Respawn Entertainment is shaking things up for Apex Legends' sixth anniversary, introducing a range of big changes to disrupt the game's meta and push players outside their comfort zone. Assault class characters are getting a huge buff, with two inventory slots specifically for grenades, and a new ability that sees them move and reload faster when they crack an enemy's shield, highlighting the target for the entire team in the process. The Support meta is about to be buried.
Then there are the weapon balance changes, with every firearm in the game getting some kind of power increase, whether it's in raw damage output, recoil rework, or an attachment change. The guns you like will also be easier to come by, thanks to brand-new loadout bins called arsenals scattered across the map.
Time to kill will be drastically reduced thanks to those gun buffs, reducing the likelihood of a third party sweeping in and cleaning up after a tough battle. Also, other than gold helmets and a new red helmet -- which overrides any armor and pushes you to the highest tier -- there will be no damage reduction for headshots. Watch out for those Kraber snipers at the other end of the map.
During the Apex Legends Global Series in Sapporo, in a back room hidden behind the main stage where thousands of attendees were screaming for their favorite esports teams, we spoke to Joshua Mohan, associate design director, Eric Canavese, lead BR designer, and John Larson, legends designer about six years of Apex and beyond.
What do you think the massive balance changes will bring to the game and what have you seen in playtests so far?
Joshua Mohan: The Assault class changes are a really good counterbalance to the Support meta, because Assault Class changes are all about finishing fights, whereas right now, the fights are very extended. So that'll be a good, refreshing change, I think. And then Eric's team has done a huge balance pass on every single weapon, which has been really shaking things up. It's gonna feel, I think, markedly different next season.
Is there a risk with changing every gun? No guns stand out, the favorite guns could still be the favorites because they're all rising together. Have you weighted them to give specific guns a bit more oomph?
Eric Canavese: Definitely. While we have buffed every gun in the game, they're not buffed equally. It's not like a 20 percent across-the-board buff. We took our assault rifles as a benchmark when we were buffing them, and nudged our assault rifles up, which already sit atop the pack, and then sort of all of the supporting cast of weapons around them, like the SMGs and LMGs, snipers, marksmen, shotguns -- all of them have been buffed more to sort of challenge those kings at the top. I hope we'll see a lot more weapon diversity, being able to play the weapons that you're comfortable with and the weapons that you like. I think that's going to feel much easier to run those weapons than it has in the past, with a little bit more of a rigid meta that we've had with the assault rifles and bubble-meta shotguns. We're trying to challenge that a bit and give players a new meta to crack.
It's interesting because it seems like you're encouraging long-distance play with the lack of the helmets, but then at the same time you're buffing the Assault legends, so you want people to get in there as well. So, what's the goal there? You want people to capitalize on their downs -- is that the play?
Canavese: That's a good way to put it. Traditionally in Apex, you don't need to respect the snipers nearly as much because you can get back up, and generally, they don't deal significant amounts of damage. You can kind of poke your head out, and if you do get hit with a sniper, you just pop your head back in and heal. With the changes to the helmets, we're giving those sniper players much more influence in a fight. Hitting a headshot is going to do quite a bit more than it has before, which is going to create bigger windows to push on and more exciting gameplay around long-range weaponry. But Apex is a very good close-combat type of game, so we're not getting rid of the idea that you've still got to push -- you've still got to get in there and finish the fight.
What about with third parties? Because you said you're hoping these changes cut down on those. Obviously, it's a part of the game. It's going to happen. You're not going to eliminate it entirely, but it is really annoying when it happens to you.
John Larson: You can look at what's happening right now with the [Support meta which] protracts fights. Encounters are longer. Noise is being made. You're pinned down. I think that just increases the chances that another team is going to be able to make it into that encounter. So when fights are ending more decisively, I think that's the logic behind it: decisive ends to fights. I won, you lost. There still might be third parties, but it's not as much of this snowball of fighting where it grows and grows and grows.
How did you land where you're at then? Because you've got the lower time-to-kill (TTK), but then you've offset that with more small heat items in med stacks and quicker crawling when you're down. Did you reduce TTK first and then realize, 'Oh, that's a bit too much', and offset it a little with these changes?
Canavese: More or less, yeah. We started with the balance changes with the weapons and started increasing damage across the board. And then, naturally, we knew there'd be more damage to go around so we'll probably need to do something on the healing side of it. We weren't sure which version of that we would do. We tried a couple of different things, and eventually landed on reinforcing the small meds (which now stack up to six in the inventory), because you're going to take a little bit more poke damage, and like I said, popping out is a little more dangerous. So yeah, it was a natural evolution of the more defensive side when you increase the damage. But it's all about creating better punctuation at the end of the fights, getting out of that hyper-reactionary phase of the third or the fourth party, when you're not really thinking about your strategy anymore. You're just trying to survive. We want to offer a little bit more breathing room before these battles. But like you say, you're never going to eliminate third parties. And if we did, it wouldn't be Apex. It's all about positioning and timing. Those are the mechanics to being a successful Apex player, and want to get back to that.
Now it's been a little while, how do you feel about the last few legends like Alter and Ballistic? Alter has such an interesting toolkit but it feels like she's underutilized in the community right now.
Larson: Alter is one that we're trying to push more into the spotlight and make more accessible for players. That's the tricky part of her kit. On paper, it's this cool portal play-making ability, but it requires quite a bit of map knowledge to use well, or it's more situational. So we'd like to push on that more. I think the upgrade system is something we'll look at to continue pushing players to explore the Legends' kits. Ballistic will be a big beneficiary of some of the Season 24 changes. We're gonna keep pushing on those. We want to make bigger swings on Legends and respond to feedback as it comes.
It's interesting to say that it's partly an accessibility issue, because Newcastle is popular, and he's probably the hardest legend to use well because you're thinking about where you're going and where the shield's going at all times.
Larson: Yeah, I have too small a brain to wrap my head around it. Give me a big bubble. Newcastle is an example of a character that we were drip-feeding a lot of different buffs. A lot of people would say he's good, but it's just harder to play him. I think now that Support meta is full bore, we've finally seen that pick rate skyrocket up, and people who just felt more comfortable experimenting with his kit more.
It's wild looking at the player screen in the arena, and it's just Gibraltar and Newcastle all the way down.
Mohan: I think you have a good point there. All of our Legends have a lot of theoretical power, but it's sometimes hard to access. It's something we look at nudging every season and yeah, both Ballistic and Alter are gonna be receiving some changes very soon.
Legend consistency -- is that what you'd call it?
Mohan: It's more the accessibility. Making it easier for players to grasp. How do we use this Legend effectively? How to tap into that power? Because the theoretical power is there. How do we just give it to you, and get you to that fun moment?
Alter is great but we've all killed ourselves multiple times pushing through those portals. What about the Revenant changes? It's been a long time now since those came in. He's very aggressive, but it feels like his old tac is missing from the game now because silencing player powers adds so much utility. You could use it on a doorway and block powers on a push and that sort of thing, and now he's just kind of a one-man Octane jump pad. So how do you feel about that, in retrospect, now that he's been out for a while?
Larson: Yeah, there was some frustration surrounding Revenant's kit at higher levels of play, so we tamped that down. I think we'll revisit that. In terms of the old tactical silencing, I don't think we have any desire to bring back respawn or revive canceling, but Ballistic in next season actually has an upgrade that grants silence on his tactical. Sorry, Rev.
Is it true that some Ash changes are coming too?
Larson: We've been sitting on those for a while. With these Assault changes, it felt like the right time to push those out. We can dive into those a bit if you want. The passive seemed like a candidate for an update. Any passive that requires you to be toggling your map view a lot is not truly a great passive, and it didn't synergize well with her kit, which is all about locking down a target and then pouncing on them. And so we wanted to think if there was an opportunity to give her a new passive that synergizes more with her tactical and ultimate. So she gets this horizontal dashing ability now to help get you another angle or get you to a spot where you can just have a little bit more skirmishing power within fights, and chain it together with an ult. She's much more mobile on the battlefield now. And there's an interesting flow between the passive, the tactical, and the ultimate. And she has some pretty juicy upgrades for players to explore.
When you say dash, do you mean like a Doom Eternal quickstep kind of thing?
Larson: Yeah. I mean, I'll leave the players to explore and figure it out, but it is a sort of omnidirectional, horizontal dash.
How do you feel about the akimbo pistols you added to the game recently?
Canavese: We're extremely happy with the response to it, how they're sitting in the roster of the meta, and how much damage they're dealing. The Mozambique definitely had that rise. You know, as we move into [Season] 24 with the balance changes, we've taken hammer points out of the loot pool, specifically because with the damage changes that we're doing across the board, we wanted to peel back on that aspect and try to get the base core of Mozambiques and the 2020s to see where they land in the grand scheme of it without this big loot chase to get to the end. So we'll see what happens. But I think the P2020s are gonna do some serious work in this upcoming season. They've got a pretty substantial buff coming for them. I hope to see them overtake the Mozambique as the akimbo weapon of choice for a while.
It's all about iteration, right? So on that topic, what's the worst idea you've all had that you tried out before realizing you shouldn't ship it?
Canavese: Oh, man, okay. I don't want to out myself like this. I have a lot of bad ideas, but I don't usually talk about them. We tried a thing with weapons that lasted maybe one playtest before it was pretty obvious that it was not the direction we wanted to take. We tried this concept of a primary and a secondary weapon, where, for example, an assault rifle would be a primary weapon and a pistol would be a secondary weapon. And we would lock your loadout to say you can only carry one primary weapon and one secondary weapon to force weapon diversity. It did not go well. It was not a good playtest. And we learned very quickly that player expression in their loadout is very, very important to them. We always kind of knew that, but it was a prototype to challenge that theory. In the execution of that, we found that players were much more frustrated with just the general looting phase -- I want to run these weapons, and your arbitrary rules are not allowing me to do it. So I don't think it's something that we're going to consider for the battle royale. It's just not really in our DNA. We want you to use what you want. And I think the new loadout arsenals are a much better way of getting you what you want and providing you the sort of agency to fill your loadout in the way that is most meaningful to you.
Larson: One bad idea made me so mad that this question kind of triggered me. There was a version of the Ballistic ult where you didn't have to reload. I remember getting one-clipped by bots in our internal playtests (bots being devs who aren't as good as me) with an R99 that had infinite ammo. Oh, my God, there needs to be a reload on a weapon with this fire rate. So we tried it for a while. We pushed on it. The concept of not having to reload an infinite mag R99 was traumatizing for me.
Canavese: I was pretty against that, as the Weapons Guy.
What's competition like on the team? Who's the best player? What's the average rank?
Canavese: On the design team? Probably Gold if you average it out, but we definitely have peaks.
Larson: We've gotten better. Competition has gotten a lot stiffer. I'm too employed to be a Predator, but I got Masters right before coming here.
What weapons do you think will shine most next season?
Canavese: I think the 3030. There's going to be some spikes in the long range. Even Sentinel -- headshot damage is going to be pretty significant, especially charged. So I think those are going to get a lot of love. But I hope SMGs are going to get some love next season. The R99 is coming back onto the floor and has had a pretty beefy buff that challenges its crate version a little bit.
What about Legends? Who will come out on top next season, and do you think Newcastle and Gibby are gonna disappear down the ranks a little bit?
Larson: Yeah, we're pulling back on the heal expert perk so they won't get the gold armor perk anymore in terms of the small meds. So we are nerfing some Support perks wholesale. I think their stocks will go down for sure. They won't be useless by any means. But I can't get off Ash in playtests. She's working really fun. She has a double dash upgrade and a double ult upgrade.
So you can phase and then you just face a different direction, straight from it, and can just chain them together? There's no pause?
Larson: Yep, she's really fun.
Speaking of Legend abilities, do you have any plans to combat the Crypto zipline traps?
Larson: Where an invisible Crypto stands at the end of a zipline and blocks people to make them fall off the map? We only just saw that before coming. I don't think we've wrapped our heads around what we would do to fix it, but now that we know about it, it's something that we'll discuss, as we do with anything that comes up like that. Is it healthy? Is it good for the game? Is it frustrating to be on the receiving end? And it'll go through its paces, and I'm sure we'll come up with a solution. Something that makes working on the game so fun is that we are tool makers, right? We make all the stuff and throw it into the sandbox, but it's really the players who show us what to do with it and push it to its extent. That's one of the reasons I love being a designer -- all of these new problems that arise are just more puzzles for us to solve. It's really, really fun, and it's really, really challenging.
Apex Legends' next season, Takeover, launches on February 11.