Wattson’s ultimate ability Interception Pylon is one of the best in the game. It’s kind of like a fusion between Gibraltar’s shield and Lifeline’s healing, but instead of blocking bullets or restoring health, the Pylon blocks grenades and restores shields. In the current meta, defending against incoming projectiles and enemy abilities (e.g. Horizon and Fuse) is crucial, and Wattson comes in clutch against these exact tact
[DK] I hope not. There are small differences right now, Lifeline’s Ultimate and Valkyrie’s Ultimate are different, but that’s just to accommodate the needs of the mode, rather than balance. I hope we never have to be in a position where we have to change an ability between Arenas and Battle Royale for balance. That would be really awkward. One of the goals of Arenas is that you can use it as practice, right? You go in, you get lots of practice with your abilities, weapons and so on. And if we then say ‘hey, you’re practising one balanced state, but then you go into Battle Royale and that’s different,’ then, we’ve failed on that g
We were joined in this interview by Robert West , senior game designer, Daniel Klein , lead game designer, Ashley Reed , senior writer, and Dave Osei , lead level designer. These four individuals may know more about apex legends map Guide Legends than anyone else on the planet, so they were the perfect people to interrogate for more details on Season 9: Leg
[Dave Osei] I can say from the design perspective, we wanted to try something different for map updates. We had a trend earlier of just destroying maps for a map update, a Harvester coming down on World’s Edge and creating a lava crack, just dropping Skull Town off the map in Kings Canyon. So for Olympus, we wanted to go outside our box and try something new, adding something to my map, rather than taking away from the map or destroying an area. So this Infestation gives us another tool in our toolbox of how to change how we do map updates in the fut
[DO] Actually when we started this map update, we started before Olympus even came out. So a lot of this was a design call of confidence, asking ‘where do we think we need to improve on Olympus before this ships?’ We noticed early on that fewer people were dropping their Orbital Sannon and Solar, just because it was further away from the rest of the map. We have two Tridents over there and we had a balloon, we thought that’d be enough to get people to want to drop there and then come out to the centre of the map. But it still was not getting as much traffic as we wanted, and that actually backed up our intuition. So placing something a lot more beefy down there that can draw more attention to your eye and make you more accessible to bigger loot seemed like a good idea from our perspective. So we’re happy that we chose that locat
[Robert West] I’m not sure if that’s always been a goal, but we’re always experimenting with different ways to play. And we’re prototyping things and we kept iterating on things that we found fun, and liked, and pushing that further. Originally, we were thinking this might be a limited-time mode, and over time we realised it has more legs than that, so we gave it more support, pushed it further, and it got bigger and bigger. We all love the fights and PvP in the game, so different ways to experience that is c
[DK] I absolutely expect that there’ll be follow up balance changes, but we have simple ways to balance the cost of abilities, such as how many you get for free and how often you can use your ultimate, that are Arenas specific. We’ve had to make some small changes to some abilities to make them make sense in Arenas, like Valkyrie doesn’t go all the way up [when using her Ultimate], because the map isn’t big enough for that. But in terms of balance, we tried to achieve the same balance state between Arenas and Battle Royale. Again, we’ve got lots of plans of what to do if something is on fire, or if something else becomes a problem, but right now, I honestly don’t think anyone in the world knows what’s going to happen. We have our data collection set up and we’re ready to react to it. I hope we’ll be in a world where there’ll be a small spectrum of power that Legends can have between Battle Royale and Arenas. I’d never want to be in a world where someone says; ‘never pick Crypto in Arenas because he’s useless,’ or ‘you can only bring Rampart in Arenas because she doesn’t do anything in the Battle Royale,’ right? That I would step in and fix, but small things like, ‘Oh, this guy does a lot better in Arenas.’ And cool, that’s f
Whereas Bloodhound serves as a mobile reconnaissance unit, Crypto specializes in careful approaches. With his Surveillance Drone (Tactical) he can keep tabs on enemies and other interactive objects from a distance. And with his Neurolink Passive, his allies can tag everything Crypto sees within a 30-meter radius – from enemies to valuable Supply Po
While its damage output isn’t enough to score eliminations, Rolling Thunder shines in strategic implementation. Remember, Bangalore’s Smoke Launcher (Tactical) already gives her access to a handy smoke grenade. With Rolling Thunder added into the mix, Bangalore can flush enemies out of open hiding areas or lure enemies into flanking teammates. After all, a measly 40 damage will hurt if it’s a bunch of missiles going off at o