Starting a new multiplayer game sometimes feels like getting rolled over by a tank. Especially if it’s a competitive game like Apex Legends that doesn’t seem too noob friendly at a first glance.
But overall, Apex Legends is a very noob-friendly battle royale. We’ll go over a few specific things like movement and looting and once you are aware of them, it will take you about a week to get comfortable. Two if you don’t play any competitive FPS games at all.
After that, you can start learning different tips & tricks and tweaking your settings to start getting better and even climbing the Ranked ladder.
Pinging
Apex Legends will put you in duos or trios. You can’t play solo unless you want to fight squads by yourself. But teammates are a good thing. They will be by your side allowing you to explore and learn the basics of the game.
To make your squad experience better, Apex Legends was the first to introduce a ping system to communicate with teammates. And most importantly, people actually use it.
The default ping button is the mouse wheel button and you can use it on everything. Enemies, weapons, places of interest, or even your own health to ask for healing items. With every ping, your character will say a voice line to make sure everyone on the team is aware of it.
Make use of pings in Apex and you will quickly learn new things about the game. Remember not to overuse the ping button as no one in the world like a teammate who spams with pings.
Looting
Apex Legends has THE most noob-friendly looting system. Whenever you look at an attachment it will show you if any of your weapons need it. And you won’t even be able to pick up lower-tier armor to avoid dropping yours on accident.
In inventories, both yours and dead opponents, the game will mark the items you do and don’t need so that you don’t get overwhelmed. It’s easy to the point that you can just spam “E” and end up with decent gear.
Matchmaking
The skill-based matchmaking in Apex Legends is reasonably good. And we are talking not just ranked but casual lobbies as well. If you are new to the game you will be matched against players that are also new to the game.
Unfortunately, matchmaking does not eliminate the risk of imbalance. And sometimes you may face a lvl 500+ player on steroids. Playing against smurfs is choking, we know, but don’t get discouraged as that will unavoidably happen. Take a breath, recharge your shields, and get back out there.
Movement
What you will first notice after playing the Tutorial in Apex Legends (if you never played Titanfall) is that the gameplay and movement are much more fast-paced. It feels a lot like the original Warzone.
You can stow your weapons, slide, climb up high walls, and you don’t take fall damage. Those are the mechanics you should keep in mind when learning Apex Legends. After you can test your might by learning more advanced movement mechanics like wall kick and boost jump.
Shooting
Many competitive FPS games like Call of Duty, Valorant, or CS:GO have heavy recoil and bullet spray and in some cases bullet drop. Luckily for you, Apex Legends is much more forgiving. Because of how fast-paced the game is, the recoil on the guns was made easier to control.
Landing your shots and lasering down opponents is quite easy. That also means it’s easy for your opponents to laser you down as well. You will learn to shoot well in Apex Legends pretty quickly but to get better you will need to work on other things than that.
Legends
Legends are the playable characters in Apex Legends. There are more than 23 Legends as of now but at the start, you will only have access to 6. This will make your choice of character much easier when learning the game.
Each Legend has three unique abilities: passive, active, and ultimate. They all work in different ways on every Legend which is why definitely jump into the Firing Range to see what they do.
Some Legends will be a bit more intuitive than others and for a beginner player we would recommend you to try out these:
- Lifeline. She has a healing drone and a care package
- Bangalore. She has covering smokes and an airstrike
- Bloodhound. He briefly sees enemies through walls and their tracks
All three will be available from the very beginning and are pretty easy to learn and play. Once you get more comfortable try out someone like Pathfinder or Gibraltar. Both are designed to be of great help to the squad.
Maps
What will make your experience less noob friendly are the maps. There are 5 of them and they are constantly rotating.
You may often find yourselves lost, but you know what, it’s fine. Explore the maps, head towards the ring at all times and you will be okay. It takes a while to learn such big maps anyway, so you shouldn’t worry about that in the very beginning.
