in Fortnite, most Unreal Engine games and many others. This is more advanced than VAC, as Easy Anti-Cheat runs on kernel. However, kernel-based anti-cheat are known to possibly have security issues and privacy risks, and might be incompatible with compatibility layers such as Wine/Proton and/or newer versions of Windows.

External links

References

1.

@KralRindo (August 9, 2023) on X (Twitter):

We are at the end game now

I wanna give sight about why it took much longer to datamine, and what exactly gonna end datamining

With last patch, Respawn removed couple files that had scripts and map data (aka VPK's) and moved all data to Rpak's

Now it's easy to edit, change and export a vpk file means we can do little tweaks that helps us datamining

But these assets being in rpaks means we can no longer edit them, legion+ currently can export that data (still WIP) but when new mid season update comes, it won't be able to

Not being able to get the scripts means we will have really hard time getting data and making in game showcases, or much longer process

Also the fact Respawn releases event at launch, and a lot more careful with dfs assets already killed datamining, there isn't much to find anymore

This might be end of an era.

2.	Apex Legends cross-play: how to play with friends

Apex Legends

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