RIKKI POYNTER: The only thing I really hate about this game
is that you need friends to play with,
and I don't know what those are,
because all of my gamer friends don't wanna play with me.
(INTRO MUSIC)
Hello, and welcome back to the channel.
Today I wanna talk about
a game that just might be beating Fortnite
both in the whole Battle Royale genre,
and also when it comes to deaf accessibility.
So, I am a huge Battle Royale fan,
that is like my number one genre
when it comes to games,
and I've been a fan of the Battle Royale novel
since I was 15 years old.
That's a little over ten years now,
and this has just been my absolute favorite novel.
The movie is questionable but you know what?
I own it and I watch it, but this is my ride and die.
and if you are familiar with my channel,
and if you've been following me on Twitch because I do stream,
I play Fortnite the most.
Am I very good at these games? No, but I enjoy them.
And ever since Battle Royale and PUBG came out, you know,
there's been a whole lot of other games that are similar
like Ring Of Elysium, I believe it's called,
and Realm Royale and just, you know,
a bunch of other things here and there,
but they never really stuck.
They might get popular for a little bit,
and then they just kind of die off.
But there's this new game out called Apex Legends.
You can get it for free on Origin,
and it's been dominating Twitch lately.
I mean, it's held the number one spot.
Every single time I look at the browse list,
it's always on the number one spot.
Almost 300K whereas Fortnite is just under 200K,
which is, you know, amazing to me.
And I got the chance to play it a couple of days ago,
and overall, I really like it.
And I found out before I started playing it
that there's a lot of really good accessibility features,
and I wanna talk about that today.
So two things I wanna go over really quickly is, one,
this is more like a first impressions kind of thing,
and I haven't been able to use
every single accessibility feature
that is supposed to be deaf friendly.
And also, some of these accessibility features
are for other disabilities, so I haven't really used them
because well, if I don't really need it,
then I can't really figure out how it's helpful
or how helpful it is. Does that make sense?
So, first let's go over a little bit about what Apex Legends is
besides just being another Battle Royale game.
I can't find just a simple summary.
Apex Legends is a free to play Battle Royale game
where legendary competitors battle for glory,
fame and fortune on the fringes of the frontier.
So, yeah, it's just like any other
Battle Royale game out there, really.
But what's cool is, you do get different skins.
I think you get six at first and then you as you gain
more experience,
you get to pick more, and there's a lot of diversity
already in the line-up.
So I think there's a non-binary character
and there's two Black women on there,
or is one of them non-binary?
I'm not familiar with the exact, you know, descriptions of them.
Yeah, that's just really cool to see.
So, going over the accessibility stuff.
One thing that's really cool is that it does have voice chat.
Similar to something like Overwatch does,
and what's really cool about this especially
is that it also is blind friendly
or visually impaired friendly.
Because let's say I type something,
let's say I'm playing with my friend James.
If I put a text in there, if I say something like,
"Hey, there's something over here," right,
it will read that out loud to him,
and it's good for me as well,
because although I have issues with understanding
a lot of people
over headphones and what they're saying exactly,
if I'm really focused on the game, it will alert me.
I will know that once it starts speaking,
there's something that's trying to tell me something.
So I can look over and read it really quickly.
Sometimes you'll have the voice chat
or the text in the corner over there on Overwatch or something,
and I'm not really able to pay attention because I'm so focused
on the game and trying to shoot people.
The game does come with subtitles,
so when you're in the middle of the game
the characters will start saying stuff,
and it'll show up on the bottom.
When you're doing the training, the subtitles will be there.
For me, I think that the subtitles are okay,
but they don't have the best contrast.
So, if I remember correctly, the subtitles are white
but the background of it is grey, like a light grey,
and that's not really the best combination
because they kind of blend together in a way.
So, really, what I would suggest is black on white
or white on black because it's just a really nice contrast
and it's easier to see.
I think some people have complained, understandably,
about the size of it, but for me my eyesight's pretty OK,
but I understand obviously that there should be
maybe like an option
to make the subtitles bigger.
I'm not sure if that's there, but if it's not,
that's something to look into.
There is a ping feature where you just go on
that middle button of your mouse, you click it,
and when one, you wanna go find a location,
which places like PUBG and Fortnite already have.
But, you can also do that for item location,
which you can kinda do on Fortnite already.
You can just you know, click on where you want on the map
and then somebody might be able to come over,
or they will be able to come over
and see that there's an item.
But, I don't know, it's just nice to have that on Apex.
I think, correct me if I'm wrong,
if an item is pinged on Apex
it tells you that there is an item?
Like out loud, in the voice text.
It's escaping me right now but I think that's what it is.
And one other accessibility feature
that I've been told about
but I haven't been able to use is text to voice
or no, voice to text.
So you know it's similar to the app, Make It Big on the iPhone
and also on Android. I found it on Android.
If you know me from before, I couldn't find it,
but I've found it,
and you know, Google Android came out
with this live transcribing app.
It's supposed to be on Apex as well.
I haven't been able to use it myself yet
because the people that I have played with -
I've only played with two people.
One don't use a mic, and the other one
I could kind of understand already
'cause they're very loud,
and very clear in their speaking for the most part
or I have somebody in the chat transcribe for me.
But from what I've been told, it is kind of like craptions.
It's kind of similar to the YouTube system,
so I can't say for sure,
but if I can get somebody to play with me,
I would like to test that out.
So, those are the main deaf friendly features
that I could think of.
If you have any more that you are aware of,
feel free to talk about it down below in the comments.
The only thing I don't really like about this game,
it has nothing to do with accessibility,
is just that it's trios only,
and you have to play with people.
Which means either A, you need friends
that want to play with you,
which I don't often have, or B, you play with randoms,
which I really don't like doing.
As a deaf woman, playing with randoms
is never really a good thing.
When I first started playing Fortnite
I did random squads a lot,
and I didn't have a mic,
and I didn't have headphones at the time,
so it was really a struggle trying to play with randoms.
And when my chat would be able to hear what was being said,
a lot of the times these people weren't so friendly.
So it's just not something
that I really want to deal with, right,
and it would just be nice to have solos,
which I know if you're familiar with me,
I hate playing solos on Fortnite.
I find it to be so boring, and I don't know,
I get more scared playing solos
than if I'm playing like Fifties
or Team Rumble where there's a shit ton of people,
all at the same time, and I just go dive in head first
in a group of enemies because I don't know, I'm weird,
and I am better at shooting a group of people
than playing one solo person. I don't know.
But when I play other Battle Royale games like PUBG
and Ring Of Elysium, and if Apex would do solos
I think that would be pretty awesome.
Maybe they will consider doing that in the future,
but I also saw some people in comments
when I was watching streams.
They said that it would kind of ruin the game.
They didn't really say why,
but if that is an opinion that you share,
I'd love to know your reasonings down below.
But yeah, overall I find Apex to be a really fun game.
I'm really bad at it, like I was able to deal some damage.
In one game I dealt a little over 100 in damage,
but wow, I can't aim. Like my aiming's already bad
in other games but this one was really, really bad.
Some of it is just because everybody kind of blends in
with the background and the area,
and it's really hard to see where everyone is
in my personal opinion.
I think that's kind of why I ended up liking Fortnite so much
is because it is colourful,
but everything seems to be really sharp
and there's a lot of contrast most of the time. I don't know.
Apex is a game that I would love to play again,
and hopefully, you know,
I'll find some other teammates more often
because I like it.
Those are my thoughts on my first impressions of Apex.
Let me know if you've played,
and let me know your thoughts down below.
Let me know what you think about the possibility of solos.
And let me know if you are a disabled gamer,
a deaf gamer that plays it,
if you use any accessibility features.
Let me know your personal opinions on them.
These are just mine, it may be different for you.
As always, I very much appreciate you watching,
and if you would like to help translate this video,
I will have a translate link down below
in the description box
and in the pinned comment.
Again, thank you very much for watching.
Go follow me on Twitch if you haven't,
and I will see you later. Bye.
(MUSIC)