'Apex Legends' Ranked Mode May Beat 'Fortnite' to Offer Competitive Play

The new battle royale game Apex Legends amassed over a million players at a far greater speed than Fortnite did. And now, the Titanfall spin-off may beat its biggest competitor to the punch with a highly-desired “Ranked Play” mode, as evidenced by some code allegedly found under {Apex Legend’s](https://www.inverse.com/article/53074-apex-legends-tier-list-and-character-guide-best-fighters-ranking) hood.

On Twitter on Wednesday, a Fortnite player named “Stout” revealed he may have found evidence of Ranked Play included in some .txt files of Apex Legends.

“I might of just found out about ranked play in AL look at lines 95 and 96,” Stout tweeted along with a screenshot of the .txt. Lines 95 and 96 of the game read: “rankedplay_display_enabled ‘0’,” and “rankeplay_voice_enabled ‘0.’”

Based on Stout’s evidence, it seems ranked play may be coming to Apex Legends. A highly-demanded feature that is still mostly absent in Fortnite, ranked play manifests in different ways depending on the game. But generally speaking, ranked play is a game type in which players of similar skill are placed in matches and compete to “rank up” (or if they lose, “rank down”), which adds more stakes to every game than just winning and losing.

As esports have taken off, ranked play sometimes ranks players worldwide, meaning there can be an official “number one player” in the world. It’s a lot like leaderboards on old arcade cabinets, but on a global scale. While Ninja is regarded as the number one Fortnite player, a leaderboard based on ranked play would actually define players with that objective recognition.

Inverse has reached out to Respawn for comment on Ranked Play, and we’ll update this post when we hear back. Meanwhile, you can see Stout’s tweet below.

Apex Legends is available now on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC.