It’s a bit hard to believe, but Apex Legends is five years old this month. Five years is more than most live games get. These days a game is lucky to even make it a single one. I could’ve told you Apex Legends would be a hit when it came out, but I don’t know that I would’ve predicted this kind of success for it back in 2019. And in its fifth year, Apex Legends is refusing to stay still, continuing to morph under its players’ feet to stay ahead of the game. I recently got a hands-off preview of its upcoming 20th (!!) season, and though it may not introduce a new hero, the team at Respawn sees this as yet another in a long line of opportunities the studio has given itself to reinvent the game.
In 2019, Apex Legends stood apart for not being just another battle royale. Legends like Gibraltar and Lifeline made it so that you weren’t just another gun on the battlefield. An emphasis on trios and the interplay between character abilities called for strategy beyond expert gunplay. The ping system revolutionized communications in a notoriously toxic field, even if it didn’t entirely solve the problem . And ever since, Respawn has continued to build upon that foundation with new arenas, map changes, fresh additions to the armory (as well as endless fine tuning), and new characters. Along the way, the game even began offering more compartmentalized modes that broke away from the battle royale’s core tenets, like a one-life Elimination mode rooted in Counter-Strike that was ripped from us too soon. Eventually, Apex Legends grew a little too big, prompting the team to slow the high-level additions it was making in order to make smarter calls for the health of the game, like extensively overhauling characters like Revenant. The game’s 16th season reworked the entire class system that’d been in place for years. Season 20, also known as Breakout, continues this streak, introducing a host of changes that double down on the evolving vision for the future and health of Apex Legends .
Most prominent among the changes coming to Apex Legends is what the team are calling “Legend upgrades.” In much the same way that players can currently level up their shields by racking up damage and eliminations, players will now be able to gain levels throughout the match—a feature commonly seen in MOBAs like League of Legends , and even other battle royales like Fortnite —earning passive skills and modifying them to their existing ones. For example, Mad Maggie’s ultimate will have an upgrade that gives it fire properties that linger after it’s already been thrown and explodes. Another allows a character to pick up a fallen teammate with more base health. Skills will be forced out in choices at the second and third armor and Legend levels, which are now tied together since body armor has been removed from the game as ground loot and is now part of your kit. Players will begin rounds with base level white body armor, eliminating an aspect of the early game scramble and placing stronger emphasis on getting into direct action in order to grow stronger and win, rather than chance upon great loot and hide until the end of the game to do anything.
Levels can be earned by damage and eliminations, but also by exploration. Interacting with harvesters, which are being littered around the maps—Ed Acostini, a world director on the team, confirmed Storm Point, Olympus, and World’s Edge would be the maps on rotation this season—and caches, as well as carrying out class actions like hacking radars on recon will yield Evo experience. The changes to the base BR experience don’t end there. Crafting materials are being focused from the game, and the replicators you’d use them at are having their pool of craftable loot pared down to the basics—shields, ammo, healing, and team banners. For folks who play at slightly higher levels than the average Apex players, shield swapping has been fundamentally retooled to correspond with the changes made to Evo progression and Legend upgrades. In the spirit of fairness, players who are fully dead will now drop shield cores that match their level and restore shields based on your level relative to them. For example, a blue shield (which is the second level) will heal the entirety of your shield if it is also blue, or a portion of it if you’re at a higher level. If you pick up a shield core of a higher level than yours, you will not only restore your full armor, but be granted an overshield on top of it.
Many of these changes strike me as smart innovations on the relatively sturdy ground Apex Legends has always stood on. Some of them, like one designer teasing that the popular Digital Threat weapon sight will be removed from submachine guns, seem primed to light a fire under the playerbase. Metas form and evolve, and it’s great to see the game rise to meet them in such a grand way. Not to mention, the Legend upgrades allow for a new degree of customization that could shake up how many of us have come to play our favorite characters over the last several years. Supposedly, they should even allow the team to be able to better pinpoint places where tweaks should be made, and allow them to tune While routine can be great, and Apex Legends could’ve coasted on it, it’s exciting to see one of the biggest players unafraid to shake it off and continue to experiment with the core formula without necessarily alienating those who’ve stuck by it.
Speaking of experiments, Apex Legends is getting a full suite of overhauls and additions to the experiences outside of the BR mode. Limited-time modes (or LTMs as they’re often shortened to) are clearly an essential part of the game now, as highlighted by the recent popularity of the Three Strikes mode. A new LTM called Straight Shot will be debuting in season 20 and touts 30 players on smaller maps with fully-kitted weapons to boot. Instead of launching from the dropship, squads will be spawned on points of interest in trios in order to quicken the action and the ring will close in half the time it regularly does. Thunderdome, a new map coming to the Mixtape playlist in season 20, is supposedly designed with modes like Straight Shot in mind, and the team seemed to emphasize that players should absolutely expect there to be further investments in LTMs as part of Apex Legends‘ future.
For ranked players, Respawn seems to be returning to a form of the system they are already familiar with. To begin the season, players will all begin with one ranked point and will be matchmade within a distribution of their amassed ranked points, meaning the beginning of the ranked split is going to be open season as players of all skill levels duke it out to climb in ranks. This system means that provisional matches, which would initially place players in a rank after a certain amount of games, are gone, as well as promotional trials. Folks will still be able to play with teammates who are not their rank, but they’ll just be grouped according to the total ranked points of the party leader.
The quality of life in and around Apex Legends is going to be spiffed up too. Players in Straight Shot, for example, will be able to queue for matches from the spectate screen in order to keep people playing, and the lobby is becoming an actual in-game locale that you can visit. Here, players will be treated to a more simplified breakdown of the game’s ongoing stories and they’ll be able to interact with items around the space that will launch the “newest evolution of Apex episodes,” which will now be fully drawn and voiced. Additionally, a museum is being erected in-game on World’s Edge that celebrates the history of the Apex Games and the universe, and will host easter eggs and fan art as well. Both efforts are being undertaken in order to make it so that players can find the story of the game within the actual game, instead of being drip-fed morsels of lore via official social media accounts. I would simply do anything to be able to log off, and it seems Respawn is in my corner.
Across the board, Apex Legends seems to be taking tremendous chances on its game five years into its lifetime. Though nothing I’ve said threatens to undo the game if it were to fail, it’s the fact that the team’s even willing to shift gears so dramatically that feels worth calling out. For a AAA live service game, change like this isn’t unheard of, but it’s increasingly harder to come by, especially as execs often double down on what works in favor of what’s untested until it drives their business into the ground and they move on to the next bloody venture. Rather than simply reducing or simplifying—which, to be clear, the team is smartly doing where there is plenty of bloat—Respawn is deepening the average experience for every player, broadening the scope of what they can do when they boot up the game, and investing in their playerbase’s clear passion for the world and characters they’ve inhabited for years. I don’t see why Apex Legends can’t potentially be around for another five years if it continues on this track.
Moises Taveras is the assistant games editor for Paste Magazine . He was that one kid who was really excited about Google+ and is still sad about how that turned out.