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Future Apex Legends Characters May Have 'Useless' Abilities in Arenas

By Noam Radcliffe

Respawn's lead character designer says battle royale will always be the team's primary design concern for balance.
Respawn's lead character designer says battle royale will always be the team's primary design concern for balance. / Photo courtesy of Respawn Entertainment/EA

A designer on Apex Legends has confirmed that Respawn Entertainment is working on a Legend they don't expect to release until 2023 and whose abilities likely won't apply to Arenas "at all."

Speaking in an interview with streamer Raynday, lead character designer Daniel Klein said that the battle royale mode will remain Respawn's priority for the foreseeable future, even to the point that Legends have abilities that are useless in Arenas.

"The big question is, are we going to start balancing or designing for Arenas? It's very rare that there's a clear, 100% answer, but the answer is 100% no. We are designing for the BR," Klein said. "That should be the only thing on our mind when we make a character, to the point that there are characters that straight up do not have passives in Arenas, and we're perfectly ok with that."

Klein said the Legend tentatively set for release in 2023 will likely be an example of that balance philosophy playing out.

"They have some really, really cool abilities that just will not apply to Arenas gameplay at all, and that's fine. We're absolutely ok with that. As long as there's something they can do in Arenas, we know we can balance for that something."

In Klein's view, Apex has two tracks: the battle royale and the experimental game modes of which Arenas is a harbinger. Although there likely won't be another Arenas-style experiment for a while, it's an exciting way for the team to stretch the solid foundational mechanics of Apex into new game modes.

"I think that the other track that we started with Arenas — and there's not going to be anything in that track for a while, but — [is] experimenting with what else can we do with the stuff that's really, really cool about Apex. The characters, the movement model, the weapons, the weapon feel. We sort of have a diamond on our hands here, that we've only been using the BR so far. And, like I said, the BR is going to continue being the most important thing to us, but there are other things you can do with that really, really cool set of gameplay mechanics."

Klein didn't provide any more details about the 2023 Legend, and was careful to say the team's current plans for that character may not work out.

Apex Legends' last Legend, Valkyrie, arrived at the start of Season 9 on May 4.

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