Apex Legends has a content material drought downside. It stays among the best battle royales and has dominated the scene due to its intense, fast-paced motion, impeccable gunplay, and distinctive Legend characters. However whereas it’s been 4 years since Apex shock launched and shortly rose to success, it’s now starting to look drained.
Whereas Apex’s season launches are often nice, providing both new weapons, Legends, or maps, the content material between season launches is often few and much between. There are some updates between seasons that come a month or two after launch – season 14 launched ninth August introducing new Legend Vantage – and the next replace, the Beast of Prey Assortment occasion, dropped two months later.
Assortment occasions often final about two weeks and provide up a couple of beauty gadgets to purchase and earn, usually together with an Heirloom – a legendary merchandise that transforms your melee assault with a singular weapon tied to a particular Legend.
These Assortment occasions additionally usher in restricted time modes like Gun Run (principally Gun Recreation from Name of Obligation) and Management (Domination), it’s not that a lot of a draw and the participant base, myself included, is getting drained. We’ve had the identical restricted time occasions yearly for too lengthy now. The Winter Categorical prepare domination mode occasion has been the identical for the final three years and, whereas it’s nonetheless a enjoyable sport mode, I would like one thing new. The Halloween occasion is similar and regardless that timed occasions final two weeks, some gamers lose curiosity after every week, usually even much less.
The group has been determined for a brand new everlasting sport mode, one thing like Management, which pits two groups of 9 in opposition to one another. It’s appeared in earlier timed occasions and is a welcome change from Battle Royale and Arenas.
Final week, Management returned as a part of the Spellbound Assortment occasion, which was nice to see. Nonetheless, the occasion replace had so many points. I ran right into a ton of difficulties after I tried to load Apex, I used to be unable to get previous the loading display most occasions and after I ultimately made it to the primary menu, I’d get kicked out of the sport resulting from a “deadly error” or Code Web.
Getting disconnected from matches has been a recurring downside particularly after main Season updates when there are large sport adjustments like new maps, weapons, or Legends. I’ve acknowledged earlier than that I actually wouldn’t thoughts Apex taking a day or two off to implement a giant replace to repair a few of the underlying points to the sport, like what Fortnite does between seasons. However that is a lot tougher to implement than simply saying. Nonetheless, gamers have additionally been asking for Apex to repair its server stability points for a very long time, particularly since getting disconnected from ranked video games usually end in gamers getting a time-out penalty for “leaving” the sport after they have been simply disconnected.
The group actually simply would love some open communication and updates concerning the state of affairs, particularly when these issues are simply aggravated by the occasion or season updates that spotlight new cosmetics and the identical repeating restricted time sport modes.
Respawn tweeted from its official account – not even the Apex account – that it was looking into the issues following the Spellbound launch. The following day, no replace, nothing from Respawn, regardless of plenty of gamers reporting they’d misplaced the cash they’d spent to get occasion skins, all due to the servers’ instabilities. They lastly tweeted an replace {that a} repair had been rolled out to stabilize the problems, practically 24 hours after the debacle and nonetheless solely on the Respawn account.
Heads up, legends ?
We simply pushed a repair to resolve the connection points gamers have been seeing within the foyer. Thanks for sticking with us via this, and we hope you benefit from the Occasion!— Respawn (@Respawn) January 11, 2023
I like Apex. It’s my primary battle royale, and one I regularly play. However I can’t ignore the problems Apex has, with its lack of content material drops and poor communication from Respawn. A fast repair might be to open up customized personal lobbies to everybody, which the Spellbound occasion did do. Nonetheless, lobbies wanted a full server of 30 folks to launch. Any much less and it doesn’t work.
Clearly sport growth is extraordinarily difficult – there are many shifting elements to think about, particularly with a dwell service, and the whole lot must be completely examined earlier than it’s launched to the general public. However Apex devs have already mentioned they take a look at information from present and restricted time modes, in addition to participant behaviors, to offer updates to the sport. If that’s the case, why are we nonetheless getting the identical vacation occasions again and again, regardless that curiosity has dwindled? And bugs like server points that forestall folks from logging on are, frankly, unforgivable.
Epic took Fortnite offline for a couple of days to relaunch it on a brand new engine. It was a giant transfer – it little question price tens of millions in misplaced income – nevertheless it in the end meant the participant expertise was the most effective it might be when it got here again on-line. Possibly it’s time for Respawn to do the identical? The Apex group has been asking for main updates to the sound and server system for years, because of the audio bugs and server latency points which have plagued it prior to now, however proper now issues don’t appear to be getting any higher.
The dearth of updates has meant that plenty of gamers and content material creators who used to play Apex have began emigrate to different video games. In line with SteamDB, Twitch viewers dropped closely from November twenty first’s peak at 285,383 to a gradual decline to a low of 83,838 on December nineteenth. That’s an enormous 70% drop. The participant base additionally dropped 12% from 413k on Steam to 360k throughout this timeframe as nicely which was between content material updates.
Main Apex streamers like LuluLuvely have converted to taking part in different video games like Overwatch 2. Ex-Apex Professional participant Rocker, who performed for one of many high North American Apex groups NRG, launched a press release on Twitter on January tenth saying he was quitting not solely aggressive Apex, but additionally taking part in Apex generally.
He wrote, “I am executed with apex. I have been mendacity to my self for awhile saying I need to grind and that I benefit from the sport, however in actuality I simply can’t appear to take pleasure in it- not to mention play the sport for greater than 2 hours at a time.”
quitting
Learn: https://t.co/KhW7Mh0exG
— rocker (@rockerapex) January 11, 2023
I additionally took a break, although a shorter one, from Apex for a month to play Warzone, which was a pleasant trip however for me, nothing comes near Apex’s motion and gunplay. I like Apex and its core sport, however the lack of updates will probably be its downfall until it’s addressed, and quick.
Apex Season 16 is about to launch someday in early February and for the reason that vacation season is over we could get extra updates to the sport. I actually hope so, as a result of whereas I like the sport and need to see it proceed to succeed, if nothing adjustments I’ll need to shift my most important FPS focus elsewhere.
