Apex Legends director Chad Grenier refuses to crunch, while acknowledging that this could slow down updates to the game. The revelation comes shortly after Respawn made a quick change to its much-hated Season 7 Battle Pass.
With Apex Legends Season 7, Respawn implemented a few critical changes to how Battle Pass progression works. Instead of having different kinds of rewards that could’ve been slightly frustrating, the team decided to introduce stars as universal challenge rewards. To complete a single Battle Pass level, players need to collect a total of 10 stars, but it’s the overall slow progression towards these stars that makes the system utterly broken and hugely painful. The fan backlash was so vocal that Respawn had to roll down the changes a bit by making stars cost 5,000 experience points instead of 10,000, which is still a few times more compared to the previous Battle Passes.
In an extensive AMA thread on Reddit, Apex Legends developers from Respawn answered various questions from the community. Addressing the implemented Battle Pass progression changes, game director Chad Grenier told that there was a simple reason for making things generally slower. Previously, players tended to unlock the whole series of Battle Pass rewards only two-thirds into seasons, which left them unoccupied for the remaining third. Based on this data, Respawn’s intention with Season 7 was to engage players throughout the whole period. As spotted by Eurogamer, one of Reddit users accused the studio of not being able to deliver enough content to engage players, forcing them to grind more hours for the Battle Pass progression instead. Grenier fended the accusation off by saying that the team has doubled in size to satisfy the demand for new content. He also refused to crunch the team into working 15-hour shifts to deliver more content, saying that he would rather maintain healthy working conditions, which is part of why Apex Legends updates don't come as frequently as they do in some competing games.
Apex Legends players still can expect some new seasonal content coming this December with the returning festive Holo-Day Bash event. According to a few seemingly intentional leaks, the event is coming back alongside fan-favorite limited-time mode Winter Express. The LTM might already be undergoing internal testing, while respective reward badges are currently available in the game, according to players. This is without doubts an exciting piece of news, as the Winter Express mode was among the most widely loved ones with its clear emphasis on constant action accompanied by a cheery holiday soundtrack.
While the no-crunch policy is undoubtedly a favorable decision for the Apex Legends development team, the game does lack regular content - especially when compared to its direct competitors like Fortnite and Warzone. Both the aforementioned games receive new updates much more frequently, which ultimately does put Apex Legends at a disadvantage. Despite complaints from some players, though, the decision to slow down updates for the sake of the actual people behind them is the right call.
Apex Legends is available on PS4, Xbox One, and PC via Origin and Steam.
Source: rkrigney/Reddit
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