Apex Legends Season 9 Legacy Hands-On Preview

I’ve been playing Apex Legends since the release of Season 2 back in July 2019, though I wouldn’t get into it properly until Season 5. Since then, I’ve been closely following the game at every Season launch, even staying up all night with a friend on the eve of Season 7’s launch in order to grind ranked on the final day of Season 6 and then try out the new map, Olympus, the following day. So when I was invited to join EA and Respawn in a special first-look and early hands-on experience for their biggest update yet, to say I was stoked would be a bit of an understatement. 

The past year has been massive for Apex Legends. A launch on Steam & Switch, coupled with crossplay, has seen a huge rise in players, and just recently the game reached 100 million unique players. The game has seen a plethora of Limited Time Events, along with changes to the meta that came with the introduction of new Legends, and a new map Olympus. Now, Respawn is showing no signs of slowing down, with the introduction of a new Legend that allows for incredible map-wide mobility for the whole team, a rework of the Olympus map, a brand new game mode that is here to stay, and the introduction of the most ambitious weapon seen in the game yet.

The event started with an hour-long presentation, in which members of the Apex development team Chad Grenier, Ashley Reed, Daniel Klien, Dave Osei and Robert West talk us through the various stages of new additions that are coming to Apex Legends, ranging from the new level design, how the new Legend Valkyrie functions, weaving the lore of Titanfall into the game and balancing the brand new 3v3 mode called Arenas.

As with most map reworks, the changes to Olympus stem from studying a pattern of drop locations, map choke points and common fighting grounds. These findings found that the crosswords between Bonsai Plaza and Orbital Cannon (in the south-eastern part of the map) was a scarcely landed zone that was a sniper’s haven and resulted in many frustrating end-games due to the large deadzone it provided. It is with this in mind that Olympus now features the Icarus, a docked carrier ship that brought with it an unknown plant that is now spreading into the surrounding area. The new location offers a brand new fight location, takes out a large deadzone, and helps tell the story of what is happening in Season 9 of Apex Legends. To go with this change, two redeploy balloons (also known as jump towers) have been removed, one of which from Bonsai Plaza itself, as the presence of the Icarus carrier now allows for easier on-foot rotation. 

It wouldn’t be a new Apex Legends season without a new Legend, and Season 9 brings a Legend that ties Apex even closer to the sister franchise, Titanfall, with the introduction of Valkyrie, the daughter of Titanfall 2 character Viper. Valkyrie is a recon character, the first to be added in a year and a half since Crypto arrived in Season 3. She brings with her heightened mobility for her and her whole team with her VTOL Jets & Skyward Dive, as well as good combat potential with her Missile Swarm. Her passive, VTOL Jets, is essentially a jetpack that allows her great vertical mobility at the cost of leaving herself temporarily defenseless. Her Missile Swarm allows her to blanket a small area with micro-missiles, doing small amounts of damage and leaving enemies stunned, making them easy targets. Her ultimate, Skyward Dive, allows her teammates to grapple onto her as she blasts off into the sky. From here, she enters a skydive with the attached team members and can easily reposition them all across the map. Additionally, she has the passive ability to scan targets that she has a line of sight on when she’s in a skydive, allowing her to quickly assess if a location is safe to land or if a dropzone already has activity. Her ability to reposition her whole team is a completely unrivaled mobility power that is likely to shake up the meta at higher ranks, as well as her Missile Swarm making a great opener for a fight. Overall, Valkyrie is looking to sit comfortably among the rest of the cast of Apex Legends, and I’m interested in seeing how her playstyle evolves as the playerbase gets more creative with her abilities. 

Speaking of getting creative, Season 9 comes with the most unique weapon Apex Legends has seen yet: the Bocek Bow. In the words of Lead Game Designer Daniel Klein, ‘If we were adding another assault rifle or SMG to the game, I would probably be here telling you why you should care[..] but with a bow, I don’t have to sell this. Bows are cool.’ Klein couldn’t be more right, and the Bocek certainly feels like a beast in your hands. With a damage-per-shot that outmatches sniper rifles and a wicked-accurate hipfire, the Bocek is a weapon that excels in both short and long-range combat. The Bocek fires arrows, which can be found in standard loot areas but can also be collected off the ground/walls and even enemies after you’ve killed them if they had any arrows stuck in them. The Bocek brings two new hop-ups with it — Shatter Caps and Deadeye’s Tempo. Shatter Caps is a hop-up that also can be put on the 30-30 repeater that instead turns your shots into a scatter-pattern, effectively turning the weapon into a sort of shotgun. The Deadeye’s Tempo is a downright terrifying hop-up for the Bocek and the Sentinel that increases rate of fire if you shoot at the perfect moment. This window is rather generous, and if you have the arrows to spare, it turns the Bocek into a laser beam of pure chaos. All in all, the Bocek is an innovative addition to the weapons in Apex Legends, though I will not be surprised if it gets nerfed in some form based on feedback during the preview event, because in the right hands this thing absolutely destroys. Running this with a Tempo hop-up, coupled with how accurate the hipfire is, makes this weapon devastating in the hands of a skilled player, and even an average one can find themselves surviving perilous situations because they had the Bocek on their side.

Now the crème de la crème; Season 9 brings a brand new gamemode to Apex Legends that is here to stay - Arenas. A 3v3 gamemode where two teams battle amongst familiar and new locations in a first to three match that, thanks to overtimes & match points, can last anywhere from three to nine rounds. It was always Respawn Entertainment’s goal to move Apex beyond a battle royale, and the arrival of Arena is the first major step in that direction. They stressed in the presentation that battle royale is still the central focus of Apex Legends, but that Arena is still a valid and thought-provoking addition to the game and a step in the direction of something larger for the franchise. 

Balance was something that needed to be accounted for in Arena’s, as some Legend abilities would just be too overbearing in a raw 3v3 situation that Arena offers. As such, weapons, abilities, consumables and throwables are all purchased at the start of each round using crafting materials. Unspent materials are carried over to the next round, but anything you buy is not — even if you win the round. This removes the RNG that is often prevalent in the BR mode and adds an important level of economy management; overbuying to guarantee a win on a round may just cost you the next. You can upgrade your weapons’ attachments by using additional crafting materials, and every Legend’s ability has a limited number of uses, which you can also increase by investing materials into it. You can additionally purchase one use of your ultimate for a round, although some Legends can not do this on round one. All this culminates to balance the more combat-based abilities in this mode without changing the fundamentals of how they work, which was a big concern for Respawn when they were designing this mode, because balance for a battle royale and balance for a 3v3 mode is so fundamentally different. Thankfully, they seem to have found an effective strategy with the crafting materials system. 

When I first saw Arena, I was worried it would quickly grow stale, like some of the other modes that focussed solely on smaller fighters (such as the Winter Express mode), but I honestly had a blast with it. There are currently three maps available in Arena; one is a copy of Artillery from King’s Canyon, Phase Runner is a small, experimental phase runner on the same planet as World’s Edge, and Party Crasher is the result of the Mirage Voyage crash-landing into a downtown plaza on Olympus. The maps are surprisingly large for a 3v3 mode, but this helps make some more overbearing Legend abilities (such as Gibraltar’s ultimate) less overwhelming and overall accurately mirrors how combat in Apex Legends BR mode flows, so this is a feature that works greatly in their favour. During the presentation video for Arena, the buy menu showed an additional weapon that so far has not been discussed or announced, even during the demonstration: the CAR SMG, a staple weapon from Titanfall. Respawn have a tendency to find sneaky ways to tease upcoming content, such as when Loba could be seen loitering in the menu background in Season 4 or when the Sentinel could be seen when previewing one of Crypto’s finishers, a full season before the gun was actually in the game, so this could be a sneaky taste of what to expect from the future after Season 9.

Alongside the bigger chunks of the new content, there’s a few more cosmetic changes and additions coming, namely with the introduction of Emotes. Each character has one emote, and more can be found in Apex Packs or purchased using crafting metals. The emotes put you into third person, but feature an anti-peeking mechanic, so anything that isn’t in your characters line of sight won’t be rendered. It didn’t seem to work to that effect when I used them in-game, but it could just be a change that will be in the live-build (not all planned changes, specifically Legend buffs/nerfs were present). My personal favourite emote, and the one that I’m going to irritate my friends with for days to come, is the ‘Easter Egg’ Wattson emote, where she puts a small Nessy on a ground that will then remain on the floor even after the animation is complete. So obviously, even in mid-fights, I would put a Nessy down on the floor to make sure she had a good view of the action. I wish with all my heart I could show you this, but the Embargo Gods reached down to me and forbid it, so you’re going to have to see this in action for yourself on launch. 

Overall, Season 9, titled Legacy, is looking to be the greatest season for Apex Legends yet. With a long list of balance changes for almost every Legend, weapon changes and a new weapon entering the Care Package rotations, the quality of life changes this season will bring will definitely positively affect the game’s longevity even before you look at all the new content coming with a revamped Olympus and brand new game mode. Respawn has high ambitions for Apex Legends, and despite the game hitting its second year just a few months ago, this feels like only the beginning. Season 9 - Legacy will begin for Apex Legends on 4th May 2021.