In amidst the complaints about some of Respawn and EA’s dodgy microtransactions, a lack of content during the course of Season 1, and dwindling Twitch numbers, Apex Legends Season 3 has shown that Respawn has learned a lot over the last half a year.
Back when Apex Legends was released in February it was slated to be the “Fortnite-killer”, the game which would dethrone Epic Game’s world-renowned Battle Royale. It looked likely: Apex Legends hit 50 million players within a month.
But the team behind Apex Legends, who had previously worked on the critically-acclaimed Titanfall series, were inexperienced when it came to developing and maintaining a Live Service game like Apex.
This became obvious over the course of Season 1, where there were few content releases that seemed to match the game’s explosive entrance onto the scene. Yet over the last 8 months, there has been a steady increase in the amount of content.
Season 2 saw the introduction of Wattson and played host to a number of short-time limited events which introduced new skins and areas of the map. With the Wraith Town and Octane Town takeover, it looked like Respawn were starting to experiment with the layout of King’s Canyon.
Then hype started to build around Season 3. A few Reddit data-miners and teases on Twitter from the team showed that the potential for a new map was suddenly massive. Fire and Ice themed map, brand new skins, a new weapon, a new legend.
Season 3 so far has been hugely successful. Twitch and YouTube view counts are back up and sustained beyond the usual EA sponsored streams. The game itself feels very different, and not just because of the new map.
Respawn Entertainment also made several changes to the meta: new gun hop-ups have transformed the Scout and Flatline, Gibraltar has received an interesting buff, and Crypto helps to shut down the slow-paced camping meta of ranked by clearing Wattson’s traps.
Overall, the feeling in the Apex Legends community has transformed. While microtransactions continue to plague many player’s dealings with the in-game store, as far as general consensus goes, the price of the cosmetics is validated if the team can continue to release updates with this much content.
Apex Legends continues to be one of the most popular multiplayer FPS games around right now. Even with the seasonal release of Call of Duty around the corner the team at Respawn has shown that they can compete with the best.
