On July 8th, EA and Respawn Entertainment introduced a new Apex Legends Battle Pass system for Season 22. But after many of the new Battle Pass changes proved unpopular, Respawn is apologizing for its handling of the shift, and making some changes in response to criticism.
The initial Battle pass changes meant that instead of a single season Battle Pass, there would be two Battle Passes for each split of the season and neither would be able to be purchased with the premium in-game currency, Apex Coins. As a result, players could no longer spend Apex Coins from the previous Battle Pass on the next Season. EA did clarify that players could unlock the first half of Season 22’s Premium Battle Pass rewards by completing a set of challenges in the first two weeks of launch, but no further details were explained at the time.
Splitting the Battle Passes into two also meant doubling the cost of the total money spent for the full season adding up to $20 for both Premium and $40 for the Premium+. This was met with negative feedback from the community and Apex Legends’ Steam store page has been flooded with 76,872 mostly-negative reviews at the time of writing this article.
Today, July 24th, Respawn released an update changing the structure of Battle Passes, apologizing for poor handling of the previous announcement. The Battle Passes remain at two for each season but the latest changes restore the ability for players to purchase the Premium Battle Pass with 950 Apex Coins.
There are now two new Battle Pass tiers called Ultimate and Ultimate+. Ultimate is nearly the same as the Premium, but costs $9.99 USD and cannot be purchased with Apex Coins. It gives players all the Premium rewards and an additional instant unlock of eight Apex Packs and 1,200 Crafting Materials.
Ultimate+ is the highest tier of the Battle Pass including all the previous rewards seen in Ultimate and Premium but with double the Exotic Shards, two exclusive Legendary skin variants, eight Apex Packs, 1,200 Crafting Materials, ten Battle Pass Level unlocks, and the unlocking of every Legend in the game. It costs $19.99 and also cannot be purchased with Apex Coins.
Respawn also stated that with Season 22, through the first split, every player would be able to earn the Premium Battle Pass by completing a series of simple in-game challenges.
Battling Over Battle Pass
IGN was able to sit down with Steven Ferreira, Apex Legends Game Director, to speak about the amended Battle Pass plans and how decisions like these come to be internally and what Respawn’s plans are for the Apex community going forward. Responses have been lightly edited for brevity and clarity.
IGN: Why did you make the Battle Pass Changes?
Ferreira: Our Battle Pass has been the same for a long time. And for a while now we've seen and been able to track data on how many players are engaging with the Battle Pass, but also how the players value the content that's in the Battle Pass.
Those were two areas that we wanted to address with a new design for Battle Pass. That was the motivation here in terms of updating the design. One of the things that we're trying to do is make Apex more accessible. When we look at the Battle Pass that we had previously, a 90-day Battle Pass tuned for engagement in that timeframe, typically because of that long tail and wanting to balance it well for the entire spectrum of players and engage with the Battle Pass, meant that it was hard to grind through the Battle Pass over 90 days.
What we were seeing was that the majority of our players were not. They weren't engaging with it in that time, and they were engaging for a lot shorter amount of time, which is reasonable, right? The idea that players are only playing Apex and nothing but, is not reality and it's not how... You know? We don't just play Apex and I don't expect that the rest of our community does either.
Finding something that felt like it was better tuned again in a more accessible way to the majority of our players was kind of key. And so just like in season 20, we moved our ranked season from the full season back to a season split structure. The same thing with the Battle Pass was a natural progression for us to do that as well. And so the intention there is that you can still unlock the equivalent amount of cool content and stuff, but you can do it inside of 45 days. And you get a faster and a better pacing and cadence of engagement with the Battle Pass over 45 days versus 90. So that was the first thing. And like I said, what we saw in the data was that majority of players were not unlocking everything that we had in the Battle Pass in that time.
And so this is the hope of having more players engage fully with the entirety of the Battle Pass in 45 days. The second piece that I touched on was that the content, once players unlocked it, I would say the vast majority of it, players were not engaging with. In that we didn't see players equipping that content. And so it was a bunch of things in the 90-day Battle Pass that players were unlocking, but then not really realizing the value of it. Or at least to them, they were telling us in their usage data that they weren't getting of it. So one of the things we did was try to reconfigure the Battle Pass to focus on content that we were seeing players equip, or content types that we were seeing players equip, versus not equip.
Additionally around that goal, the other thing is that in terms of what we feel that players were getting value from, was the things that they were allowing them to make choice. And that's why you've seen a shift focus towards currencies and things that'll allow players to choose where do they want to spend that, what do they want to spend it on. As opposed to, we've made 110 levels versus bespoke content to unlock.
IGN: So with the Battle Pass changes, is that something that Respawn decided on or was that something that EA had pushed for?
Ferreira: No, that was something that we designed. Like I said, the primary challenge that we looked at was too few players are engaging with the Battle Pass in a meaningful way and getting the value out of it in terms of, like I said, what we were seeing in terms of equipping the content that was being unlocked. And we felt that it was almost creating a system where it was like, you engage with the Battle Pass designed this way because we've been doing it for so long. Having 20+ seasons of the system working, generally speaking, in this way, was a long time without actually addressing: is it working or is it not? And what we had seen for quite some time, was that it was increasingly so, not fulfilling in our definition what players were getting value from.
IGN: So then with looking at the analytics of people equipping things in the Battle Pass versus what they didn't, is there going to be less of say, gun charms or maybe blue tier skins that people aren't like super into for weapons or characters?
Ferreira: Yeah, that's right. So what we found was that the majority of the rare items and the stuff that was like the trackers, and as you said, gun charms, et cetera, that we were just not seeing the pickup from the majority of players on equipping and using of those things. So they unlock them and they keep unlocking them, season over season, but nobody's actually using those items. And so our focus was to shift development of that content over to content that players are actually equipping, and then do find valuable. And like I said, moving some of that over into unlocking currencies that'll allow you to choose what are the things you want.
IGN: Do you know what kind of challenges we'll see in the Battle Pass? Are they going to be like the dailies?
Ferreira: The challenges change and have changed, and so I don't know what the specific challenges are. We'll share more of that obviously when we get closer to season launch. But yes, the intention is that not that these aren't really hard. Again, our goal here is to push towards a more accessible design for Apex. And so, same thing goes with this, is that the goal is that more people will try it. And the reason that we go, just to be fully transparent with this, is we've tried other kind of systems for letting people try it out and feel what it feels like. And sometimes we've done, is just log in and get this unlock immediately.
What we found is that sometimes people will just log in and get that unlock immediately, and then they won't actually try it. And I really, really want our community to play the Battle Pass and feel what the new feel of the Battle Pass is and what the rewards are within the Battle Pass. And so in this way it won't be difficult to accomplish the challenges. They're going to be very basic to your point about how dailies are set up. But there will be a few basic challenges to encourage the community to actually try out the Battle Pass.
IGN: What about the other concerns about the state of Apex that players have aside from the Battle Pass?
Ferreira: So the other piece to this that I think has been a clear part of what we were seeing from the community feedback is this concern that because we're doing this stuff that we're not addressing other things that matter to players, right? Which obviously couldn't be farther from the truth, whatever matters to players, matters to us by definition.
And we take that seriously, there’s obviously a part of crafting the experience that we as game developers care about and want to create something for players that they'll enjoy. But this is a live game and we've always felt that part of that experience means that part of this game is not just our game, it's not the devs game, it's the community's game. And so when there's something that matters to the community, by definition matters to us.
And so there's a couple of things that came up that I think were common threads in the feedback and a lot of the responses that I read through was “Why are we working on this instead of working on things like solving for cheaters, solving for the health of the game, solving for game stability, competitive integrity?”
These are all things that honestly make up the majority of what we think about and work towards day in day out on Apex. But the reality is that a lot of these things are long-lead time initiatives. They are complex problems for us to address. And they're not just like, oh, here's a problem, here's a band-aid solution. We actually look to implement solutions to this as part of the experience.
And so I think one of the things that we haven't done well and again, going back to what I kicked the conversation off about is that we don't really share what we are doing. And so we want to make a commitment to the community that we're going to do better at sharing what is actually going on.
We have things that are coming out in the upcoming season and we have things that are a long lead time in our road map that span out multiple seasons. They are all focused exactly on the things that the community’s concerned about, but we never talk about them and we never acknowledge and have a conversation about the things that we're trying and doing around those topics.
So I think as we get closer to the launch of the next season, we're gonna make an effort to put a focus on that and actually share with the community what we're actually doing across those things that I think, understandably so, the community feels we're ignoring. But I just want an opportunity to reassure the community that that is not the case, that these are top priorities for us.
IGN: So then based on things that you have changed now (with the Battle Pass) and that you do want to be more transparent with players, how do you think that you would go about doing an announcement like this in the future if there were to be more battle past changes?
Ferreira: Yeah, that's a fair question. I think this is the kind of thing where again, we went off of the data and something that we had been looking at for many months as to what was the right way to do this. But I think there are tools that we use regularly for things in our game, like focus groups and community conversations. We bring people in to give season previews and things like that.
And I think this is the kind of thing that we could have slowly rolled out and gotten more community engagement in and feedback through those kinds of channels that we've got in place.
We're very careful about how we were doing this to make sure that we had what we believe to be a better experience for players. But just dropping this onto the community without engaging the community in the process of designing this, I think, for something that clearly the community cares about it as much as the Battle Pass, was a misstep on our side.
IGN: You speak about wanting to make Apex more accessible about wanting to give all players a great experience in Apex. And you did speak about obviously looking at hackers, but what can you say about if the team is looking at trying to appeal to a more casual audience because a lot of people do feel that the game has gotten more competitive and we have seen this issue before with Titanfall 2 where the skill gap just jumped and it kind of alienated a lot of people. But is there an internal discussion on how the general casual audience can be brought back in?
Ferreira: When I say accessibility, I think that I use that term as a pretty broad umbrella. And this is one of those when we break it down to how we actually solve for that in designing the game, they are two different things because it is a challenge.
It's not an easy thing to solve by any means but I would describe it as probably one of our, if not our top priority in solving for the game right now. The reality is that Apex is a competitive experience and always will be that'll never go away. It's why Apex is fun, in my opinion, this is part of the DNA of the core experience that we have.
But some of it is that the on ramp to becoming good is too steep and too difficult and some of it is that the game is designed a little bit too much towards competition such that we do let that kind of run away and that skill gap, as you pointed out has become quite vast, over the last five years.
I have a bunch of ideas of how we're going to address that and it's going to touch on what I would describe as probably every part of our game. I'm actually excited to say it is coming up in the next season, that we're gonna be talking about very soon.
It’s addressing some of that head on and it's setting up some of the foundational pieces that I think will make apex innately more accessible to a casual player. I would say that probably the focal point of the next season is tackling a bunch of this and making the game more accessible to casual players.
Apex Legends Season 22 “Shockwave” launches August 6th, 2024 with detailed patch notes on upcoming changes releasing August 5th.
Stella is a Video Producer, Host, and Editor at IGN. Her gameplay focus is on competitive FPS games and she's previously reviewed Apex Legends, Hyper Scape, Halo Infinite Multiplayer, and Battlefield 2042. She regularly hosts and shoutcasts competitive Apex Legends and Halo Infinite tournaments when she isn't streaming on her Twitch channel after work outs. You can follow her on Twitter @ParallaxStella.
