EARespawn’s free to play battle royale Apex Legends has already gotten off to an astounding start, which has left me super excited to see what they come up with for the game down the road.
We’ve already heard unofficial talk of Solos and Duos modes thanks to dataminers, while an official EA/Respawn roadmap promises new characters and loot will be introduced in seasonal instalments.
EAWhile all of these inclusions sound great, what I (and I think plenty of others) really want to know is how Respawn plans to develop the Apex Legends map. Will we have a Fortnite style map that constantly evolves, or a number of different battlefields to choose from, like in PUBG?
As it turns out, we’ll be getting the latter approach. That’s according to a new interview with Venturebeat, in which Respawn boss Vince Zampella discussed the development of current map King’s Canyon and the changes it went through before release.
Zampella explained that the King’s Canyon map felt just the right size for 60 player mayhem, but acknowledged that bigger maps could release down the line.
He said:
We tried bigger. We tried smaller. And again, some of that will probably change over time. We’ll probably release other maps that are bigger if we decide they’re fun. This was just the — as we started playing and growing and shrinking, this number felt right.
EAZampella recently revealed that Apex Legends soared to a staggering 25 million players in the space of a week, with a concurrent peak of 2 million.
While I can’t imagine EA or Respawn were quite prepared for this level of success, I suspect both companies are already hard at work trying to figure out how to keep the hype going. Hopefully that means fairly regular new content.
Ewan Moore is a journalist at UNILAD Gaming who still quite hasn’t gotten out of his mid 00’s emo phase. After graduating from the University of Portsmouth in 2015 with a BA in Journalism & Media Studies (thanks for asking), he went on to do some freelance words for various places, including Kotaku, Den of Geek, and TheSixthAxis, before landing a full time gig at UNILAD in 2016.