Season 16 of Apex Legends brings with it many changes, so much that we could almost name this new patch like Chapter 2 of Battle Royale. We take stock just below.
[Mis à jour le 13 février 2023 à 15h14] After TSM’s victory at the Apex World Championships a few days ago, one could sense an air of renewal in the Apex Legends community. After three months of an almost prison season 15 for players and pros alike, Respawn has finally announced all the new features that have built its next season: Festivities. This sixteenth chapter in one of the most competitive Battle Royale today aims to reforge a game experience seen and reviewed, and offer players new ways to start, improve, and simply play. We explain it to you just below.
With the second part of the ranked game split already well under way, Respawn has finally brought us Season 16 of Apex Legends. Revelry should arrive on February 14th next, a date that coincides with the habits of Respawn Entertainment, which tends to upload each new season on Tuesdays around 7 p.m.French time.
Season 16 will be a time for Respawn to continue to deepen its matchmaking formula in order to offer more balanced games to its players. The studio has already claimed to put in place some new solutions which should be deployed in 2023. The split of ranked games will start from scratch on Olympus or Canyon des Rois. And a new legend was to join the fight, and according to recent leaks, it should have been Ballistic.
A big change in this Festivities season is the complete overhaul of the game’s class system. The 23 legends will now be divided into five distinct classes: scoutcontroller, assaultflanker and support. Each of these classes will get a universal passive between the different legends. The supports will be able for example to craft the banners of their comrades even after the end of their dexpiry date:
- Support (Lifeline, Loba, Gibraltar, Newcastle): Can craft banners in crafters even after banner expires. Have special crates that include healing items.
- Assault (Fuse, Maggie, Ashe, Bangalore, Revenant): Can open special crates that include attachments for their weapons.
- Flanker (Mirage, Pathfinder, Valkyrie, Horizon, Octane, Wraith): Can see which is the most important item in a package when it falls from the sky.
- Pathfinder (Crypto, Bloodhound, Seer, Vantage): Can use Command Centers to track enemy locations on the map for 30 seconds.
- Controller (Catalyst, Caustic, Wattson, Rampart): Can use scan beacons to find the position of the next area.
A new weapon arrives with season 16, it is the Nemesis, an all-new assault rifle with energy bullets and a high rate of fire. The weapon should fire in bursts and is of course expected in the hands of controller players. We also now know that the Team Deathmatch or Team Deathmatch mode will make its permanent entry into the game, having benefited from the work provided by the Control and Arena modes. The latter will unfortunately definitely disappear from the game.
Finally, the last part of this patch is about game balancing. Respawn definitely wants to say goodbye to meta scanning, and has completely changed how Bloodhound and Seer work. The two legends who had become essential in ranked games and at very high level see their mechanics upset, and their power reduced. Bloodhound’s scan will only show enemies for 1 second instead of 3 while Seer’s passive will be audible to other players and will now only show enemies’ heart rate (plus their position relative to the cursor).
You can learn more about Apex Legends Season 16 at Respawn official website.
Although Apex Legends already has its own anti-cheat system in the form of Easy AntiCheat, some discussions on the Electronic Arts side have reached our ears about an upcoming deepening of player protection measures. This change, long believed to come in the form of Hyperion, software that protects applications from outside software influence (including Strikepacks and Cronus), will finally come in the form of an all-new anticheat. called “kernel”, ie acting at the base of Windows. Successfully employed by Valorant, this solution could well reduce the diabolical growth of the number of cheaters on Apex Legends recently, and even prevent users of Strikepacks and Cronus from using their recoil control tools or rapid fire, at the Fortnite way. These changes could arrive in the coming months.
It was requested when the game was released in 2019, crossplay was finally implemented on Apex Legends in October 2020, and has since been active by default on all platforms. It does not affect your solo games, but defines the type of players you encounter when playing in squads with your friends. If you are all on the same platform, the players in front of you should mostly use the same console. If you are on different consoles, your lobbies will be populated by a mix of players from different platforms. Console players can optionally disable crossplay in game options.