How One Battle Royale Shooter Overhauled Communication in Online Games

Online games are a blast, but they can quickly become frustrating thanks to one common factor: other players. Often, it's your own teammates that cause this frustration, largely due to poor communication. Fortunately, one shooter solved this problem in the form of pings.

How Apex Legends Revolutionized Communication

Battle royale games are, by definition, an online-only genre. The focus is on beating all other players to be the last person standing. It's fun taking on a whole server of people on your own, but it's much more enjoyable when you team up with other players.

However, unlike many other online games, this genre relies heavily on good communication with your teammates. You need to coordinate when sharing healing items or weapons, call out the enemies' exact whereabouts, and strategize where to go on the fly.

While voice chat is a viable option for advanced communication, it has some inherent problems. Not everybody is on the in-game voice chat; I personally never use it because I don't like talking to strangers. You might come across an occasional toxic player who'll ruin your day. Some players don't speak your language which makes communication impossible.

Voice chat is usually only enjoyable if you're playing with friends, and even then, you're probably better off using Discord rather than the built-in voice chat.

Turtle Beach

Apex Legends has largely solved this problem thanks to a groundbreaking ping system. Pressing and holding the ping button brings up a ping wheel that lets you tag locations with labels, such as "enemy here" and "going here." The system allows for quick and precise communication, effectively eliminating the need for voice chat. It's great for cross-platform games.

In addition to pinging the exact location in the game and on the map with a symbol, your character actually says a voice line that your teammates can hear, effectively serving as a stand-in for voice chat. Your teammates can react to your pings by saying "OK," "no," or "thanks."

Furthermore, pings are integrated into the gameplay with Apex Legends' legends (playable characters). For instance, Bloodhound sees the enemy players' tracks and can ping them for their teammates to see.

Pings Have Become a Staple in Multiplayer Games

Following the success of Apex Legends, we've seen numerous examples of games that have adopted and enhanced the ping system. The list includes Valve's upcoming Deadlock, Fortnite (added in Season 8), Valorant, Halo Infinite, and Call of Duty: Warzone.

I've used the system extensively in Warzone; I repurposed the DPI button on my Logitech G502 to use it for pings, allowing me to simultaneously ping the enemy's location as I shoot.

It's worth pointing out that Apex Legends didn't invent pings in online games; MOBAs like DotA have had pings for a very long time. League of Legends added smart pings years before Apex Legends was even announced. Rather, Apex helped revolutionize the concept of pings by transforming them into a complete replacement for voice chat.

Riot Games

It Almost Didn’t Happen

You might be surprised to learn that EA actually filed a patent for Apex Legends' ping system. What's even more surprising is that instead of keeping the system exclusive to themselves or charging other developers, EA launched an accessibility patent pledge and made the system free for everyone. While the original intent of the ping system was accessibility, EA inadvertently reinvented the (ping) wheel and made voice chat near obsolete.

EA's pledge is a refreshing contrast to what we've seen from Nintendo, who recently filed a lawsuit against the developers of Palworld for infringing on Pokémon's monster-catching mechanics. This isn't to say that one company is better than the other, but EA's patent pledge is a step in the right direction toward a better future for the whole video game industry.