For the avid players residing over on Apex Legends, this week is the two year anniversary. On Tuesday two years ago, it marks the first sign of life for the battle royale with rumors beginning to circulate the Titanfall developer Respawn Entertainment is planning to ship its own take on the genre. Then leading to February 4th is where Apex Legends finally dropped for the general public. Now two years later, the game is even larger than ever.
As per the recent earnings call from publisher Electronic Arts, company CEO Andrew Wilson issues that Apex Legends receives a 30 percent increase in its average player count year-by-year. Now even bigger than anticipated, the developer decided to return to the first builds of Apex Legends giving their experience and even some images to share as well.
In the latest blog post, game director and studio co-founder Chad Grenier walks you through the beginnings of what later becomes Apex Legends. You can view some screens from the early builds of the game in the images below:
“After shipping Titanfall 2 we were hard at work on post-release Titanfall content and naturally starting to explore ideas for another game,” Grenier shares. “Apex Legends wasn’t even a thought yet. We were discussing and trying new ideas, playtesting prototype campaign ideas, playing new game modes, and two designers started a small prototype that would change the course of our game.
“Almost two years before the release of Apex Legends, we had our first company-wide playtest on a new game mode called ‘Survival’ where pilots and Titans would fight it out to be the last man standing, battle royale style.” Grenier continues by disclosing that the first versions of Bloodhound, Gibraltar, and Wraith were introduced by October 2017. And as the development continued, so did improvements on the overall gameplay also, he tells.
While still in the Titanfall universe, ‘Survival’ as it was initially called eventually scrapped both wallrunning and Titans from the equation – core Titanfall components. “Of course, we tried to keep Titans in the game for many months, but once we accepted that we were making something fundamentally different from Titanfall, we entered a new phase.”
The name of the game turned from “Survival” to “Apex Predator”. Kings Canyon became more like Kings Canyon we know today. We began prototyping new mechanics like respawning teammates and legend abilities. […] It became clear to us that we had something great on our hands, and our plans for the other project were scrapped. We were then all-hands on what would eventually be called “Apex Legends” and would never look back.
Now entering its eighth consecutive season, Apex Legends has rearranged the inaugural King’s Canyon for its now 7th time welcoming its latest Legend – Fuse. The former Salvo member makes the total headcount for the Apex Games sitting at 16 Legends: seven more than the original 9 cast of characters. And three maps in total for players to diversify their playstyles as well.
Looking ahead, Apex Legends is officially coming to Nintendo Switch next month. In that, the title will incorporate double XP for its newest platform and will feature cross-play the first day it hits the Nintendo eShop. You can read the full report by heading here.
What interests you most about the up and coming of Apex Legends?
Apex Legends is out now for Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, and PC; comes to Nintendo Switch on March 9, 2021.
Source: Respawn Entertainment
