Apex Legends‘ next season, Takeover, promises to flip the game’s meta on its head with a comprehensive set of changes to balance. With buffs to Ash and Ballistic, new Assault Legend perks, buffs to every weapon, the removal of helmets, changes to armor, Arsenal modules, and much more, Apex Legends‘ Season 24 will be one to watch.
Apex Legends‘ Season 24 will change the game in several major ways. While a new Legend won’t be coming to the title, a comprehensive damage rework will reshape the landscape of game balance. Every weapon will enjoy a buff, headshot damage has been reworked, helmets have been removed, and Evo Shields will cap at purple, with the Mythic-tier shield locked behind an incredibly rare Mythic helmet. This increase in time-to-kill will make engagements far faster and greatly change the fabric of Apex‘s meta—not to mention the many other changes bundled along.
To learn more about everything being brought to Apex in Season 24, Game Rant sat down with a group of the game’s developers including design director Evan Nikolich, lead BR designer Eric Canavese, lead Legend designer Devan McGuire, lead progression designer Chris Cleroux, and technical gameplay designer JJ Odell. This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
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Apex Legends’ Developers Explain Season 24’s Changes
Q: A lot was divulged about how Ash and Ballistic are being buffed, but can fans expect buffs for Seer?
McGuire: No, nothing specifically for Seer this new season; he’s had his time in the sun. We’re looking at him because he’s definitely sitting way below where we’d like him to be. The focus here is on Assault and the characters that shine in that, and we won’t be seeing much of Seer getting any spotlight time in Takeover.
Q: How will the rollout of mythic weapon skins be balanced with universal Heirlooms, Mythic skins, and regular Heirlooms?
Nikolich: The big thing is this is our first attempt at weapon Mythic skins. We’ll see how it hits, how our players like it, and balance it. I can’t speak to the exact roadmap of what we have planned for this year in terms of Mythic skins and Heirlooms and things of that nature, but we’ll be looking at what is in demand, what players are asking for, and making sure we’re servicing their needs.
Q: Fans will gain more insight into account progression than ever at the end of a match. Can they keep track of how many packs they’ve opened on their account?
Cleroux: We don’t track any information about packs. It’s an interesting idea and certainly something that I’ll make a note of. With our updated flow, we want to communicate account-level progression and Weapon Mastery and those are the two new elements introduced to that post-match flow.
As an example, if you’re playing a rank game, we’ll go through your rank scoring summary, and then we’ll go through your XP or account level summary. Then we go through your Weapon Mastery updates, and then we go through your updates to any active passes you have (be they Welcome Passes or Battle Passes, etc.). We wanted to ensure that players had a full understanding, a nice presentation, flow, and celebration of everything they achieved throughout their match.
Big Changes To Apex’s Meta
Q: The new Assault class perks follow the trend of class perks being fairly noticeable and strong in contrast to how they were originally conceived. What was the thought process behind making a Legend’s class so much more important in how they play?
McGuire: That’s a good question. Originally, the goal was similar to how we attacked the classes back in Season 16, wanting to give every class its own specialization. Originally, we had this very highfalutin idea of going, “Hey, you know what? We’ll do all of this at the same time. We’ll buff every class to have its own unique specialization within one season. It’ll be this big overall gambit.” Not only was that a difficult thing for us on the dev side to tune and go after to ensure each one of them felt right and ownable within the time limit that we would have to get that out, but it also wouldn’t give a new direction or feeling to the game. Everyone would still play the same game, explore those things during the season, and then it’d be done.
This structure has allowed us to watch what happens when a particular class starts to flow in and out of the meta and changes how you think about the game. I don’t think we hit as strong with the Controller and the Recon ones to see that change come through, and this is why we pushed extra hard on the Support to see how that could go. I think it’s done a lot to focus on different aspects of the game that were not in focus before—bringing characters to the limelight that didn’t see that style of play outside top-end competitive play. It has allowed players to experience a different feel and taste and kept the game from feeling stale. Maybe we went too hard, and we had to back that off a little earlier than we wanted to with that patch before the holidays, but that is kind of an interesting thing that this dynamic has caused. It’s caused Apex to feel fresh, it’s caused Apex to shift in the way that you think about and play the game.
We’re hoping that with this change this season, as we move the Supports into where we think they’re going to be nice and healthy for the long-term of the game and give Assaults a chance to shine, we will see that same ebb-and-flow trend going forward. Ideally, Skirmishers will be the last class and the ones we’d want to hit next. Then they’ll all have their specialties and have had their chance in the sun for people to learn how they can be effective, and they’ll have this new dynamic once this is all said and done. It’s a quest!
Q: Every weapon is being buffed in Season 24. How did this decision come about? Were there any weapons the team was hesitant to boost?
Canavese: We play the game all the time, and we are no strangers to the Support metas going on, the rising tide of Apex‘s player skill, the awesome abilities that have been put into the game, and the crazy movement the players can do. When you couple that stuff with the weapon roster that hasn’t changed over time, it’s like the time-to-kills are getting longer and longer because of those factors. Instead of taking the fun out of playing the game in those areas and nerfing that stuff down so people can get kills, we looked at it and said, “What if we make the weapons a little bit stronger?”
We threw it into the game for some play tests, and things started to click. We were like, “Okay, conflicts are resolving a little faster. We’re feeling more confident in our ability to prepare for the next fights instead of the fights coming to us.” That was starting to feel like Apex of old—but in a good way—while still having all of the innovations we’ve been putting in the game over the years. That was a lightbulb moment where we realized, “Okay, there’s something here.” We reined it in and refined how those damages and the headshot multipliers were implemented.
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I would say the weapons that were trickiest to balance would be things like the Wingman. When you’re at 45 damage for a bullet, your range isn’t too much there; if you go to 50 damage, that’s a breakpoint—you’re shaving bullets off of time-to-kill there! We had to be very careful about the specific damage values and the specific headshot values of some of these precision weapons so there was still counterplay, time to react, and time to heal. That bounce-back moment is very important in Apex, but we still wanted to provide more lethality in those weapons.
Getting kills in Apex is fun, and we wanted to promote that. We wanted players to feel like they had the power to do that, and to make sure it wasn’t just firing into sponges the whole time. We’re pretty happy with where we’ve landed, but as with any change that we do in Apex, we’re going to be monitoring it—we’re going to be looking at the health of the game, we’re going to be looking at the data and player sentiment to make sure that we hit the nail on the head here, and we’ll make adjustments as we keep going.
Q: Will there be any ammo changes this season similar to the recent changes to light and energy ammo from a few seasons back?
Canavese: No ammo stack changes this time! All ammo stacks are the same, and all the weapons retain their ammo types. We’re just looking at the actual statistics of the guns and the amount of damage and the potency they put through.
Arsenals And Assault Class Changes
Q: How have Arsenals been balanced to ensure they don’t override the value of floor loot?
Odell: We’ve paid much attention to that in the development process. Of the strongest levers we found, there are two big ones. The first is the amount of ammo you can find at the Arsenals. It starts pretty low, so it’s like, “Hey, I can choose to go to an Arsenal and get my weapon, but I’m not going to get that much ammo.” Maybe it’s enough to take out one person, but it’s not going to allow you to sustain, so it’s an active choice there. ‘Do I want my weapon?’ versus ‘Do I want to get a random weapon with more ammo, batteries, etc.?’
A second one is the positioning of the Arsenals; we did our best to place them not right next to other pieces of loot and not in good places of cover. If you go to the Arsenal, you’re at a positional disadvantage. They’re often not at the high ground or the place where you necessarily want to take fights. So those have been two good levers to choose ‘Do I want my guaranteed weapon?’ or ‘Do I want better positioning and (in almost all cases) better starting loot?’
Q: Will the speed boost granted by Battle Surge stack with abilities like Knuckle Hustler or Warlord’s Ire?
McGuire: There’s a limit to how fast you can go with that and it takes the strongest one. I think Ballistic is one of the ones we’ve had to run up against given that we’ve added speed to Tempest. We had it originally stack, and it went really, really high. So no, it just takes the better of the ones that are there.
Q: How does the team decide whether to give a character major buffs such as with Ash and Ballistic in the upcoming season instead of a complete rework such as those received by Revenant and Lifeline?
McGuire: When we’re looking at characters for reworks, those are usually ones where their entire fantasy isn’t performing, and they’re not living up to their potential expectations. It helped in Revenant’s case that the gameplay wasn’t working out for him, as well. Those efforts are almost as arduous and challenging as making a full character—they require three new abilities, or at least consideration of how those new abilities will play, which requires new assets to be created, testing, and trying different things out. This takes almost the same time in the production cycle as making a new character from scratch.
Changes like the ones that we saw to Loba and Mirage or Ash and Ballistic here, while significant, are usually an adjustment to the core abilities that are already on the table through either heavy tuning or new functions and scripts that can be written within the core of the character’s current design—things that alter their play style but don’t change the core of what they do. They’re easier for us to tackle and direct when we’re going after a focused expression or change in the season. Restructuring the character’s identity for a rework while keeping the identity of their character, personality, and style, is a much more invested effort. We need to be careful and considerate when we go down that road because it takes a long runway to get to completion. These do have a couple of seasons worth of testing before they get out, but there’s a different time frame we have to consider based on how much effort is involved.
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Battle Royale
First-Person Shooter
- Released
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February 4, 2019
- ESRB
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T for Teen: Blood, Violence
- Publisher(s)
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Electronic Arts
- OpenCritic Rating
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Strong