Five years is a milestone lifespan for any game, especially a live service title, so how do you do it Apex Legends continue to evolve and keep up in an ever-changing, ever-competitive space? I recently had the opportunity to speak with several of the development team about this new mode and the history of the Apex games so far, as well as discuss the new limited-time Launch Royale mode that takes you back to the start of the round from 2024.
“We’ve changed the game a lot since launch,” design director Evan Nikolich told me. “Season 20 last February was a big change with the armor work, pick-ups and other things. It came around ‘how would it feel if we went back? What’s the difference between the game we play today and the new game?” Asked why now was the right time to release Launch Royale, Nikolich said now was a good time for reflection on how far Apex had come. “It was a good time to show how much we have changed and evolved, and to celebrate our history. As we end the year and enter another anniversary season, there will be more change, so why not look back and reflect a bit?”
Launch Royale is a limited-time mode that takes you back to the original Kings Canyon map almost exactly as it was when Apex Legends exploded overnight after shadow drops in 2019. This includes the first eight Legends as they were then (no upgrades, plus their first sets of abilities) and original weapons that all worked together to mark the start of the Apex games. Even the mode’s teaser trailer, released on X day of the new season’s launch, was a deliberate callback to the first season’s shadow release.
Depending on when you first dove into the Apex games, Kings Canyon’s original format may well be one you’re fond of (as I am). It’s been a while since the original was actively playable, but are there any new map secrets for players to look out for? Fashion and event manager Mike Button suggested that the introduction of fresh Easter eggs needed to balance bringing back a map that fans were familiar with.
“You should see all the things you remember from the OG map, but it’s not a complete rebuild,” Button told me. “We went back, with everything we could pull and dust off from that time.” Kings Canyon has had a number of iterations over the years so it’s worth noting that this version is not the pure original build of this map, as some issues needed to be resolved by the map team to bring it up to today’s quality standards. “It should be remembered,” Button continued, “so if there were secrets in that OG map that people remember fondly, go into the map and find them!” For me, after many evenings spent diving into this mode back in the day, the map is definitely as I remember it – and even some older, playful strategies still work like sniping from the skeletons lying around Skull town.
Launching Royale as a mode has been an idea for a while, the team said, but Season 23 provided the best opportunity to bring it to life because its themes aligned for the game’s Event team to finally bring it to life. As someone who was there during the original season, the goosebumps that crawled up my spine during my first game reminded me of how important Kings Canyon was and is to Apex. Was it an easy job for the game’s team to make sure their work still captured that same feel now?
“It took time,” Button said. “You want to get it right, especially something like this where there’s a lot of nostalgia and you want to match people’s memories. Some things we thought would be easy were super hard and some things we thought would be hard were easy, it was figuring it out. out to make it happen.’
Kevin Wolski, Senior Technical Game Designer, was part of the team that put together Launch Royale and was surprised at how easy some parts were to bring back, including the weapons that ended up being the easiest to get back to their original designs. Some of this was made easier by Respawn digging into an archive of game data that helped remind the team of how specific things worked back then. The legends themselves, however, were more difficult to bring back, Wolski said, because they have evolved much more.
“For example, Lifeline’s Revive Shield is something we had to dig out and get working again because her Revive Drone ability has changed so many times,” he noted. “It was a super fun process digging all this up and finding ‘can we even get Lifeline’s Revival Shield working again?’ Do we even have these things left? It was kind of like an archaeological dig in some ways.”
It’s not an exaggeration to say that the original Kings Canyon map was and still is an extremely important map for Apex, as it was where it all began. “Original Apex took a lot of old and existing Titanfall 2 spaces, stitch them together and get the original Kings Canyon together as quickly as possible,” Nikolich said, emphasizing that lessons were quickly learned from this process.
The team quickly learned that joined deathmatch maps created high peaks and “death bowls,” as Nikolich likes to call them. Lessons learned from this can be seen reflected in later maps, such as World’s Edge and Olympus. “We’ve seen with Storm Point the ultimate composition of the live gaming community but also our hyper-competitive community,” he said.
As a regular Apex player, its five years and 23 seasons have flown by. But for the team, each new update has brought plenty of lessons, not least from developing the ever-evolving game in such a competitive space, and doing so while maintaining a large player base. “We’ve definitely won some,” Nikolich said, emphasizing how important it had been to listen to the player base and align their tastes with your own on the development side. “The big one is you have to listen to the players,” Nikolich continued. “As we’ve grown, being able to engage with players and get really good at listening to them, because things don’t hit all the time, is still something we’re learning to do every day. So we’re continuing to work on the.”
A big example of how community feedback has helped develop Apex and shape it into its current iteration is its ranked mode. “(There’s been) a lot of learning there and I think we’re in line, we’re getting there,” Nikolich said. “We’ve tried to be very responsive to the ranked changes, we’ve been on quite a journey with that. We’re at the forefront of ‘what does it mean to be a ranked competitive game?’. We’re not a Counter-strike or a Valorant where it’s only two teams, so we’ve been on that journey for a while and (we’re) definitely trying to listen to the players (about things like) placements versus kills, combat and what does it mean to be a well-ranked competitive Apex player? “
“After being out this long and making so many changes, we can’t be afraid anymore,” said Lead Battle Royale Designer Eric Canavese. “Nothing is sacred, challenge the status quo. What worked five years ago may not work now. It’s always internal to look at what we’ve done and always try to push to greater heights. Sometimes that means making incredible risky changes and seeing how the player base likes or dislikes it and then respond to the feedback they give us.”
“This season and last season showed that we are not afraid to make even faster changes than we have done in the past,” Canavese continued. An example of this is the reworked Lifeline which has been released this season with several new abilities including gliding with the DOC drone and the introduction of Rift Relics as a special ground loot that comes from cosmic rifts littering the sky. “Even now we’re still learning and evolving, I’m really excited about the future and what that mentality will bring us moving forward,” he teased.
Season 23 introduced the second rework of a Legend, with major changes to Lifeline. In addition to a new base look (AJ is rocking the purple hair), her abilities also received an overhaul. “We’ve had a lot of safe changes that we used to make in the past to try to make sure we keep things balanced,” lead designer Devin McGuire told me. “But they didn’t hit with excitement or fervor, and characters fell under the radar when they launched.” Rampart’s launch in Season 6 was one such example of this, which didn’t land with fans despite the care taken to try and balance how powerful her Amped Cover Tactical would be. “We’ve taken steps to be less conservative with our changes to let Legends shine, to find the blemishes that hit players and then pull them back to their rightful place,” McGuire said.
“Fast forward to something like Lifeline, back in the day we would never have considered adding a secondary passive that was also a movement ability,” he continued, referring to her new ability to slide with DOC. “But the game has changed, it’s evolved, sped up – people are more skilled and evolve with the way the game has done. Taking those risks for something that’s fun and helps drive combat is something we’ve learned through this experience. We “We’re now less afraid to do (this) because we know how to set up changes if they get out of hand by knowing how movement abilities affect the game.”
With a current roster of 26 Legends, it’s hard to believe there’s still room for the design team to go when bringing in new characters, but Devan suggested that there are almost limitless possibilities when it comes to creating new ways to fight. “There are still areas we want to explore, there are more areas in the Recon space and the control space of how to manage the field that isn’t just laying down a big area that you can’t get through – we’re actively looking there for opportunities” Skirmishers and Assault characters are things that come naturally to us – anything that has movement on it is naturally a fun thing in Apex and there are many different ways to express movement that can lead to an ability or character identity. ” Still, with such a large character list, it takes longer to develop a unique take. “It takes us more time to find and create that niche in the midst of the roles already while not stepping on the toes of others or who have already done better in that space,” McGuire concluded.
Where would the Legends be without their weapons in the Apex arena? Probably dead. But for the game’s teams, the same concerns apply when adding new weapons or revamping old favorites. “We have to be very careful to make sure that any add-on provides interesting new gameplay, that it’s not another version of a gun that we already have,” Canavese said. “We’re really serious about adding content and that’s why you might have noticed that we’ve slowed down a bit on the weapons, because now we have a healthy roster and we like the ecosystem it’s given us.
This is not to say that further changes are not possible. “Weapons that are still close to the same version of their former selves that I really want to look at are things like the Volt,” he continued. “It’s one of those great weapons that does what it does and does it well, but I think there’s more we can do with it — we just don’t know what it is yet.” That promise of more seems to run through Apex Legends, which, five years in, still has plenty of life in it.
