The Respawn Entertainment battle royale, Apex Legends, just dropped Season 4 on February 4th, 2020 and your boy had to get all up in there to see what’s new in the Outlands. This is the one-year anniversary for the game and during that year the developers have added new legends, map updates, and weapons for their player base. In my opinion, this game at it’s core is the best battle royale on the market. The world comes from Respawn, most notably known for the Titanfall series of shooters. Their previous work has enabled them to bring top tier, fast paced gameplay to this lush multiplayer world for 60 players to loot and shoot in.
So what’s new this season? Well, first off Respawn released the new legend Revenant– an assassin type character with a bevy of unique skills. His tactical ability can silence enemies which prevent them from using their own abilities for a limited amount of time. He also has his ultimate known as “death totem” which he can use to respawn at if he dies during a fight. Some of his passive skills include the ability to crouch walk faster, as well as climb higher up on walls than other legends. If you haven’t seen the trailer for this new character it’s a must watch and shows how hard Respawn’s creative team has been working towards establishing enticing lore for this world they’ve built. Altogether, I like this new legend, but want more. The pattern for Respawn has been to release one new legend per season. Sadly, the seasons are simply too long and content grows dry quick– season 3 lasting roughly four months. There are rumors we may get more than one new legend this season but that has yet to be confirmed, but if you ask me– the game will need it in order to stay competitive with other similar games available to players.
Other new features include the map updates to World’s Edge. The primary change is the planet harvester, sitting in the middle of the map which has caused massive rifts in the ground across Capitol City. Another new addition would be the gun racks which currently can be found in the Survey Camps. These racks guarantee players three weapons. I do enjoy map updates, but these weren’t much. Most of the map is the same but hopefully we’ll get more changes as the season progresses. If not, this feeds more into the problem of content growing dry and I just don’t know if this will hold players’ attention.
Loot-wise there is a new sniper along with weapon adjustments. The new sniper is known as the Sentinel and feels much more like a traditional bolt action sniper. Prior to this one, all the other snipers felt more like scout rifles aside from the Triple Take and Kraber. I love the aesthetics of this new sniper and hitting shots with it is extremely satisfying. Unfortunately, the speed of this game and lack of aim assist on console pushes most players to favor fast firing auto-rifle type weapons. The other sniper rifle changes include sniper ammo being separate from all other ammo types as well as the removal of the G7 from the sniper class. These changes felt meaningless to me, I’ll continue to avoid snipers and the G7 was always considered a scout/auto rifle anyway.
There was also a pretty moderate weapon patch this season which featured a lot of great changes. Respawn nerfed weapons that were too strong last season as well as changed some weapon’s tiers. For instance, the Devotion and L-Star weapons essentially swapped places on the tier list. The Devotion is now a weapon players can only get from a care package and the L-Star can now be found on the ground and loot boxes. This was an awesome idea as the Devotion was one of the strongest weapons in the game when fully kitted out. Now players will see the weapon less but when they do it’ll always be kitted out making care packages much more important and rewarding. On the flip side, players now get to use the L-Star more often which just adds a tad more diversity and enjoyment to the game as it was extremely rare to find before. The last change I’ll note from the patch were the adjustments made to the G7 and Havoc. Both of these weapons were abused throughout season 3, so Respawn has taken a stab at balancing them out with a few alterations to their rate of fire capabilities. Honestly, these weapon patches are where the money needs to go. If Respawn could modify Apex Legends on a two month schedule of patch releases I think this game would be in a much better place. Even if the patches become half the size of what they are today it would still be a win.
Overall, I’d say this season met my expectations, but I wouldn’t call it a success for Apex Legends. I only anticipated seeing some map updates, a new legend, and a new gun. Unfortunately, I foresee this content growing dry within a month. I hope Respawn can ramp things up moving forward because I do see so much potential in this game. Regardless of skill level, Apex simply lacks the consistency of big plays which all players desire in a battle royale. Lastly, if anyone is looking for a fellow legend to drop in with on PS4 you can holla at me on Twitter to link up or keep an eye out for highlight videos over on YouTube!
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