If you somehow missed it, earlier this week Respawn unveiled some massive changes coming to Apex Legends in its upcoming Legacy season – the biggest being a new permanent game mode called Arenas. Set to run alongside Apex’s standard battle royale matches, Arenas has been described as the “first step” in moving Apex Legends beyond battle royale. And as it turns out, the first pitch document for Arenas was inspired by Auto Chess: a pretty surprising choice given that battle royales and auto chess, erm, aren’t particularly alike.
It all made me wonder what sort of wacky experiments Respawn is carrying out behind the scenes, and what we could potentially see next. Could it be single-player modes, co-op, gauntlet runs? So I decided to put this question to Respawn in an interview with chief operating manager and Apex Legends general manager Dusty Welch, and game director Chad Grenier. It seems that the Apex Legends team is keen to venture further into areas such as PvE – and pointed to previous Apex experiments as an example.
“We dipped our toes in a PvE mode a few seasons back with quests,” Grenier said. “And the team certainly loves to make that kind of content. A lot of our team comes from a single-player background… we made the single-player campaign in Titanfall 2.
“And so with all of the awesome legends and all the lore and storytelling that we’re doing, the team naturally I think would love to deliver some sort of content that’s like that, like single-player PvE content,” Grenier added.
It could be some time before we see more PvE elements in Apex, however, as Grenier said the team had chosen to focus on PvP in order to protect team health while working from home during the pandemic.
“…We’re always balancing team health, and making sure we’re not crunching,” Grenier said. “Because our focus is on PvP, we had to move away from that type of content for the time being. That’s not to say in the future that we might not see some kind of PvE or campaign or something like that. But right now, we’re not really focused on it – we’re thinking about how to continue with a PvP game and continue storytelling. They’re making awesome shorts like Northstar that was just released. But the desire is certainly there.”