Apex Legends Season 24 kicks off on February 11, one week after the game’s sixth birthday. The new season doesn’t add a new playable legend, map, weapon, or support item, but does make some major changes to the Assault class to make it more lethal, buffs every single firearm, nerfs armor, and introduces Arsenals–new kiosk-like contraptions on every map that can build the gun and attachments you want to make it easier for players to acquire their preferred loadout. These additions all seem to be in service of making the time-to-kill in Apex Legends substantially shorter.
I’ll reserve full judgment for the start of the season, but I’m not a huge fan of that direction. A big part of why I like Apex Legends is because the time-to-kill is much slower than other competitive shooters, like Call of Duty or PUBG. In Apex Legends, you have to pump quite a few shots into an opponent to put them out of the fight–it’s very forgiving, especially if you’ve been playing the game for years and know how to best rotate around each map to quickly move between cover and heal on the move. The Respawn team feels confident that changing this formula is the right direction for the game, noting that the faster time-to-kill shouldn’t be too drastic, as these changes will be countered by buffs to healing.
“There’s no way around it–increased damage, lowering [the] max level [of body shields] from red down to purple… these are absolutely affecting the time-to-kill in Apex,” lead battle royale designer Eric Canavese told me. “We’ve done some things on the other side to accommodate for that [like making] healing a little bit faster–the cells and the syringes, you’ll be able to pop faster, so there’s a little less down time, [and] you [can] stack a bit more of them [per slot] in your inventory… We improved the knockdown state [as well] so that you can crawl to your friends a little bit faster.”
Admittedly, this change could address one of Apex Legends’ longest-running problems: third-partying, or the act of moving on two other teams in the midst of a fight and taking advantage of both of their weakened states to score some easy kills. It’s a popular strategy in Apex Legends and an ongoing annoyance. By making it easier to finish off your opponent (or for them to finish off you), the hope is that fights wrap up before another team has a chance to come in and third-party.
“We’re hoping [this season update is] going to bring a little bit more punctuation to those combats, which allows you to reset [and] get ready for those third-parties because everybody’s going to hear that gunfire,” Canavese said. “Fights are going to feel a little bit more lethal. Cover [is] going to be a little bit more important, making the right rotations and not just running out in the middle of a field and then, ‘Oh, I got shot a couple of times, I’ll just run away and heal.’ Everything’s going to be a little bit more dangerous. But it’s going to promote good strategy and good tactics, and playing for the win and [trying] to work with your team and use your abilities to the best that you can so that you can not get blown up immediately.”
As part of the plan to make firefights feel more dangerous, the Assault class is getting a major update this season, mirroring what Respawn has done for three of the other four classes so far. Season 24 makes it so Assault legends can more easily carry extra grenades, and they now get both a speed boost and automatically mark targets when they break enemy body shields so that they can close on wounded foes. On top of those changes, both Ash and Ballistic are getting changes to their overall kit and improvements to certain skills. None of the changes sound as impactful as the updates in 2024 that improved the Support class and made drastic shifts to the kits of characters like Lifeline and Loba, but the Assault class is already quite powerful, so it makes sense they’re not getting a huge buff.
“We’ve been tracking this particular type of class-wide change for the last couple seasons now,” lead legend designer Devan McGuire told me. “We’re at Assault, we’ve done Controller and Recon and Support. …So there’s only really one class left [Skirmisher], so that will at least end that particular dynasty [of updates]. And then we’ll be looking at a different method of making, again, impactful changes that allow certain characters to rise into the spotlights.”
In terms of what these changes might look like and what’s in store for Apex Legends in 2025 during its sixth year, tons of new playable legends doesn’t sound like it’s in the cards. “What we’ve seen is that the addition of a new legend hasn’t had as much of an impact on the general feel of the game as it has in the past,” McGuire said. “With the larger roster, you’re not seeing this legend show up as much in every session. You may have certain play styles that just don’t map to the way that that legend plays, and you don’t necessarily want to put that effort into it. But when a change affects a [whole] class, chances are you play someone in that class or you’re playing with someone who’s [using] that class and you do get affected, your gameplay changes and you feel those moments. So it has a different sort of pull.”
“We’re trying to make the rank climb feel different, and that is mostly done through changing the core game,” design director Evan Nikolich added. “So when we had six legends or eight legends, adding a new legend had a huge ripple effect. You have 26 legends and [add someone new], it’s not nearly as impactful versus making a systemic wide change. And you’re going to see that across [the game]. This season, we’re doing a lot with weapons. [In] future seasons, we’re touching maps and touching the [battle royale] rules and really evolving what you’re seeing, game to game, frame to frame. What you’re fighting is more impactful than a new legend. When we do add new legends, we want something that really strikes at the core of Apex and ripples out significantly. So [Season 21’s] Alter is fantastic, but she doesn’t have the same impact [as], say, when we added [Season 1’s] Octane.”
“Also, players who are new or coming in fresh are more often [the ones] lured by the idea of, ‘Oh, there’s a character I’ve never seen before and there’s abilities I’ve never seen before,'” McGuire said, adding that most players who have been playing Apex Legends for years have their go-to picks already locked and are less likely to be as excited by new faces. There are outliers of course–a friend of mine pretty much only played Pathfinder from day one but since Season 21, he’s been an Alter main. He’s the only one I know, though, and most of the lobbies I’m in see me go up against legends from the first 10 seasons.
“I think Alter had the unfortunate case of being a character who has a lot of interplay with her team and coming out in a season that had the Solos mode [return] alongside [her],” McGuire said. “There’s very little synergy between the Solos mode and Alter, and I think a lot of people didn’t get a chance to fully experience what she could [add] to the equation. We’re seeing a rise in that now with some of the recent changes, and we’re hoping that that will continue for her moving forward. But yeah, we’re definitely shifting our mentality away from ‘How often can we get a new character in?’ to more of a, ‘What can we do to impact the game experience and make that stay as fresh as [possible] and important to the core of the game?'”
Moving away from a strategy of regularly adding new playable legends carries its own risks, of course. The most important–to me, anyway–being the narrative draw that they used to add, curating an experience that felt like a serial TV show that you needed to stay up to date with or pay attention to. New characters were a strong draw for new players and a powerful incentive for longtime players to stay glued into the game’s ecosystem.
“The shift [in our strategy] you’re seeing [in 2025] is constantly shifting and evolving,” Nikolich said. “It feels fresh and fun. I think [another] big [goal] is really helping players find the fun. As the game gets older, the player base gets more consolidated, and we love our hardcore audience, but they also [play a lot]–the skill floor has risen so high. As we’re bringing new players in, we really need to do a much better job helping [them] find the fun. Where we get better is that first five minutes. You’re like, ‘Yeah, I’m in. I love this.’ And you [could get] that really well [in the early seasons] where everyone was learning and you [could] have a good match pretty quickly. Now getting [your first] good match as a new player can be tough, and so we’re going to really focus on helping players find their fun over the next several seasons. Both now in [Season 24] and the next several splits.”
Apex Legends is available for Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, PS5, PS4, Switch, and PC.
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