Apex Legends’ Season 7 Battle Pass debacle is Respawn’s latest blunder in force feeding
Apex Legends has just launched its seventh season, releasing a brand new map and legend along with it. Impressions of both the new map (Olympus) and legend (Horizon) have been off the charts positive with a great deal of player excitement about the changes. Despite the positive buzz, much of the early excitement was drown out by criticism of a new battle pass system that seems impossibly difficult, requiring obtuse amounts of play-time and tasking players with feats that many simply cannot achieve. Despite all of the positive gameplay related content rolled out for the seventh season of Apex Legends, people were obsessing over the battle pass and the difficulty of unlocking skins, music packs, loading screens, gun charms and more upon release.
Every time that I step out to criticize Apex Legends or its developer, Respawn Entertainment, I feel that it is necessary to preface it by declaring my love for both of them. I am a huge fan of the Titanfall series, I have played and streamed Apex Legends since it first arrived on scene and I think very highly of Respawn as a studio. Their gameplay first mindset has made their shooters click with me time and time again and at this point, I count Apex Legends among my favorite multiplayer games of all time. With that said, Respawn has been on an aggravating path with Apex Legends that looks to force players to play as much as humanly possible and “grind” until they can’t grind anymore. While almost all on-going games do this to some extent with player retention in mind, there is a line that can be crossed, burning players out and driving them away from the game. By voicing my concerns, I hope that Respawn can avoid doing exactly that.
The modern videogame market is highly saturated. Tens of thousands of games are vying for the time and attention of millions of gamers by releasing weekly patches with new content, battle passes with skins to unlock, new characters, weapons, missions and more. All of these things share one thing in common; Player retention. In order to keep players engaged and thus, keep access to their bank accounts, games must hold the attention of its player base and attract new players.
My concern with Apex Legends is that Respawn is trying too hard to retain players and is forcing its player base into playing the game non-stop. Instead of relying on making the Apex Legends experience rewarding, the focus seems to be on forcing players to play as much as possible. While the way that the game’s Season 7 Battle Pass released had a lot of players cringing, this isn’t anything new.
As soon as Respawn introduced mid-season rank resets into their ranked play mode, I was immediately suspicious. The whole point of having seasons is giving players a time frame to challenge themselves and work to achieve the highest rank that they can before the end of the season. This makes sense considering each new season will introduces different elements like new maps, weapons and characters. So if the point of seasons is already to give players a unique set of challenges during a set time frame, why then, would Respawn set your rank backward half way through the season? It’s like seasons within seasons.
Respawn explains the mid-season rank reset by framing it around a map change. At the time of the mid-season rank reset, Respawn changes the map on which ranked play occurs, which is fine. This means that if you really don’t like the map that ranked play takes place on to start a season, perhaps you can enjoy the second half of the ranked season more when the map switches. While that is how Respawn has described mid-season splits and justifies setting your seasonal rank backward, that’s really not the main motivator in doing it. Players work toward achieving a certain rank in the first half of the season but lose it when the mid-season rank reset happens. If players want to finish the season at their desired rank, they are forced to play more and rank up once again, within the same season.
It can be argued that keeping players in the ranked playlist has a benefit in that it keeps the number of player in the ranked playlists consistent throughout the season, but I think that the real issue here is that Respawn simply wants to force you to keep playing ranked, all season long, even if you’re not enjoying or don’t feel compelled to. Respawn knows that the fear of missing out will kick in and players will keep playing so that they can maintain the rank that they wan, even though players already achieved it that season. The player didn’t lose rank because of their skill or performance, it was just taken away because the map changed, apparently. The real story here is that Respawn just wants you to keep playing and won’t reward you for hitting your desired rank once. They force you to do to twice.
The next red flag was the implementation of season-long quests that have been introduced to Apex Legends. While quests are a decent idea in theory, giving dedicated players a means to unlock additional lore and participate in a season long story line, the quests in Apex Legends are little more than an attempt to force players to login on a daily basis and collect items which fall out of loot bins. The seasonal quests don’t require skill or any type of achievement, you simply have to force yourself to play Apex Legends on an almost daily basis. This leads to many players feeling the need to play Apex Legends every day, when you actually want to do or play something else. This naturally creates an unhealthy resentment toward the game, which players are not playing for enjoyment but because of a forced sense of necessity. And then when all is said and done and you’ve done your duty of playing Apex Legends on an almost daily basis, all season long, you’ll be rewarded with a lame gun charm or weapon skin that really doesn’t impress anyone. The rewards for the quest are forgettable and the process of completing them is totally underwhelming.
That brings us back to the launch of Season 7. The team at Respawn decided to spice up the battle pass system during Season 7 which isn’t a bad idea in theory. Players have been working off the same battle pass system since the game was introduced and revamping that system can give players new challenges to complete, which isn’t a bad idea. In the process however, Respawn rolled out a new battle pass system which seemed nearly impossible to complete. After playing the game for nearly six hours on launch day, I was only Level 2 of 100. Player feedback on the new battle pass system was overwhelmingly negative, which probably drove less people to purchase the battle pass out of the gate, knowing that they couldn’t complete it. This not only hurts Respawn and Apex Legends monetarily, it set a bad tone for Season 7 at launch which by all other measures, seems incredible.
This battle pass blunder didn’t happen by mistake. The team at Respawn clearly put thought into the new battle pass system and rolled it out with a goal in mind; Force players to play Apex Legends even more. While this should always be the goal of any game design team, the most effective way of getting players to play any game is to make it a high-quality gameplay experience and to make that experience rewarding. Respawn nailed the satisfying gameplay formula with Apex Legends on the day that it shipped. That is why the game has been such a runaway success. Many of the team’s other decisions since launch however, have run counter to their “fun first,” philosophy.
Let’s draw a comparison. Live service games like Destiny 2 have had plenty of ups and downs. Despite having an incredible gameplay experience, top-tier graphics and incredible lore since day one, almost all of Destiny’s “down periods” have been caused by the game becoming too much of a task and asking too much of the player, without adequately rewarding them. Respawn should look at the lessons learned by developers like Bungie and remember that in order for Apex Legends to continue to grow, it needs to maintain a positive community. To achieve that, the game must have a steady stream of engaging content and above all else, offer a rewarding gameplay experience. Features that force players to give too much will only drive players away in the long run. While there is a great deal that can be learned from what mobile games are doing to quickly hook players and make money, those same mobile games rarely last longer than a few months in the spotlight because they ultimately fall short of offering a truly engaging experience.
I hope that Respawn can take a step back and see how their fixation with trying to force players of Apex Legends to play the game as much as humanly possible actually hurts the game in the long run. Respawn acted quickly to address the battle pass issue, which is good, but this is only the latest mistake in a streak of grind-focused decisions. I feel comfortable saying that Respawn has crafted one of the best shooters on the market with Apex Legends. I hope that they continue to learn from their mistakes and that it can maintain its position in the gaming world for years to come. Put the players first and give us in-game content that is enjoyable above all else. The thrill of playing Apex Legends has carried the game this far and must remain the centerpiece of Respawn’s efforts.
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