EA and Respawn Entertainment’s new battle royale game continues its rapid success. This week Apex Legends is celebrating 50 million players with a fun stat-filled trailer (above). While we await the first season, the first balance patch also has arrived, seeing tweaks to the Peacekeeper and Wingman.
The celebratory trailer already boasts over 1 million views. It shows off some fun collective stats, like 31 billion pings, 170 million respawns, and, humorously, at least 1 kill with the infamously derided Mozambique hand-shotgun.
The first major balance patch hit yesterday. The big news are nerfs to two of Apex Legends’ most powerful guns, the revolver Wingman and the shotgun Peacekeeper. The Wingman now fires slower with less accurate hip-fire, to better model its revolver roots. Likewise the shotgun bolt mods are a bit less effective at speeding up the Peacekeeper’s reload rate.
Both guns will also spawn less frequently as they still remain powerful killers. Respawn detailed their balance notes with a post on the Apex Legends Reddit page: “A core philosophy of our development process for Apex Legends is to listen to player feedback, parse through all the data we get from the game, try things, and then playtest them a ton to get them just right,” writes Jay Frechette, Community Manager, Respawn Entertainment.
Respawn is well aware of the general crappiness of the Mozambique: “We love y’alls ‘Bique memes, so we’re hesitant to lose that.” Frechette notes that guns are not designed to be balanced with each other. Some will be stronger than others while some will be more useful in early versus later stages of a round.
Other balance changes include increasing energy weapons and ammo and buffing Caustic’s traps. Respawn mentions the problem with larger characters being slightly easier to hit. Instead of adjusting their hit boxes, they plan on increasing their overall power. The goal is to create asymmetrical characters that are sill roughly balanced with each other.
Still coming soon is the first competitive season for Apex Legends. As a free-to-play battle royale, Apex Legends looks to model itself after Fortnite with the use of seasonal, purchasable battle passes. The first season should begin sometime this month.
Apex Legends is available on PC (Origin), PlayStation 4, and Xbox One. It’s rated T for Teen.
