Apex Legends Season 24 marks the sixth anniversary of the breakout battle royale hit, taking the genre by storm in early 2019. Six years is a long, long time to keep a game running and to keep a large audience of players engaged, but you know what people love? Buffs. Lots of buffs. That’s what Season 24 is bringing to the table when it launches next week on 11th February.
As the rumblings coming out of EA higher-ups seem to vacillate between Apex Legends needing a full sequel and needing to keep a hold of what it’s got, and the work for Season 24 has certainly looked to refine and hone the game further. There’s no new Legend characters this time around, with Respawn recognising that, when you’ve got more than two dozen characters, it’s difficult to create something that’s tangibly different and exciting. So the team is pushing toward making more systemic changes with quality of life changes and improvements prioritised alongside new content through the year ahead.
So let’s start with those QOL changes. Matchmaking is getting another overhaul to prioritise fairness, now making use of ranked placements to impact unranked play – so less ability to go and smurf some lower players – and will display the skill width to give you an idea of where you stand in relation to the rest of the lobby.
Speaking of Ranked, anti-cheat will be a continuing priority, but Respawn has also come up with an intriguing way to help disincentivise cheaters with a new Road to Ranked system. This system of in-game challenges will replace the simple account level check, making it so you need to prove skill and teamwork to play Ranked, getting new players up to speed, and adding a hurdle that bot accounts cannot bypass simply through time. Existing ranked players will keep access, though.
And then more broadly points of interest will be highlighted when you drop, letting you easily scope out loot tier and zones, you’ll get even more granular detail through the end of match summaries, and weapon mastery trials are removing sillier objectives in favour of consistent performance.
There’s also new Arsenal crates, visible while diving, that guarantee a weapon and a quick upgrade, removing some of the guessing game from the first few seconds of a match and making things more deterministic.
All good changes, but the thing that Respawn really hope will get players hooked again is a general boost to how fast-paced, snappy and rewarding the combat is. Every single weapon has been buffed in one way or another, increasing damage and with changed headshot multipliers. Some weapons are getting a bigger boost than others, but the general goal is to uplift all ships to the same level, instead of neutering an effective and popular build.
At the same time, armour has been simplified, effectively removing helmet armour from the game – a mythic helmet armour upgrade is actually just upgrading the main armour to red tier – and with headshots no longer affected by armour. Sniping is just about to get much, much more effective – the Kraber will be able to one-shot players with anything up to purple armour. The counter to this is that you can carry more syringes, and crawl speed when downed is increased, so you can hopefully get to cover or nearby buddies.
With no new characters, Respawn has looked to rebalance the meta in two ways. Support characters will no longer have the Heal Expert perk, aiming to push them back to actually being a support class, while the Assault characters Ash and Ballistic have been buffed to make them more explosive in combat.
Both have a new Stowed Reload perk that will reload any weapon after 2 seconds – the Gold Mag weapon upgrade is also boosted to this level – their Combat Reserve perk will add two additional slots specifically for grenades, beyond whatever your backpack can hold, and the Battle Surge ability triggers whenever cracking an enemy shield to increase move speed and reloads, as well as highlight that enemy for your team.
More specifically, Ash can snare more effectively, her ultimate will travel further and move faster, and Tether will snare enemies from your location instead of theirs to really hamper their movement. Her data knife is also making way for a new omnidirectional dash for added mobility. Ballistic’s upgrade can now double his Whistler tactical charge, and his Sling can carry Havoc ammo, to boot.
Again, this is all about the meta shift, to try and put Apex Legends in a better, happier place going forward. But what’s the ‘Takeover’ thing about? Well, that’s referring to community curated game and mode modifier, leaning on the game’s most popular streamers and creators to cook up challenges, rewards, modes and events. Each one will run for two weeks, with a community challenge in week 1 determining the reward for the solo challenge in week 2.
And the beloved R-301 is getting even more love with three Mythic variants dropping into Pubs with Rampart-themed supply drops. They’ll have three distinct Hop-Ups – Red for aggression, Yellow for speed, and Green for support – and give you a big boost to any match your playing. This ties in with a Wraith-inspired Mythic R-301 look that can be purchased.
As there’s questions over the future of Apex Legends, Season 24 feels like a slow and steady kind of update. There’s less of the glitz and glamour of a new map or hero, there’s no grand throwback event to call back to the “good old days”. Instead, it actually seems to be doing the one thing that players tend to want the most: buff the heck out of everything. Will that be enough?