Apex Legends Year 3 has come to an end, with Year 4 kicking off with Season 12: Defiance. Year 3 introduced Apex Legends’ strongest roster of playable characters to date–not in terms of in-match balance or storytelling, but in regards to the chaotic and joyful fun they brought to the Apex Games. Say what you will about Fuse, Valkyrie, Seer, and Ash, but those four embody the best part of Titanfall 2‘s legacy, in that a first-person shooter doesn’t have to make practical sense on paper in order to be really fun.
When developer Respawn releases new playable characters for Apex Legends, they traditionally contribute three things to the game: a new story, a new change to the meta, and a new way to have fun. Every legend has done this, though most focus on one of the three areas upon their release.
Season 5’s Loba, for example, changes the meta in creating a safe way to acquire loot, and also introduces a new way to have fun in easily locating high-tier loot and stealing it away before other players can grab it for themselves. But she was (and largely continues to be) principally a vessel for story–her addition was heavily tied to Revenant’s backstory, leading to the introduction of interaction quips and Apex Legends’ first and best Quest, The Broken Ghost. And her relationship/love triangle with Bangalore and Valkyrie has been one of the dominant story threads throughout Year 3.
None of which is a bad thing–that’s just who Loba is. Of the three pillars that Apex Legends’ characters traditionally embody, she’s primarily a new avenue for Respawn to tell more story, not drastically shake up the game’s meta or add fun in a new and unforeseen way.
In our recap of Apex Legends Year 1, we dove into the introduction of Octane, Wattson, and Crypto. It was a year with characters principally geared toward attempting to shake up the meta, especially in regards to Wattson and Crypto. The next year, we talked about Apex Legends’ transformative Year 2, which added Revenant, Loba, Rampart, and Horizon. It was a year when Respawn was exploring intriguing ways to tell stories in a constantly evolving service game, best seen in Revenant and Loba’s introductions and storylines. We got a bit of that with Rampart and Horizon too, but those two legends are largely designed around affecting the in-match meta.
Year 3 was a drastic shift in comparison to Apex Legends’ first two years. Its four characters impacted the meta in several ways and have introduced new avenues for more stories. But most of them are principally geared towards finding new ways to have fun in a battle royale game.
Season 8: Mayhem added Walter “Fuse” Fitzroy, a character who’s all about throwing as many grenades as fast as you can as often as you can. On paper, he’s absurd for what Apex Legends is–a game where mastering the gunplay is the most important aspect for achieving victory. Someone who picks Fuse can easily carry half a dozen grenades and toss them with near pinpoint accuracy in a matter of seconds. As I’m typing it out, the idea of a character in a battle royale being able to do that sounds bad for the overall balance of the game. It doesn’t make any sense. And yet, Fuse isn’t overpowered–his abilities aren’t strong enough to get him to the top of many tier lists, and he isn’t often used in high-tiered Ranked matches and competitive play. He is really fun to play, though.
You can say similar things about the other legends added in Year 3. Season 9: Legacy added Kairi “Valkyrie” Imahara, a character who can fly–a ludicrous-sounding benefit for a battle royale game where everyone else is regularly limited to fighting on the ground. Season 10: Emergence introduced Obi “Seer” Edolasim, a character who can see enemies through walls via the sound of their heartbeat whenever he wants. And finally, Season 11: Escape brought Dr. Ashleigh “Ash” Reid to the Apex Games, a dangerous simulacrum who can pin targets in place, teleport, and see where firefights are happening anywhere on the map.
Like Fuse, all of these characters sound overpowered. And a few, like Seer and Valkyrie, initially were, prior to mid-season nerfs to their abilities. But these characters largely only feel powerful–in comparison to legends like Wraith, Gibraltar, Pathfinder, Octane, Caustic, or Bloodhound, they aren’t all that strong. What they can do is “cheating,” or at least feels like it should be, but Respawn has done a damn good job of balancing these legends so that they’re not game-breakingly powerful.
As examples, Fuse’s penchant for blowing stuff up is as much a danger to himself as others when he’s fighting indoors. And as quickly as Valkyrie can take to the sky, she’s limited in how she can fight once airborne. Seer, meanwhile, has some of the flashiest abilities in the game, advertising his position for all to see when he uses them. And despite the overwhelming power of Ash’s abilities, she largely needs to rely on others in order to fully act on them, limiting her utility as a solo act. So despite all four feeling very powerful in a given moment, they all possess limitations that prevent them from being unstoppable in every moment. Those instances of strength, however, happen enough to ensure all four characters are fun to use for an entire match.
Because even if he’s not an S-tier legend, it’s hilarious to drop an absolutely bonkers number of explosives on an unsuspecting enemy as Fuse. It’s satisfying to fly over a bottomless pit on Olympus as Valkyrie, circumnavigating an enemy’s well-placed defenses and easily taking a path that would require quite a bit of skill with a different character. It feels like you’re a dangerous predator when you follow the bleeding heartbeats of enemy squads to their hiding place as Seer, only to destroy them while they’re trying to heal. And snaring a foe as Ash is an incredible feeling–almost as good as correctly predicting where your squad is corralling an enemy and teleporting ahead to give your wounded prey a nasty surprise.
Those sensations are what made Titanfall 2 such a superb game. On paper, having a pistol that can lock onto multiple enemies sounds like cheating, the ability to temporarily phase into an alternate dimension sounds absolutely ridiculous, rewinding your place in time can’t possibly be fair, and calling down a ginormous mech should be something that makes you absolutely unstoppable in the confines of a first-person shooter. But none of that is true. All of these mechanics are incredibly fun and deliver on the sensation of making you stronger and more skilled than everyone else, even if that’s not always the case.
So despite it being a year when it felt like Apex Legends’ three Quest storylines didn’t hit all that well (Season 8’s Armageddon and Season 9’s The Legacy Antigen were alright, but Season 11’s Trouble in Paradise ended on a deeply unsatisfying note), we got a mediocre Switch port, and there was a noticeable lack of interesting limited-time modes, I ultimately loved Year 3. It’s been my favorite year of playing the battle royale game because of how well it represented the legacy of Titanfall 2.
No character embodies that legacy more than Valkyrie (which is maybe why she was added during the season that was aptly named “Legacy”). Valkyrie is the best of the post-release characters to be added to Apex Legends, and I’m not just saying that because she’s my favorite to use and is voiced by the immensely talented actor Erika Ishii (Halo Infinite’s Lumu, Deathloop’s Dr. Wenjie Evans, and Destiny 2’s newer Ana Bray). But the winged avenger is a character seemingly designed first and foremost around a very simple but fun concept (in this case, flying) and making it a reality. Though Valkyrie has a strong connection to Titanfall 2’s Viper (she’s his daughter), she hasn’t added much to Apex Legends’ current-day storyline besides being the third point in Loba’s love triangle. And even though she does influence the meta by helping her allies redeploy and move about the map, it’s not so game-changing that it transformed how players needed to think about the game. Valkyrie’s whole identity is tied to the notion that flying is cool, so being able to fly in a battle royale game should be fun.
And that’s all Valkyrie is–she is simply a character who is fun to play. The idea of being able to effortlessly take off into the sky and then unleash a swarm of missiles at the press of a button sounds more exciting than, say, setting up slow-to-deploy cover as Season 6’s Rampart. Though, to be fair, no character sounds as fun to play as Valkyrie on paper. That’s why she’s one of Apex Legends’ best characters: She sounds cool to play, and then when you actually do, you realize she’s as cool as she sounds. Couple that feeling with her incredible personality–she’s constantly teasing the other legends for choosing to fight on the ground, confidently flirting, offering a playful wink at the enemies she curb stomps into the dirt, and smugly declaring that the skies belong to her–and you have a character who’s regularly reminding you that you’re as cool as the abilities you possess, even if they aren’t game-changing. And that’s all that Titanfall 2 was, just match after match reminding you that Pilots are the coolest soldiers ever. (Especially in its best mode, Live Fire. Gosh, remember Live Fire? No need to make Titanfall 3, Respawn. Just slowly transform Arenas into a Live Fire copy-and-paste and I’ll be happy.)
Now, compare Valkyrie to Wattson, a character added to Apex Legends in Year 1. Over the latter half of Year 2 and most of Year 3, players have been clamoring for Wattson to get a buff to her kit, which she finally got in Season 11. Here’s the thing: Wattson didn’t need a buff. Despite what players said about her, Wattson ranked highly among Apex Legends’ roster with a killer win-rate. And that makes sense, given her ability to lock down a zone and negate many legends’ abilities. But Wattson never feels strong. It’s not cool to create an electrified fence and see nobody fall victim to it, even if a far-off, unseen team purposely avoided attacking your squad upon spotting the fence and decided it was too much of a hassle to deal with. And it doesn’t feel especially rewarding to place an Interception Pylon to stop incoming grenades and then see an enemy squad shoot the pylon down, even though that means said squad just wasted ammo and is possibly now a sitting duck as they reload. Wattson has unseen power that has permanently shaped Apex Legends’ meta in that it’s now necessary to always have a strategy on hand to quickly bust a bunker–she’s really good (and was made even better in Year 3), but she’s not necessarily fun to play because her ability kit isn’t impactful towards your squad’s success in as obvious a way as that of other legends.
There’s a lot more about Apex Legends Year 3 that I could get into in this recap–like how the 30-30 Repeater, Bocek Compound Bow, Rampage LMG, and CAR SMG likely showcase the new direction for Apex Legends’ firearms; how the Season 9 adjustments to characters’ starting armor kit made for an altogether better battle royale; how Arenas‘ steep skill-ceiling makes the case that Apex Legends needs a permanent mode that’s more approachable for new players; or how Season 11’s Storm Point reveals the dos and don’ts that need to be followed when finalizing the new map for Apex Legends Year 4. But those takeaways seem small in comparison to how Year 3 acted as a reminder that Respawn is capable of taking outlandish concepts that sound overpowered and unfair, and finding a way to make them feel balanced so that players can still enjoy the fun aspects of those ideas.
It’s a sentiment that Respawn seems to be holding onto as it heads into Year 4. Season 12 adds Margaret “Mad Maggie” Kōhere, an “aggressive playmaker” who is enjoyably chaotic to play on account of her preposterous-sounding abilities, like damaging enemies through walls or tossing out a wrecking ball that both stuns enemies and leaves behind speed boosts for Maggie. In the same way Year 3’s legends are all a joy to play, Season 12’s new character puts priority on bringing the fun. (Though, admittedly, Mad Maggie might end up being known as more of a meta-changing legend when all is said and done, given how her tactical ability offers such a clear counter to defensive legends like Gibraltar.)
I don’t want Respawn to abandon the other two pillars of its characters when designing who we’ll see in Year 4. Adding primarily story-driven characters (like Loba) is important for exploring new avenues of delivering the game’s narrative, while introducing characters that are principally geared towards reshaping the meta in some way (like Wattson) ensures the overall gameplay doesn’t grow stale (and I still hold that Apex Legends needs a new support character for that very reason). I just hope Respawn knows a new character doesn’t always need a huge narrative moment or in-match balancing reason to justify their addition–as Year 3 has shown, that stuff can come later if you have an idea for a character that’s just a fun concept to play, and little else.
GameSpot – Game News
