Apex Legends – Season 4 Patch Notes | Map Updates

Jason McCord, Design Director on Apex Legends explain the incoming update. With Apex Legends Season 4 - Assimilation fast approaching, I wanted to share with you some of the design decisions that drove the Season 4 map updates to World's Edge. Our main goal for a map update, on the design side, is to get players to make new decisions. By the end of a season, you probably have your favorite spot, or spots, to land. You might prefer to rotate out of your drop location in a certain direction which in turns makes a lot of your games feel similar as the season progresses. Our goal as Designers is to offer new ways for you to approach the game, and in this case the map, so that each drop, rotation, and gunfight feels as fresh as possible. Here are a few things we're doing in Season 4 to hopefully help achieve that.

The Planet Harvester As you drop into World's Edge, you'll immediately see the Planet Harvester, which Hammond Robotics are using to gather precious metals from the core of the planet for reasons unknown. The red beam can be seen from the entire island, giving players a better sense of directionality and understanding of the center of the map. Anyone who has played Season 3 of World’s Edge knows that Fuel Depot can be scary, especially in late-game. Because this POI is the center of the map, changing this location gives players more opportunity to experience the new content more often. With its large, multi-level design the Planet Harvester is unlike anything else on World's Edge and brings exciting new gameplay options to the game. Fights are largely self-contained as squads will tend to enter the fight through the long hallways that lead to the center of the structure. This should make 3rd parties a little more predictable and hopefully easier to defend against. Considering the unstable, volcanic nature of World’s Edge, it’s no surprise that the Planet Harvester has caused giant lava-filled faults to rupture, splitting Capitol City in two.

Capitol City Splits in Two Capitol City was the biggest POI in Season 3, getting the most action right out of the ship. By sending the fissure straight through Capitol City and creating some dead space in between (swallowing up one of the construction buildings as well), we essentially split this area into two separate zones for players to land in and loot: Fragment East and Fragment West. The large fissure can only be crossed in two locations (a zipline, or a fallen skyscraper bridge). This allows teams some breathing room to control one side after the drop, reducing the risk of running into 3rd parties from the other side of the city. Is the construction site too hot for you? Land in Fragment East and use a Wattson or a Caustic to control the choke points for extra security. Of course, Pathfinder and Octane can both use their ultimates to get their teams across at any location. The Updraft The original design of the new fissure had players drop to their death if they had the misfortune of missing a jump. We wanted this gap to matter - for players to fight across and control the bridges as the only way across. This let certain Legends shine (Pathfinder / Octane for crossing, Caustic / Wattson for defending) and created some intense firefights when the ring was approaching. The problem was, a fatal fall felt too punishing. The last thing we wanted was players avoiding the new map changes because they had an unfair experience. Now, if you jump into the fissure that cuts through Capitol City you’ll slowly be carried back up from the heated, pressurized air, and allowed to coast across and land on the other side. This is balanced by two things. First, you take 25 damage from the intense heat and embers floating inside. This is a consistent amount of damage every time you drop back down. Second, you travel very slowly, in third person, while moving in the updraft. You are essentially a flying loot piñata for any nearby enemy players. Competitive integrity is always a big factor while designing new features, and our main concern with this feature was allowing players to escape fights they are losing by sliding into the fissure and sailing away. We think the damage and slow rise make players respect the gap while in a firefight, while, in calmer moments, allowing players to have fun and experiment with this new space without the risk of immediate death.

Survey Camp This is a new, small POI in the snowy fields between the Epicenter and Skyhook. This is another camp created to relieve the pressure of locations like Capitol City, Refinery and Epicenter. It also creates some potentially new rotations, like moving through the train tunnel to get to Skyhook. Because this is a small POI, we wanted to give it a little more of a draw. For this reason, we created Weapon Racks.

Weapon Racks These are guaranteed weapons placed on racks in the small buildings of Survey Camp. You’ll recognize them from Training or the Firing Range. his should give players who prioritize a good weapon over a premier drop location a new decision to make. We’re always excited to try flipping Battle Royale rules on their heads, and we look forward to seeing how this feature influences where players drop. With these updates, as well as a new Town Takeover coming later in Season 4, we hope you are as excited to play the new World’s Edge as we are!

PATCH NOTES

New Battle Pass

Over 100 exclusive items including Legendary skins, Apex Packs, Loading screens, Music Packs, and more! Check out everything in the Season 4 battle pass here.

New Legend: Revenant

Consumed by hate and obsessed with revenge, Revenant uses unnatural abilities to haunt his enemies and defy death.

• Passive: Stalker - You crouch walk faster and can climb higher up walls.
• Tactical: Silence - Throw a device that deals damage and disables enemy abilities for 10 seconds
• Ultimate: Death Totem - Drop a totem that protects users from death. Instead of getting killed or downed, you will return to the totem [with X health]
• Low Profile -Revenant takes +5% damage.

New Weapon: Sentinel Sniper Rifle

The Sentinel is a bolt action sniper rifle, effective at medium to long range. If a player presses the "fire select" with a shield battery equipped, the Sentinel will consume the shield battery from your inventory and temporarily enters an energized state. While energized, the Sentinel fires projectiles that deal massive damage to shields. The projectiles use different VFX trails, and there is a unique energized firing sound, so all nearby players know that the Sentinel is firing these higher damage projectiles. The Sentinel has a limited amount of energy that decays slowly over time, and loses a big chunk of juice for each shot. Once the energy runs out, the energized state ends.

Map Update

Our main goal for a map update, on the design side, is to get players to make new decisions. By the end of a season, you probably have your favorite spot, or spots, to land. You might prefer to rotate out of your drop location in a certain direction which in turns makes a lot of your games feel similar as the season progresses. Our goal as designers is to offer new ways for you to approach the game, and in this case the map, so that each drop, rotation, and gunfight feels as fresh as possible. Here are a few things we're doing in Season 4 to hopefully help achieve that. You can read the full details of the changes in our blog here and you can check out the highlights below:

• The Planet Harvester: With its large, multi-level design the Planet Harvester is unlike anything else on World's Edge and brings exciting new gameplay options to the game.
• Capitol City Split in Two: Capitol City was the biggest POI in Season 3, getting the most action right out of the ship. By sending the fissure straight through Capitol City and creating some dead space in between (swallowing up one of the construction buildings as well), we essentially split this area into two separate zones for players to land in and loot: Fragment East and Fragment West.
• The Updrafts: If you jump into the fissure that cuts through Capitol City you’ll slowly be carried back up from the heated, pressurized air, and allowed to coast across and land on the other side. This is balanced by two things. First, you take 25 damage from the intense heat and embers floating inside. This is a consistent amount of damage every time you drop back down. Second, you travel very slowly, in third person, while moving in the updraft.
• Survey Camp:This is a new, small POI in the snowy fields between the Epicenter and Skyhook.
• Weapon Racks: These are guaranteed weapons placed on racks in the small buildings of Survey Camp. You’ll recognize them from Training or the Firing Range. This should give players who prioritize a good weapon over a premier drop location a new decision to make.

Ranked Series 3

• Moving to Splits per season, ~6 weeks of ranked play before a reset
• Adding Master Tier, Apex Predator becomes top 500 players by platform.
• Soft reset and scoring are the same, but soft reset is every split.
• Dive trails will be moving to a seasonal reward model, but Series 1 & 2 players are grandfathered in.
• The update to how assists are scored in Series 3 also applies to Revenant’s Silence ability.

Anniversary Login Gift

• For the first week of Season 4 - Assimilation (Feb 4, 2020 - Feb 11, 2020), anyone who logs in during that time will receive the Anniversary Gift, which includes:
• Year 1 Origami Flyer charm (if you’ve got any ideas for cotton, please let us know)
• Year 1 Loyalty badge
• 10k XP for your first match of the day (available each day)
• The Loyalty badge comes in 3 different flavors depending on when you took your first leap from the drop ship, so feel free to flex on all your latecomer buddies.

Loot

• New Sniper Ammo: [10 shots per pickup] - Our goal here is to create a deeper, more balanced long-range meta. Since snipers shared ammo types with SMGs and LMGs, there wasn't a great way to put ammo scarcity on sniper rifles without really penalizing the more ammo hungry weapons that used the same ammo type. So for Season 4 we’ve added a new class of ammo that only applies to Sniper Rifles that we hope will have players being careful about the shots they take and limit how long they can pressure targets at long range before having to reposition.
• All snipers now take new ammo type:
  • Sentinel
  • Longbow DMR
  • TripleTake
  • Charge Rifle [now uses 1 sniper ammo per shot. Magazine holds 4 shots]
• New attachment: Extended magazine for Sniper ammo.
• Energy Ammo: Now gives 30 ammo per pickup instead of 20. Most ammo players pick up comes from packs that spawn next to energy weapons on the ground. Now that there are only 2 energy ammo weapons in Apex, we needed to up the ammo per brick to keep energy ammo from being too scarce.
• Removed Loot: The following items have been removed from the game
  • Turbocharger hop-up
  • Extended mags for energy ammo [this change went out earlier than intended in the last update and should make sense with other changes in this patch but we wanted to include it here as well for players returning for Season 4 that were not aware].
• Gold Backpack: UI update to better convey to the player when they are using or being revived with the perk.

Weapons

We want to shift up what weapons are the strongest. Also, we're aiming to reduce the power of some weapons that seem too strong and give a little boost to some weapons that haven't been performing as well as we'd like.

Update to Ironsight Accuracy

Apex guns move around subtly while ADS -- they rotate and sway as you move your aim, they bob up and down and side to side while moving, etc. We have special tech that makes sure the reticle on the optics stays centered even as the gun moves around a bit. However, until season 4, the ironsights on weapons didn't have this tech. That meant that the ironsights reticles could move around with the weapon and actually be slightly inaccurate -- they wouldn't point at the screen center where the next shot would fire. With season 4, we have updated most of the weapons' ironsights to properly stay centered now. Not all ironsights are upgraded yet, but we will be updating the remaining weapons as this season progresses. The weapons that will be updated for Season 4 are:

• Longbow DMR
• TripleTake
• Charge Rifle
• Sentinel Sniper Rifle
• Havoc
• R-301
• Flatline
• Spitfire LMG
• R-99
• Alternator
• Mozambique
• Mastiff
• RE-45
• Wingman

G7 Scout Moved from Sniper to the Assault Rifle class.

• Now only accepts AR optics and attachments [including barrel stabilizers and stock].
• Still accepts Double Tap hop-up.
• Contributes to progress for stats/challenges for AR’s moving forward.
• Reduced fire rate 4.5 -> 4.0
• Increasing time between shots for double tap 0.425 -> 0.475
• Fixed bug where G7 had 0 ADS air spread, making it the only gun that was perfectly accurate on ziplines, etc.

L-STAR The L-STAR is no longer a crate weapon and can now be found around the map.

• Uses energy ammo.
• Reloading has been removed and the L-STAR will overheat after sustained fire so best to fire in short bursts to manage overheating and recoil.
• Damage reduced per shot 19 -> 18
• Rate of Fire decreased 12 -> 10
• Less horizontal viewkick when the weapon fires.

Devoltion The Devotion was chosen to go into the crate for a couple of reasons. Mainly 1) it is an energy ammo LMG, and so is the L-STAR and 2) data shows us that a fully kitted Devotion is actually one of the strongest weapons in the game, and could work at crate power level.

• Removed from normal loot pool and is now a crate weapon.
• Magazine size: 54
• Total ammo stock: 162
• Turbocharger functionality.

Havoc With the removal of turbocharger, we wanted to buff the base havoc. Most notably, we are reducing horizontal recoil and making it easier to control.

• No longer accepts the Turbocharger hop-up [turbocharger has been removed from the game] but can still equip Select Fire.
• Decreased time between shots when using Select Fire hop-up .77 -> .56

R-99

• Reduced damage per shot 12 -> 11
• Increased magazine size for the first 3 tiers:
• Base: 18 -> 20
• Common: 20 -> 22
• Rare: 23 -> 24
• Epic: 27 -> 27

Prowler

• Increased damage per shot 14 -> 15

Hemlok

• Increased single-shot rate of fire 5.6 -> 6.4

Wingman

• Adjusted magazine sizes:
  • Base: 4 -> 5
  • Common: 6 -> 6
  • Rare: 8 -> 7
  • Epic: 10 -> 8

EVA-8

• Double Tap hop-up: reduced the delay between bursts: 0.85 -> 0.80

Mastiff

• Fixed an exploit that players discovered and reported where you could rapidly fire the Mastiff.

Gold Weapon Update The following will be the new set of Gold Weapons for Season 4:

• Havoc
• P2020
• Sentinel
• Prowler
• R-301

Legends

Bloodhound

• Downing (not killing) players adds 5 seconds to Beast of the Hunt timer. It is possible to exceed starting time with successive kills.

Crypto

• EMP no longer destroys friendly Gibraltar Dome Shields.
• Dome Shields no longer can stick to Crypto’s Drone.

Bug Fixes

• Fixed bug that was causing players that reached account level 500 to crash or access their inventory or store.
• Fixed bug where player level text would appear on the badges of level 100 badge when it wasn’t supposed to.
• Fixed bug for some cases where players were unable to equip weapons from care packages when attempting to swap it with an existing weapon.
• Fixes for a few bad spots in World’s Edge where players were getting stuck or getting to places they shouldn’t - thank you to everyone that’s been capturing and reporting these issues and keep them coming!
• Fixed bug where sometimes when the Jumpmaster disconnects then the followers in their squad would float in mid-air and be unable to unfollow.
• General stability fixes.

Quality Of Life

• Fixes for cases where approaching the edge of the Circle would make the players screen turn almost all white.
• Updated colorblind settings based on player feedback.
• Increased the timer for when you can still be credited for an assist after dealing damage: 5 seconds -> 7.5 seconds.
• Community Request: Added a Random Favorites option for unlocked skins that can be found in the Legend customization menu.
• You’ll see an option to “favorite” skins you’ve unlocked
• Choosing Random Favorite option from the skins menu will randomly cycle your chosen favorite Legend skins in between matches.

Nerfed the Roller that falls from the Loot Drone.

• Reduced damage.
• Decreased radius of splash damage.
• Updated the visual FX to the explosion for better visibility.
• “Target Compensation” and “Melee Target Compensation” options have been moved to the “Advanced Look Controls” menu.

Penalties And Loss Forgiveness in Ranked Mode There are some changes coming to loss forgiveness to reduce abuse of the system. Loss forgiveness when a teammate leaves or fails to connect is unchanged, and is working as intended. We will be limiting the RP loss forgiveness when you leave once per day. If you exceed once per day more than three times per ranked series, you lose all forgiveness for the remainder of that series. Once these limits are reached players will no longer receive RP loss forgiveness when abandoning a match, regardless of the reason for quitting. We will continue to display prompts that alert you that leaving will count, and now will alert you when you are about to run out of loss forgiveness games.The scaling penalties are the same as last Series. Players Crashing With DXGI_ERROR_DEVICE_HUNG Some player are experiencing an issue where Apex is crashing with a “DXGI_ERROR_DEVICE_HUNG” error message. We are working closely with NVIDIA to help determine the cause of the issue and provide gamers with a solution (via updated driver or game patch) as soon as possible. Matchmaking Update With this patch we’ll be pushing out changes globally to matchmaking that we’ve been testing in specific regions. We’re well aware that this has been a contentious topic among players and there’s been some misinformation out there so just to be clear: skill-based matchmaking has existed in Apex since launch and we’ll be continuing to improve it over time.