Interview with Respawn Entertainment: Discovering what is new for Apex Legends
Part of the recent hands on session with Apex Legends Legacy, the upcoming update for the now two year old game, was a chance to ask questions of the developers.
The folks from Respawn Entertainment, who were willing to speak with myself and other media folks from around the country and Asia, were:
Chad Grenier, Game Director
Ashley Reed, Senior Game Writer
Robert West, Arenas Designer
Dave Osei, Lead Level Designer for Arenas Maps/Olympus
Daniel Klein, Lead Game Designer for Valkyrie
You will see their names below, or just initials, so have a read and while not all were asked by myself, I can claim over 30% of them, so read on my friends.
Q. Knowing the Legends have certain abilities best for Battle Royale, were there any challenges in making the experience balanced in Arenas?
Robert West: Yeah definitely, different game modes mean that different abilities are going to come in to play and be better or worse, depending on the mode. We didn’t want to make the abilities different at all, between the two and what we ended up using was the store, as a tune in and way of balancing in terms of cost. Bloodhounds scan ability is pretty strong, so it might cost some amount, where as Pathfinder’s grapple is going to be a little bit cheaper and you get more uses out of it, so we ended up going that route for balance.
Q. Will Pathfinders’ passive ability, have any use in Arenas?
RW: There are no survey beacons in Arenas.
Daniel Klein: Adding onto that, Pathfinder doesn’t currently have his own passive ability in Battle Royale and that’s been something we have been tracking for a while. I don’t have a timeline for you, I can’t make any promises, but my goal is to give Pathfinder a passive ability that is unique and separate from the recon passives down the line, in both the main Battle Royale and Arenas.
Q. Seeing as how abilities are being tied to the store, will there be any new general abilities that can be purchased and used by any Legend, or are you sticking to character specific options?
RW: Character specific abilities, the general stuff will be the weapons, along with grenades that you can buy.
DK: You will be able to buy the gold backpack ability in the store.
RW: Which for those that don’t remember, will give you more health and armour when you revive someone.
Q. Arenas seems like a great mode to feature Titans, has the team considered this?
DK: I’ll take that one, No. The answer to that is no, there will not be Titans in Apex Legends. Our combat, abilities, everything is designed for human scale combat, so Titans have no place in this, sorry.
Q. Will there be Rank options for the Arenas game mode?
RW: Right from the launch of the Legacy update, you can play Arenas in the regular mode and get used to it and in a future update, we’re going to focus on a full ranked mode and all the trimmings that you would expect around that.
Q. What about match making, will the Arenas mode support custom rooms?
RW: I mean that’s a cool idea, there are no plans for it at the moment, but I can definitely see something like that being of interest.
Q. Can you confirm the number of Arena maps that will be available from the start?
Dave Osei: Sure, so we have two custom maps, Party Crasher and Phase Runner and one or more Battle Royale locations will be used as Arena maps. There will be three that you can play on at once, rotating throughout the playlist, and that BR map will end up rotating every two weeks, to one of the three already mentioned, so it will start with Artillery, probably go to Thermal Station I believe and then Golden Gardens and then repeat back to the start.
Q. Will Skull Town make it into the Arenas rotation?
DO: Maybe…
RW: I thought it got blown up?
DO: Yeah, how would that work?
Q. Are there any plans to allow for community tournaments on all platforms? Because private matches are currently only available on PC.
Chad Grenier: We definitely want to offer private matches for all of our players, as you mentioned we do have a private match feature that we is currently by invitation only, that’s how we host our ASGL tournaments. But we are investing sometime in making that a public facing feature, it requires some work to allow it to scale at large, to allow for it, so in the future, we are hoping to allow for private matches, at some point.
Q. In the buy round of Arenas, can you mark weapons as favourites, to allow for faster buying?
RW: Not right now no, but that is something that we have talked about and would be cool, just that quality of life feature.
Q. Is it possible to buy items in Arenas, for your teammates?
RW: You can buy items and drop them, there is no real incentive to do so, as you get a lot of materials at the start of each round and you won’t find any situations where you have a surplus of money and your teammate doesn’t, so you want to buy weapons for them. Everyone’s going to have more or less the same amount, when you grab a material canister, everyone on your team gets it, so that’s even. The only small difference might come from kills, but that doesn’t add up to a lot, so if you feel like you want to buy for your teammates, you can, but you should always have enough to just focus on you.
Q. Will there be any changes to existing maps, to accommodate the vertical gameplay changes that Valkyrie brings to Apex Legends?
DO: As of right now no, we have certain player metrics in how we create out maps, so all Legends are viable, so that is something we will keep in mind, for how we accommodate future Legends and their verticality, so it is something we are thinking about, but as of right now, no.
Q. Given how much lore is being created for the game, expanding from the Titanfall series, has there been consideration in creating stories outside of the game, ie novels or comics?
Ashley Reed: We are actually already doing that, we have the Lore book that came out earlier this year, that has a lot of stories about the different characters. We also have the Dark Horse comics coming out, this Winter and we’re always looking for new ways to tell those stories, because people are really hungry for them and we are really excited that players are excited, so we are always looking at new stuff we can do. So we do have some stuff out there and we are hoping to tell you about more in the coming months.
Q. With the addition Valkyrie, was there talk about tying her into the Norse mythology, given her callsign, or was it just a cool sounding name?
AR: We definitely talked about it, our characters go through a lot of different iterations, as we are thinking about them. I wasn’t around when the initial concept of Valkyrie was created, so she may have been an actual Norse Valkyrie, who knows. But we have thought about how can we embrace that in the future, possible cosmetics and such, not promising anything in particular, but our minds are churning, in how we can apply that stuff.
Q. With the game now released on Switch, has that platform driven any changes to the plans for Legacy, or is the Legacy content still the same?
CG: It’s the same, so we added Switch and we intend to keep feature parody, so we don’t really think about adding or changing any of our content based on some platform. We have this awesome plans and prototypes, cool Legends and other things that we’re working on and more platforms just means players get to play it, so yeah, didn’t change any plans at all. It is one more build we have to make, for more testing.
Q. With Arena maps, have you considered really out their locales, like competing spaceships or deep-sea research labs?
DO: Yes, there is no limit to the locations that we can think of for Arenas, well, there are some, I’m sure Ashley has some narrative ones, but yeah, we have thought of some places, but as of right now, these are the ones that came to the top, they are the ones that we wanted to release and in the future we will release more, so look forward to them.
A big thanks to the folks from Respawn for answering the questions and while they have provided some details, more information will come when the Legacy update hits on May 4.
