Apex Legends’ Season 3 Meltdown starts today. The free game update comes with a new map, “World’s Edge,” that features molten lava and icy drifts. There’s also a Snowpiercer-ish train running through the map. Season 3 also brings a new player character to buy, if that’s your thing. Crypto is a surveillance guy, so he comes with drones as well as a backstory nominally tied to the new map.
Most importantly, Season 3 arrives with an all new Battle Pass with 100 levels of skins, in-game funny money packs, emotes, and other unlockables. Get your icy-hot cosmetics right here!
Even as horror stories about months of brutal crunch, workers becoming stress casualties, and even employees dying at their desks from exhaustion, have popped up in the gaming industry again, the CEO of Respawn Entertainment decided to put his employees’ quality-of-life first. Speaking at GamesBeat Summit, (as reported by Gamasutra) Vince Zampella revealed that the studio plans to support Apex Legends with a seasonal release schedule to maintain his team’s work-life balance and level of production.
“The thought was ‘hey we kind of have something that’s blowing up here, do we want to start trying to drop more content?’ But I think you look at quality of life for the team. We don’t want to overwork the team, and drop the quality of the assets we’re putting out. We want to try and raise that.”
While Zampella did not directly call out BioWare, Epic Games or NetherRealm Studios for their recently publicized troubles, it’s hard not to contrast Respawn’s strategy with theirs. Although many in the community have criticized the recently released first Apex Legends Battle Pass for being light on content compared to its competitors, (a criticism the studio acknowledges) programmers and artists killing themselves to make more gun skins is probably not what anyone wants.
Respawn and Electronic Arts have published details of the Season 1 Battle Pass for Apex Legends. For about $10 in real-world money, you can have the opportunity to grind through 100 levels of rewards. If you diligently kill your way to the end of the pass content, you’ll win enough in-game cash to purchase the next Battle Pass, assuming it costs the same 950 Apex coins. Will there be enough earnable coins in Season 2 to buy Season 3 as well? Maybe we will all be playing the next hot Battle Royale game by then.
Apex Legends Season 1 Battle Pass: Wild Frontier begins tomorrow. There is a free track for cheapskates that offers a few consolation prizes.
