I’m not sure if this is Apex Legends’ biggest mid-season update ever, but it’s certainly up there. Season 23 has been dubbed the Season of Support, with Newcastle becoming a meta pick and the return of bubble fights. If you didn’t play back when the game first launched, you’ve been experiencing a whole new world of Apex gameplay this season. If you’re a veteran like myself, we’ve returned to how the game used to be in more ways than one.
However, things are a-changing. As is always the case for live-service games, the developers are iterating, switching things up, and eschewing expectations. Apex Legends is about to get a lot weirder, with fully automatic sniper rifles, the ability to rewind time, and much more. In the words of principal game designer Bilal Arshad, “we’re trying to think about what we can do to excite players and spice things up.” The second half of Season 23 looks spicy indeed.
Apex Legends’ Fully Automatic Charge Rifle
“I want the Charge Rifle to be awesome.” That’s what lead battle royale designer Eric Canavese remembers weapon designer Casey O’Brien telling him. And her idea was out there.
“I really like sniper rifles,” she explains to me via video call. “And I really like the Charge Rifle. I think it’s really cool, really interesting, it’s this high-skill-high-reward weapon and it did make me a little sad that not everyone got to experience the power that is the Charge Rifle.”
So, she and the team gave it the Selectfire Receiver hop-up. Long-time players may remember this from the Prowler, allowing it to switch from burst to full-auto, but it makes more sense on an SMG. The Selectfire will be applicable to the Prowler this time around, too (“bringing it back just felt right”), but O’Brien hopes that adding it to the Charge Rifle will allow sniper-centric players to feel like they’re better contributing to the team. More shots is–hopefully–more hits. More hits is more damage. More damage is more kills.
Apex Legends Prowler
It’ll be interesting to see how exactly it plays out, but Canavese is happy with where the unusual alteration sits with Apex’s vision going forward. “It’s this amazing moment of giving people something that we know they’ll love with the Prowler, but then titillating them with something new.”
But that’s not the only change in the hop-up department. The Nemesis, G7 Scout, and CAR now come with an Ultimate Accelerator packaged in. This hop-up will be baked into their kit so you don’t have to hunt through every loot bin in e-District to find it, and charges your Ultimate as you do damage. As a secondary effect, it also charges your Evo Shield 50 percent faster.
O’Brien sees these baked-in hop-ups as “the next evolution of our hop-up system”, which will allow the developers more control to tweak weapons as they see fit. “They’re really cool, interesting mechanics that we can put on weapons on a seasonal cadence (or bi-seasonal cadence) whenever we want to cycle in and out the hop-ups,” she explains.
Another element of the game that allows the developers more granular control over power is the Legends themselves. As well as buffing support Legends across the board this season, a move that lead Legend designer Devan McGuire admits “has been pretty divisive”, all Legends now have skill trees that impact how they play.
Mirage and Loba, the two support Legends who remained untouched at the start of the season, finally have their reworks. Their skill trees now offer completely varying playstyles, and you can either opt to be a team player or buff your individual fighting skills. This is a direction that McGuire would like to pursue further with all the Legends.
“That’s where I’d like to see most of these things go,” he says. “It’s just a matter of time and resources and when we have the opportunity to dive into certain characters and give them that love.”
This pair seems unlikely to shake up the meta as much as the big shift at the start of the season, but you never know. Perhaps the ALGS Championship will be Mirage’s time to shine.
Apex Legends Is Getting Weird
Rift Relics in the first half of the season introduced hover mechanics, double jumps, and even the EPG-1, the infamous rocket launcher from Titanfall 2. For the second half of the season, lead events designer Mike Button says you should “expect to see things get a bit weirder.”
A new boost kit called Upgraded is hitting non-competitive modes. This maxes out all of your skill tree options while equipped, allowing you to utilise powerful ability combinations that haven’t been an option before.
More impactful than that is Void Rewind, a power that works similarly to Apex Legends Mobile’s Fade. You can utilise the ability to open a one-way portal that rewinds your position, allowing you to reposition after an aggressive play or get back into cover when spotted on a rotation.
However, Button didn’t realise that this was so similar to Fade’s ability from the now-sunsetted mobile iteration of the game. “I suppose so,” he chuckles as I make the connection. “That was not the inspiration; we just liked playing with time. There’s some other stuff we’ve tried [that] maybe we’ll see in future seasons in that regard that may be even a bit more out there in terms of playing with the game and the time stamp of different things, but [Void Rewind is] not directly inspired. But that’s a good call out.”
While Button spills the beans on two new boost kits (and says that the hover kit will return with fixes in place), there’s more to come that he’s keeping close to his chest. “As we get to the end of the season, expect a crescendo into even more craziness with Rift Relics.”
“We definitely are thinking about events as an experimentation test space” – Mike Button, events lead at Respawn.
Many players who play in more competitive modes may not think that these changes affect them. Initially, they’re right. But this game has shown time and time again that elements of limited-time modes can be implemented into the full game. Take Evo Shields, for example. Or Three Strikes’ respawning with weapons. Straight Shot’s spawn points were translated to the ALGS. And Button confirms that sometimes Respawn thinks of events, these temporary spaces, as testing grounds for ideas that may be implemented into the full game.
“We definitely do,” he responds when I ask him if he ever goes into an event with a mindset of testing an idea and, if it works, bringing it to ranked. If they’ve got an idea that “is not ready for prime time”, events are the “perfect place” to try them out. From there, the team collects community feedback and makes the necessary adjustments to push it further into the game. He uses the Selectfire as a recent example.
“We felt good enough about that internally that talking with Eric [Canavese] and the weapons team, they were looking for some other things and we just happened to have already started that journey,” he explains. “So that was one that happened quick – we didn’t even go live before that decision got made – but there are things we definitely are thinking about with events as an experimentation test space.”
Improving Apex Legends Matchmaking In Season 23
Season 23 also saw the launch of Apex Legends’ skill display in ranked, which shows you exactly how good the players in your lobby are. Respawn is also addressing matchmaking issues.
“There were some issues that we noticed with [our matchmaking buckets] which was leading to some potentially higher skill players ending up in different brackets than we wanted them to be in so we’ve made some adjustments to avoid that,” Arshad explains. “So come 23.1, hopefully we’ll see better distribution of skill when it comes to matchmaking across the board.”
This is a lot of change for a mid-season update, but the team is keen to push Apex Legends forward by interating on the game that currently exists in order to keep players engaged. I keep hearing the mantra “never say never” when it comes to live-service games, and Canavese does a good job in explaining exactly why the developers are still taking such wild, potentially divisive swings at this stage.
“We’ve done a good job of carving out our space and I don’t think it’s time to rest,” he says. “It’s actually time to keep pushing and keep carving, keep digging and finding those gems that have yet to be discovered. We have the players and we have the space to be pushing that envelope.”
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