Respawn Teases New Maps And Modes For Apex Legends

Any game developed by the incredibly talented Respawn would be worthy of attention (if you haven’t checked out Titanfall 2‘s astonishing single-player campaign, you really should). But few expected Apex Legends would land as hard as it did.

In just under a week we’ve seen a slew of news stories breathlessly reporting on its ballooning player count: a million, then ten million and yesterday, it was revealed that a whopping twenty-five million people have now turned up to see what all the fuss is about. I’m betting the vast majority of them won’t be disappointed, either.

After all, Apex Legends is a cut above most battle royale multiplayer shooters, from its punchy guns to its cool team mechanics to the kinetic way your character navigates the maps. With the studio explaining that they have plans for the game to continue for another decade, players have been wondering just what they have up their sleeve, and now we know.

Some have taken to data-mining the code, which has revealed that we’re probably getting solo and duo team modes (as opposed to the three-man teams right now), as well as ranked combat. But a more long-range vision comes courtesy of Respawn CEO Vince Zampella, who was asked by Venturebeat what’s in the pipeline and said:

“This is just the start of our journey. There will be new maps, new modes, new characters, new weapons, new skins. There will be a ton of stuff coming over the next year to 10, maybe. It depends on how successful it is.”

I’m particularly interested to see how they approach the new maps: whether they’ll take the Fortnite route of iterating and evolving the same map or have genuinely different environments to fight in. The current Apex Legends map is a great bit of design, but on occasion, it can feel a bit brown and desaturated. Being able to play in a variety of neat sci-fi environments sounds like just the ticket though to give this game some serious legs.