Five years is a milestone lifespan for any game, especially a live service title, so how does Apex Legends continue to evolve and keep up with an ever-changing, ever-competitive space? Recently, I had the opportunity to speak to several of the development team about this new mode and the history of the Apex games so far, as well as discussing the new limited-time Launch Royale mode that takes you back to the very beginning to round off 2024.
“We’ve changed the game a lot since launch,” design director Evan Nikolich told me. “Season 20 last February was a big change to the armour work, the pick ups and other things. It came around ‘what would it feel like if we went back? What’s the difference between the game we play today and the new game?” When asked why now was the right time to release Launch Royale, Nikolich said that it was now a good time for reflection on how far Apex had come. “It was a good time to show how much we’ve changed and evolved, and to celebrate our history. As we close out the year and head into another anniversary season there will be more change, so why not look back and reflect a little 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-dropping in 2019. This includes the first eight Legends as they were back 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, dropped on X the day of the new season launch, was an intentional callback to the first season’s shadow drop.
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 myself). It’s been a long time since the original has been actively playable, but are there any new map secrets for players to look out for? Mode and Events lead Mike Button suggested the introduction of fresh Easter eggs had to balance bringing back a map fans were familiar with.
“You should see all the things you remember from the OG map, but it’s not a full 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 isn’t the pure original build of this map, as some issues needed to be resolved by the map team to bring it to today’s quality standards. “It should be as remembered,” Button continued, “so if there were secrets in that OG map that people remember fondly, head into the map and search them out!” For me, after numerous evenings spent diving into this mode back in the day, the map is definitely how I remember – and even some older, playful strategies still work like sniping from the skeleton laying around Skull town.
Launch 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 as its themes aligned for the game’s Events team to finally bring it to life. As someone who was there for the original season, the goosebumps that crawled up my spine during my first match reminded me of just how important Kings Canyon was and is for Apex. Was it an easy job for the game’s team to ensure their work still captured that same feeling 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 to make it happen.’
Kevin Wolski, Senior Technical Game Designer, was part of the team that put together Launch Royale and was surprised how easy some parts were to bring back, including the weapons that ended up being the easiest to bring back to their original designs. Part of this was made easier by Respawn delving into an archive of game data that helped remind the team how specific things functioned back then. The Legends themselves, however, were harder to bring back, Wolski said, as they’ve evolved a lot more.
“For example, Lifeline’s Revive Shield is something we had to dig up and make work again because her revive Drone ability has changed so many times,” he noted. “It was a super fun process to dig all this stuff [up] and find ‘can we even make Lifeline’s Revival Shield work again? Do we even have these things left over? It was kind of like an archeological dig in certain ways.”
It’s not an exaggeration to say that the original Kings Canyon map was and is still an extremely important map for Apex, as it’s where everything began. “Original Apex was taking a lot of old and existing Titanfall 2 spaces, stitching them together and getting the original Kings Canyon put together as quickly as possible,” Nikolich said, highlighting that lessons were rapidly learned from this process.
The team quickly learned that stitched together deathmatch maps created high elevation points 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 compounding of the live game community but also our hyper competitive community as well,” he said.
As a regular Apex player, its five years and 23 seasons have flown by. But for the team, each new update has provided plenty of lessons, not least from developing the continuously-evolving game in such a competitive field, and doing so while also maintaining a large player base. “We’ve definitely had some wins,” Nikolich said, highlighting how important listening to the player base and aligning their taste with your own on the development side had been. “The big one is that you’ve got 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 is still something we’re learning how to do every day as not everything hits all the time. So, we keep working on it.”
A big example of how community feedback has helped evolve Apex and shape it into its current iteration is its Ranked mode. “[There have been] lots of lessons learned there and I think we’re aligned, 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 right on 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 just 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 vs kills, combat and what does it mean to be a good ranked competitive Apex player?”
“When we’ve been out this long and been making so many changes, we can’t be scared anymore,” lead battle royale designer Eric Canavese said. “Nothing is sacred, challenge the status quo. What worked five years ago might not be working now. It’s always looking internally at what we’ve done and always trying to push to greater heights. Sometimes that means making incredible risky changes and seeing how the player base likes or dislikes it. Then responding to the feedback they’re giving us.”
“This season and last season were showing that we’re not scared to make even more rapid changes than we’ve done in the past,” Canavese continued. An example of this is the reworked Lifeline that’s dropped this season with multiple new abilities including gliding with the DOC drone and the introduction of Rift Relics as special ground loot coming from cosmic rifts littering the skies. “Even now we’re continuing to learn and evolve, I’m really excited for the future and what that mentality will net us as we move forward,” he teased.
Season 23 introduced the second rework of a Legend, with big changes to Lifeline. As well as a new base look (AJ is rocking the purple hair) her abilities also got an overhaul. “We’ve had a lot of safe changes we used to make in the past to try and make sure we keep things balanced,” lead Legend designer Devin McGuire told me. “But they didn’t hit with excitement or fervour, and characters fell under the radar when they were launched.” Rampart’s launch in Season 6 was one such example of this, which didn’t land with fans despite care given to try and balance how powerful her Amped Cover Tactical would be. “We’ve been taking steps to be a less conservative with our changes to allow Legends to shine, to find the spots that hit with players and then peel them back into their rightful spot,” McGuire said.
“Fast forward to something like Lifeline, back in the day we never would have considered adding a secondary passive that was also a movement ability,” he continued, referring to her new ability to glide with DOC. “But the game has changed, it’s evolved, sped up – people are more skilled and are evolving with the way the game has. Taking those risks for something that is fun and helps drive combat is something we have learned through this experience. We’re now less afraid to do [this] because we know how to tune changes back 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 think that there are still places for the design team to go when bringing in new characters, but Devan suggested 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 handle the field which isn’t just putting down a big area 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 lots of different ways to express movement that can lead to an ability or character’s identity.” Still, with such a large character roster, it takes longer to develop a unique take. “It takes us more time to find and carve out that niche amidst the cast already while not stomping on others toes or that’s done better in that space already,” McGuire concluded.
Where would the Legends be without their weapons in the Apex arena? Dead probably. But for the game’s team, the same concerns apply when adding new guns, or revamping old favourites. “We have to be very careful about making sure that any addition is providing interesting new gameplay, that it’s not another version of a gun we’ve already got,” Canavese said. “We take it really seriously when adding content and that’s why you may have noticed we’ve slowed down a bit on the weapons, because now we’ve got a healthy roster and we like the ecosystem it has given us.
That’s not to say that further changes aren’t possible, however. “Weapons that are still close to the same version of their former selves that I certainly 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 that is yet.” That promise of more seems to run throughout Apex Legends which, five years in, has plenty of life in it still.
