Season 9 ofApex Legendsmay be the game’s most popular to date. The free-to-play Battle Royale expanded considerably this season, not only gaining the high flying character Valkyrie, who’s thedaughter to theTitanfall 2boss character Viper, but also getting a brand new and permanent game mode which changes up the gameplay considerably.
Arenas, run by another formerTitanfall 2boss in Ash, introduces acompetitive 3v3 element toApex Legends. Taking aspects ofValorantandCS:GOand mixing them with the first person character based action, Arenas pits teams against one another in a first to three wins format. The biggest different for players is that the combat takes place on special maps much smaller in size to the standard maps of King’s Canyon, World’s Edge, or Olympus.
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Even with these dedicated maps, there are those in the community who believe they are still too big for a game mode like this. Even with a battle royale ring closing around the action and continuing to reduce the playable space during a match, a thread in theApex LegendssubReddit has caught fire with players requesting much smaller maps. One in idea in particular would remove the Artillery map and replace it completely with thesmall Octane’s Gauntlet section of King’s Canyon.
However well liked the idea might be in among theApex Legendscommunity, Respawn’s Lead Game Designer Daniel Klein responded directly and confirmed that the area would be too small to work in Arenas. Klein reasoned that a map needs to have multiple points of interest with direct line of sight, and Octane’s Gauntlet would really only have one with a lot of slight blocking.
When questioned further over the lack of different sized maps, David Bocek jumped in to the conversation and revealed that the studio did a lot of experimenting with prototypes while in development. Extensive testing revealed that smaller maps didn’t really work as they felt the same after multiple playthroughs and lacked the meaningful decision making such as where the enemy could go required on the bigger style maps. The items and gear also tended to be too close together and came off generally as not very fun. However, the studio has not closed the door on experimenting with map sizes and will continue to test behind the scenes.
The chaos of the Season 9 launch appears to be behind Respawn Entertainment these days. The game’s servers couldn’t handle the rush of players looking to check out the new content, prompting loads of server issues, disconnects, and other bizarre issues. One thing that hasn’t been resolved quite yet was anaccidental nerf made to the defensive character Wattson, which removed her Perimeter Security’s ability to stun or slow enemies. Thankfully, Respawn is aware of the issue and is investigating what happened with a fix planned as soon as possible.
Apex Legendsis available now for PC, PS4, Switch, and Xbox One.
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