Battle royale streamer Dr DisRespect says Apex Legends could be in danger of becoming another H1Z1, the Ur-battle royale game whose playerbase cratered shortly after hitting it big. The streamer cautioned that failure to communicate with the game’s community could doom Apex to a similar fate, but also said it’s a game worth supporting and holding on to.
Dexerto reports on a recent stream in which Dr DisRespect compared H1Z1 and Apex Legends (while playing Fortnite).
“It kinda reminds me of the H1Z1 days where people were really disliking how the changes were happening and what the community started turning into,” he said. And while he doesn’t believe Apex Legends has as strong or passionate a community that H1Z1 once did, Apex players’ expectations for updates aren’t being managed well by EA.
He also pointed out that Apex Legends still suffers from a lot of the issues that have nagged it since the beginning: Optimization, cheating, and server responsiveness.
“I can feel things are getting to a point where people are itching for this game to update, to progress, whether it’s content, whether it’s the quality of servers, whether it’s getting rid of hackers, to server quality,” he said. “I don’t know what it is.”
Here’s the clip from his broadcast:
Paying attention to your community is always good advice, sure, but it’s worth pointing out that H1Z1 hit its popularity peak when battle royale was still a nascent genre, and was subject to a couple other factors that contributed to its decline – namely, the arrival of PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds and then Fortnite. So far, Apex Legends seems to have accomplished that, although industry analysts say its explosive early popularity is now flattening off.
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Since then, Fortnite in particular has tended to use up most of the oxygen in the battle royale space, and the game has changed from being the ‘next big battle royale’ to being something that can coexist with Fortnite and perhaps draw off some of its players.
Dr DisRespect says Apex Legends is still a promising title.
“I hope EA is noticing that, because they are sitting on a fun, fun product,” he said.