After much hype, many leaks and a whole bunch of rumors, the Apex Legends Season 1 Battle Pass is finally here. Entitled Wild Frontier, the pass offers you a chance to earn 100 unlocks just by playing the game. These include a couple of new skins, some Apex Coins (which can be put towards Season 2) and a whole bunch of badges, skill trackers and so on. Since its launch in early February, Respawn has received nothing but good press for their latest release, but it looks like the honeymoon period is over, as players are distinctly underwhelmed by the contents of Season 1. And, in my opinion, they’re right to be.
100 unlockable rewards sounds good on paper, but when so many of them are tiny cosmetic alterations, it’s difficult not to feel at least a little short-changed. That’s probably why Respawn is engaging in some mild damage control, explaining that this Battle Pass is actually supposed to be underwhelming.
Here’s Product Manager Lee Horn on their thinking behind it:
Our first Battle Pass is all about letting you continue to learn and experiment with the core Apex Legends experience while earning awesome loot at the same time. You’ll notice the first version isn’t built around a complex quest system where you need to do a 720 backflip off of Watchtower Artemis and get two Wingman headshots before hitting the ground. While we think there’s really cool design space in quests and challenges for future Battle Passes, we wanted the initial version to allow our players to just play and learn the game.
The obvious counter-argument to this is that if you wanted to focus on the core Apex Legends experience you could just not bother with the Battle Pass at all. After all, the only really substantial new addition is new Legend Octane, and he can be purchased separately. Fortunately for Respawn, they’ve built up such a lot of goodwill with the game that some fans are eager to reward them by throwing their money away on this.
Also, I guess I can understand why this Battle Pass doesn’t introduce huge content changes. The Apex Legends community is still growing, with new players learning the ropes of the game every single day. Bringing in a ton of unfamiliar complexity might stunt the growth going forward and turn off people from diving in.
All that being said, I think Apex Legends is a brilliant game (especially considering it’s F2P) and I like that you can purchase Season 2 using the Apex Coins that you earn by completing Season 1. Still, no one can deny that the vast majority of unlocks in this Battle Pass are utterly worthless, so if you do get it, temper your excitement.