On March 25,Apex Legendsplayers will be able to dive into the Beast Mode event that brings alongside it a series of LTMs (including one for April Fools' Day and a Power Sword Royale), changes to various weapons and the Skirmisher class, and amini-rework for Alter. This update represents the end of a journey when it comes to various Class-based changes, while also setting up the coming weeks of the current season. Beyond it, fans will no doubt be looking to season 25, but that is still quite a few weeks away.
Looking at everything coming in thisApex Legendsupdate, Game Rant recently spoke with lead legend designer Devan McGuire, lead progression designer Chris “C4” Cleroux, and lead battle royale designer Eric Canavese. McGuire discussed the journey classes have taken throughApex Legends(and Alter’s mini-rework), C4 talked about laying the groundwork for future Ranked changes, and Canavese talked about the current weapon sandbox alongside the TTK changes.The following interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
For full context, pleaseread the Apex Legends Midseason Update 24.1 patch notes.
Q: To kick things off, I wanted to ask what the domineering mindset of the team was as we head into this midseason update?
McGuire: From a Legends perspective, we’ve dubbed this season the season of aggression, really wanting to focus on the Assault andSkirmisher playstylesand giving them more specialization to their kits. That was kind of the plan we tailored from season 22, with the Controller/Recon seasons, then Support, and now finally these two. We really had this focus around getting those particular classes to be highlights and not stomping on each other’s toes. Releasing Assault for the first part of the season and then Skirmisher for the latter part of the seasons gave them their time to shine, accentuated by our probably lowest-performing Skirmisher, Alter. We wanted to make sure that she had the potential to rise. The major reworks to her kit were done with the purpose of pushing her into the limelight.
Yeah, we’re just at the tail end of this class-based focus. We really wanted to hit on the core identity and fantasy of what a Skirmisher brings to the table, what they like to do, how to bring team utility out of that, as well as survivability, and allow them to play in a more aggressive space alongside the changes to Alter.
Canavese: Yeah, and the weapons followed suit. Alongside the Skirmisher legends, we’re pushingour SMGsand similar weapons with buffs. We did a lot of stuff at the beginning of the season with damage buffs across the board, so this is more maintenance for us while we’re looking at how the community is feeling about the changes and adjusting some of the sharper edges like the L-Star. We’re really just reinforcing that we like the changes that the buffs made, and we’re refining them as we move into the more mature months of the season.
C4: On the more competitive side, fromRanked and matchmaking, we’ve been really focused over the last couple of seasons on trying to improve the perception and quality of matchmaking, so it’s that perception of fairness and the actual fairness of matchmaking. We’re bringing some changes to this Split reset, adjusting a few paradigms so we can set up a few things for the future starting in Season 25. Can’t spoil that for you yet. This is the first dip of our toe into some bigger changes around Ranked and how we get players playing and thinking competitively, while feeling that matches are more fair than ever.
Q: We’re getting a lot of weapon changes in this update, but with these, I was curious if you could talk about how the TTK changes have changed the team’s approach to weapons, if at all?
Canavese: Interesting. I don’t know if it’s really changed how we approach weapons for the most part. We really like the changes we saw, and we’re seeing more variety of weapons across the board. We’re seeing weapons that just weren’t viable being picked and used, and that’s really exciting for us. Maybe how it has changed how we think about weapons…I know there’s probably a better way to put this, but I would say that we’re a little less precious now. We’ve broken a few eggs, and we’ve seen the delicious cake we can make when we’re not afraid. There’s this mentality of pushing forward, pushing the boundaries, and trying to find ways to deliver our awesome players experiences that they didn’t quite know they wanted. Like they weren’t just asking for it.
When we announcedthe TTK changes, we saw a lot of the community being very apprehensive about the changes. There was a lot of nervousness around wide, sweeping changes like that. It even took a little bit. The first day or two was a little bit like, ‘Oh, this is very different.’ We saw, over the weeks, how it settled down and the players were like, ‘Actually, this is a pretty great experience.’ They were having a lot of fun with it. It breathes some new life into the weapon sandbox. Yeah, moving forward, I think it’s evaluating the holistic weapon roster and just power in the game in general, while not being afraid to make tweaks and tunings wider than we have in the past.
Q: Alter’s mini-rework ensures she has a little more utility in her kit. Could you talk a little bit about what you’ve seen from her on your end and why she needed that utility?
McGuire: The two main components are her tactical and ultimate. Before, her tactical had only one charge that you’re able to put on a wall or ceiling, and you have a very limited playspace that you can use with it anyway, right? You can breach through a wall of cover to get to the other side, so you’re saving it for a moment that makes the most sense, either to escape a situation when you’re pinned down, to push on a situation you assume is going to go right, or to make a play through a ceiling or something like that. You kind of hold onto that portal; you don’t experiment with it. You don’t get to try new crazy things out because you’re like, ‘I need to wait and make sure that I use this at the right moment.’ Maybe even if to just perform a kidnapping or something like that, right?
The decreased cooldown means you have it up more frequently. The two charges mean that you can play with it more; you can be more experimental. You can try things out, but there are also changes to the Void Siphon, the rope that comes down, to allow it to be placed on the side of a wall. You can throw it on a high part of a building wall and have the rope come down. You have access to the roof or the upper floors of a building from outside. It gives you a lot more play space in terms of how you’re going to be using it. Before, you wouldn’t be able to make it to the top floor from the outside of a building. Now you can from the outside. You can make a play to take height, the same way that Horizon orPathfinderwould be able to do, which is really important for feeling like you have power there.
Beforehand, you’d have to dive into the bottom floor, go up one floor or maybe a few floors, and then go up. Now you have a lot more play space options. There are some additional things that we’re doing around her Portal: through her Upgrades and the inherent nature of the Recon element of it, like throwing a portal on the wall and having LOS sightlines to see who’s behind that wall, to know if it’s safe to breach. It gives you a lot more confidence in making those assessments, and if you take the option, you may extend that time through Upgrades or give yourself the combat advantage with the handling and speed bonus coming out of it. You now have many more options to engage with those portals than you had before: more versatility in place and more options for engagement.
I think there’s also a lot of playmaking potential that comes from the changes to her Ultimate: allowing you to have two in the world, to take space, and to open up flanking positions. The ability to call your own teammates back when they’re knocked means you don’t have to rely on them having a full understanding of your kit to use it successfully, and the reuse aspect we added means it’s never a bad idea to place a Nexus down. Knowing it’s in a pretty decent spot, you can always make a play and rotate back to it within its timeframe, and you can reuse that. You don’t have to feel like you’ve wasted it, it’s done, and your teammates haven’t used it.
You can make decisions, plays, and occupy multiple spots on the map at the same time, and it opens up really good flanking opportunities or aggressive pushes that you can then retreat from. A lot of these kinds of plays and openings we’ve seen, that we’ve always imagined Alter having, are much more possible thanks to the versatility in her new kit.
Q: As you also mentioned, we’re at the end of a series of improvements to all the classes from Control/Recon, Season of Support, and now Skirmishers with the Season of Aggression. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about that evolution from the inception of classes to now?
McGuire: Way back when classes were added at the beginning, they served their purpose and represented what existed in the game, but as the game evolved, the cast crew. We had to make that change in season 16 to give all the classes purpose because, really, onlythe Recon classhad a purpose at that point. That was a big shift for us. All these class identifiers were really just half-heartedly tapping into the idea of what a playstyle could be, but giving them actual identity was the big push. Over that time, one big learning from that was that a lot of people can miss the ideas of beacons and interacting with things in the world, and that’s where the idea of giving each class a specialization that was core to their gameplay came from.
When we first started planning season 22 and starting this class initiative, we wanted to make sure that every class had its own specialization. We were originally going to do it all at once, the same way we had done with the season 16 changes, but reviewing what those classes could be and then putting those all in at the same time meant everything would have gotten lost in the mail. We wouldn’t have seen the types of shifts for players that we needed, with them trying to go after a particular class specialty, seeing what they can bring to the game, and changing up the meta. So, we decided to spread that across each season.
I’m sort of rapid-firing through this, but we started with Controller and Recon, aiming for a very, very balanced approach to bringing in those specializations. Recon would have this threat vision that would allow them to scout better;Controllers would be all about zone control. We really tried to be careful about not going overboard with them or pushing them too far into an overpowered nature. That worked, they came in kind of balanced, we saw some upticks with a few characters within those classes, but it didn’t have the impact we wanted to see across the game.
As we moved into theSeason of Support, we pushed that dial way up, knowing that we had levers to kind of pull it back, and we didn’t want it to keep them there forever. We wanted it to be at the same level that Controller and Recon had launched with, but we wanted to see how far we could push the game, to Eric’s metaphor, to crack some eggs and make a cake—to see what kind of cake would come out of that. I think the learning from that season is that, while we liked where that pushed the game, we liked how it encouraged people to experiment with characters they wouldn’t normally play as, but it lasted too long and we hadn’t set up the levers to respond quickly enough. They required pretty intensive patches for every client on the thing to adjust, so the changes to react to how the community was feeling, or how dominant a particular character was, were too long.
We took that learning into this season, and while we’ve made sure that we launched strong with everything forthe Assault legendsand all the things for the Skirmishers that are coming out, we have taken note of what levers we can use to pull things down if things get out of hand and run amok. Ideally, by the end of this, the goal would be for each class to have a relatively balanced feel that is still exciting and still a specialization to that class of characters. We’re coming toward the tail end of that, so once we get through this season, that journey will be complete. We’ll find a measured approach to have all the classes feel like they’re in line and then move on to new ways of addressing characters that are underperforming. That’s kind of the journey.
We started with classes that didn’t mean anything, and we went to classes that meant something but only of a strategic nature. We wanted to get that core into the gameplay and roll that out so that it shifted the meta. We made some learnings along that particular journey over the past year to see how it would impact the community, and we’ll evaluate that result at the end of this season, level things out, and move on to addressing new characters as we move past the class-based initiatives.
Q: To wrap things up, can you talk a little bit about what you’re expecting and/or most excited to see come out of this update?
McGuire: To the first part, I think we’re expecting players to pick up the most favored class of characters in the game and go ham with the frequency of mobility and options that are on the table. One of the most exciting things about picking Pathfinder, Horizon, orOctane is the abilityto use those movement tools at your disposal to fly around the battlefield and have fun. I think the perks being brought to the Skirmisher class incentivize more of those fun aspects of the game. I fully expect people to be picking their favorite Skirmisher characters, diving into fights, and trying to secure those knocks to keep that chain going as long as they possibly can. That, in its own right, sounds like a pretty fun tail end to this class-based journey. That’s an expectation.
The thing I’m probably most excited about, from the Legend side, is to see how people take to Alter. She had a pretty underwhelming launch that was coupled withSolosat the same time. She’s not really a solo character so she didn’t get as much play as she could have, and she’s only now starting to see people pick her up. With these changes, we’ll hopefully see a big, big adjustment there, and all things that I called out around her versatility of play, I think people will latch onto. Especially since she can multi-class tap into different aspects, filling positions and squads in different ways, that’s something we were going for.
I’m also very excited about the changes coming to Wraith, for changes to her Phase that allow you to cancel it at any time in the void, meaning you can cycle back into that fight at your own leisure. You don’t have to wait for the entire Phase time to end, so you can start a reset if you have to use it as an escape. You can use it aggressively on a push. I’m really excited to see people play as Wraith and Alter this season and see where they go.
Season of Portals, then?
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