Apex Legends S21 Devs Talk Season 21 Changes, New Character Alter, and More

Apex Legends has been one of the top battle royale games for a while, with the title wrapping up its current season and jumping right into Season 21 soon. From the introduction to a new legend to mending Broken Moon issues and improving Ranked, Respawn Entertainment has included more than a handful of updates for the new season.

Game Rant recently spoke with a handful of Apex Legends developers about everything coming in Season 21, including the new character Alter. Narrative writer Jaclyn Seto and designer Ian Holstead spoke about all things Alter, while designer director Evan Nikolich, lead progression designer Chris “C4” Cleroux, lead level designer Steve Young, game designer for balance John Larson, and events lead Mike Button talked about the features, map changes, and other details regarding Season 21. The following transcript has been edited for clarity and brevity.

Apex Legends – Alter

Q: I was curious how Alter got her start. What was her original concept?

Holstead: Interestingly enough, her breaching portal was actually the start of her kit. That avenue, we thought, was really interesting to explore. It actually started out as her Ultimate, where it could go a lot further. It could go through whole walls, and you know, a lot of walls divide our POIs.

Over time, as we were testing it, we found that it was really hard to use over those extreme distances. A lot of times, there are height changes and you don’t really know where you will end up.

Also, having an Ultimate cadence meant that you couldn’t make these cool clutch plays very often, so we shifted that over to the tactical and explored other areas for her Ultimate. Eventually, we did a bunch of iterations on her passive as well to get her where she is today.

Seto: Once the design team has a prototype that they’re comfortable with, a bunch of our teams usually get together. Narrative, design, and art are the ones we start with, and design usually has an idea of how they want this character to feel when people play them in the game. We then try to build a personality that will cater to that sort of gameplay style and how that character should feel while playing them. Once we get the personality down, we develop the backstory.

Art starts spinning up from there because there will be more inspiration on how this character will act and play, so we just continue from there until we get to the final product.

Q: You mention iterating on her passive. What did some of the early versions of her passive look like?

Holstead: I think we tried five or six versions of her passive before we got something that really worked. Some of the iterations were too complicated, and we referred to them as another tactical. It wasn’t passive enough or there would be too many steps. We found that this tactical puts a lot of cognitive load on the player, so you have to think with portals, right? You have to think about where to shoot it, where it would go, and what this combat situation looks like. When we had a really active passive, like a thing you could use as well, strategically, in a lot of places, it was hard to do both at the same time.

I can’t go too in-depth with them because some, you know, we may revisit in the future. One I can bring up is that, when Alter is in the Void with her abilities or her teammates, she could actually have had enemies highlighted from the Void to make them easier to see as a passive. That was one of those we worked on, but we simply found that the passive wasn’t compelling enough as a passive. It didn’t really affect how you play. It was a nice thing, but it didn’t really change how you play or add a lot of power to the kit. We ended up putting it into the kit, and we actually gave it to Wraith and Ash as well. We just felt like it was a quality-of-life improvement, but it wasn’t strong enough as a passive.

Q: This is the first villainous character in a while. Does making a villainous character differ any from just a standard character?

Seto: I don’t think so. Technically, if we wanted to, we could make a heroic character that has her breaching portal, her abilities. Narratively, it is more interesting to have someone who can instill fear but also you really can’t escape from though. You’re in a locked room, all walls, and she’s still going to get in and find you. It wasn’t so different in that way, but it’s more that we have some very specific villains already, so we had to find the right space for her.

Q: Conceptually, did she always have the horn and tail-like appendages?

Seto: I think that was there from very early in her design as well. That was created by our wonderful concept artist Xiao Yang.

The idea is that the horns and the tail are part of her tech to work these abilities and everything. One of the things that we were trying to figure out really early on, and Ian, you could probably speak to this as well, was where exactly she was going to shoot this portal from. I think, in the beginning, it was just going to be a gun, but we thought the tail appendage was a lot more interesting, especially for a character like her who’s a little bit more mischievous and villainous. That’s kind of where it came from.

Holstead: Yeah, we make quite the effort to try and keep almost everything grounded in our universe. If a character has an ability, you can always find it somewhere on their person. We try not just to use magic space portals, so it’s grounded in a way, obviously, in a fictional universe. Unfortunately, we can’t create portals in real life.

Q: Among her various made-up pasts was a nod to the Old Way and Bloodhound. Do these “versions” of her past have connections to other legends as well?

Seto: I can’t speak to that necessarily. I can say that they’re all a bunch of false stories Alter is telling other people. We had a really amazing time brainstorming a whole bunch of bonkers backstories for Alter because we knew that this was what we wanted to write for her trailer. The bloodhound one is there to help viewers pick up that: “Oh, this is somebody else’s backstory. It’s kind of weird that she’s the one claiming it.” It’s not necessarily that she has a connection with Bloodhound. It’s just that, for the purposes of this trailer, she has stolen Bloodhound’s backstory and made it hers in order to screw with people.

Q: We’re not going to trust Alter at any point, are we?

Seto: I think there will be times when you’ll want to trust her, but whether or not you can is dicey.

Q: Other Respawn devs have mentioned in the past that the team prefers to launch a character strong and then tune from there, so I was curious about how you foresee Alter impacting the meta?

Holstead: You’re completely right. We call it design for impact, right? We want to make sure that the updates we launch affect the game and help keep it fresh. People are very comfortable with the Legends they know and so on, so we need to give people a little bit of a nudge to try the new stuff that we’re putting out.

On how she’s going to shake up the meta specifically, I’m actually going to say, ‘Let’s wait and see.’ I think that every part of her kit has the potential to have a lot of power in different situations. It’s very easy to pick up and use your tactical, you just shoot a portal at the wall and you go through it, but I think over time, people are going to figure out that there are a lot of really interesting use cases for it. I’m really excited for people to find them, you know the YouTube videos of ‘this is the perfect place to put your tactical to do a rotation around the map’ in this way.

I’m sure we’re going to find some really cool stuff, and in general, I think Alter is going to be a great flexibility pick with a lot of different legend comps. She works really well even with another Skirmisher, but like Recons or Support are really strong with her kit. I think she really does something that no other legend does. If you have somebody who’s really good at rotating and getting a lot of information or bringing back your team, she can also fit into that.

Q: If you had to narrow down the most important thing about Alter, about who she is, what would it be?

Seto: You hear this at the end of her trailer, where she’s there for the end of the world. She really loves seeing the ends of worlds. That’s something you’re quickly going to see about her with her voice lines and everything as well. It was really about figuring out why she likes seeing these worlds ending and building the backstory in order to get her there. Of course, like, I can’t reveal why she likes the end of worlds and everything like that, but I think you’ll find out soon enough.

Q: With that in mind, is Apex going for any sort of serious multiverse element with her character?

Seto: The way that we tend to do storytelling is through the lens of our characters. We like to really focus on their growth and their relationships, so we will only approach a multiverse sort of thing if it happens to be important to the character’s growth or their story arc at that point, but otherwise, that’s probably not something we’re going to touch unless it’s a story direction for a character.

Q: What does Alter mean to each of you, personally, as her key designers?

Holstead: This was actually the first legend that I’ve worked on. I’ve been on the team for quite a few years, but this was my first opportunity to work on a legend. I’ve dedicated a lot to the development of her over, over quite a long time now. Yeah, I have a lot of personal, sort of sentimental attachment. I’m really excited for players to get hands-on and see what everyone can do with them, and I’m honestly really excited to be able to talk about my work and stuff. I’m going to be at ALGS right before Alter launches, and I think that’s going to be really special. It’s been quite a whirlwind. There’s been ups and downs, but I’m excited for a character to be launching.

Seto: Same sort of thing as Ian, I’ve been on the team for quite a while as well, and Alter’s the first legend that I’ve got to build from the ground up. She’s really special to me, and it’s been one of my dreams since childhood, essentially, to write a character that shares my background, to put that representation out into the world. She means a lot to me, and honestly, I could probably die happy once she’s out. I’m just really excited for other people to get to play her, see her, and hear her speak Cantonese. You don’t get to hear that very often in today’s media. I’m just completely ecstatic, and she’s always going to have a special place in my heart.

Apex Legends – Solos

Q: Solos is coming back for a short period of time, after many years. I was curious what makes Season 21 the right time to play it back?

Button: I think the reason was the player feedback. We’ve had that for quite a while, but it was really growing in momentum. I think that was really reason number one, and it was really as simple as that.

I do think a reason number two is thematic, although that’s less of a priority when we are making a gameplay decision like this. With the introduction of Alter and her narrative and even just the way that this season is being presented, it also made a lot of sense, right? We’re playing with alternate realities and chaos and even the name Upheaval, so doing something that followed through on that namesake and the theme also felt appropriate. That really wasn’t the reason that we ultimately made the decision, but it certainly helped because it just seemed to make sense. The timing was right.

Q: One of the new Solos features is Battle Sense. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about what it adds or replaces in the gameplay?

Button: Obviously with a namesake like Solos, you’re on your own – that’s part of the experience and what differentiates it. But because Apex is a team-based game, there are a couple of things you miss when you don’t have teammates with you, and we wanted to make up for those in Solos. One of those is Map Awareness.

There’s nobody else to call out, “Oh, hey, I saw an Octane duck into that building over there” or “Hey, they’re pushing from the East” – whatever the call-outs are. Battle Sense is a little dip into giving players that direct sense of danger, map awareness, and combat awareness, and allowing them to react. It’s definitely not a replacement, and it’s critical to a bunch of Legend Abilities.

It allows you to get a better read on other players. Battle Sense is omnidirectional. It’s just, “Hey, there’s somebody near you within 50 meters.” It doesn’t say how close you are in that 50 meters, and it doesn’t tell you what kind of Legend they are. It doesn’t even tell you what direction they’re coming from, so we felt it paired nicely with some Legends that might key off of teammate call-outs in those situations, right? As a Bloodhound, you might not pop your ping until somebody gives you a call out or you know someone’s in a building. Solos inherently removes those from the gameplay loop, so this sort of makes up for that.

Q: The presentation mentioned it briefly, but I wanted to follow up on re-queuing. After Straight Shot, is that something the Apex Team plans to make permanent?

C4: It’s something that we didn’t talk about in the larger panel, but we do have re-queue coming online in season 21 for all pubs BR modes, as well as Mixtape. We’re also exploring work that needs to be done for additional modes in the future for that. There’s continuous work to make improvements to those systems, but players will be able to experience it like they did previously in Straight Shot.

Apex Legends – Broken Moon

Q: Could you talk about the goals behind some of the changes to Broken Moon?

Young: With Broken Moon, we were noticing a lot of unhealthy trends around certain areas of the map, as far as player navigation and things like that. Specifically, with Promenade, we were very aware of the reception but also of just what we were observing. We just didn’t like the way that it was panning out, so that was sort of the focal point for a lot of the changes that we made. We nuked Promenade, we brought in the Containment Zone, and it’s much more focused in a controlled chaos kind of way. Now, it’s a much more self-contained and compartmentalized POI.

We don’t have the chaotic zip lines, pass-throughs, chokes, and whatever that were leading players in and through that area anymore. Now it’s much more intentional and much more intuitive. As far as the rotations both in and around there are concerned, we now have really fun zip lines within the Containment Zone itself that are only used for rotational purposes within that POI. In my opinion, it’s the most fun use of those.

Outside of that, it got a significant update with all the connective tissue across the entire map. It got a really nice overhaul. There was a lot of thoughtfulness put into the design and making sure that we have more fleshed-out camps and mini-POIs pretty much everywhere now. We also wanted to make sure that, visually, it was much more distinct than any of our other maps the second time around. The biome refresh just looks and feels like a brand new map compared to where it was before.

Q: What would you say to players who have historically avoided Promenade because of its design as they head into the new map changes?

Young: Now you can avoid it forever because it’s not there anymore, but the new Containment Zone in the center plays great. You’re now easily able to make tactical decisions based on the layout, and there’s no real contentious Point A vs. Point B or anything like that. It’s very well laid out so that you can come up with really fun, creative strategies. If you need to quickly rotate and get out of there, you can do that too. It’s not a death trap anymore like it was before.

Q: One thing that caught my attention during the presentation was the mention of the Alien Eggs as the reason for the quarantine. I was curious how these play into new lore? Are players able to interact with these eggs or are they just hidden?

Young: For the eggs, I mainly like to call that one out as a shout-out to all the effort that the art team put into this biome refresh. I can’t really comment further than where they are right now, but it’s just such a cool little detail on top of everything else. Like I was saying earlier, it just looks and feels like a brand-new map.

The egg infestation is sort of this narrative justification for how the Containment Zone is currently dressed up and why it’s like an actual Containment Zone. Trees had to be wrapped up, and things like that. They’re studying them right now, just from a narrative perspective, so that’s how they exist right now.

Q: When it comes to designing new modes or seasonal changes, I know you probably have to consider Legends and their abilities to some degree, but I was curious if the Season 20 Upgrade paths make these plans any more complicated or impact how the team approaches that element at all?

Larson: I think it makes it a little easier in some ways like you have more flexibility. Even in normal BR with the perks, in my experience and data shows in other players’ experiences, the perks you’re taking in a pub match are often different from what you might be going for in a Ranked match, where you have a more strategic focus.

I don’t think it’s worth the investment to delve into making specific Upgrades that excel more in different game modes. It’s just not worth the resources, and I think they already lend themselves to a good degree of flexibility just to pivot between different modes and different play styles. I think, ultimately, they’re nice for us to give players flexibility, but we’re not going to try to cater to specific modes with Upgrades.

Apex Legends Season 21 Features

Q: Apex Artifacts give fans a new level of customization, and I was curious if the concept of customization itself is something that’s going to be prioritized in season 21 and moving forward?

Nikolich: I wouldn’t say prioritize, but we’re always looking for how players can express themselves. You know, our game now is five years old. We have a lot of channels that we’ve used and we’re always looking for more so players can express themselves in new and unique ways. I wouldn’t commit to anything today, but it’s something we’re always looking at and what you will see more of coming in the future, most likely.

Q: Apex Legends Season 20 had a big focus on the Upgrade Paths, but were there any specific lessons taken from Season 20 for Season 21 beyond just characters?

Nikolich: I’d say the big thing around the simplification of the crafter is taking a lot of that cognitive load off the player, really leaning in towards the speed of combat. Stuff like our Ranked changes really focus more on combat. This combination with the armor changes, I believe, actually lends the game to feeling more fair, while pushing a focus on rewarding players for doing the key actions of the game by limiting some of the RNG and allowing more control on the player.

I think it’s great to be landing at a POI and everyone’s at whites, and you know they’re going to be at whites until the fight resolves itself, instead of the shock of, “Oh crap, this person now has killed purple or gold, and I have to run away. That feels out of my control.” Now, it’s like, if I lose a fight at an initial POI, I understand why, and I can get better at that skill.

Q: Could you also talk about the changes with Ranked coming in Season 21?

C4: The tuning changes, we’re going to keep those pretty similar to what it is now. We’re always constantly evaluating, but we’re really focused on four major components for Ranked.

One is about cheating. We made a change in late Season 20 already to try to adjust cheating that was brought on by lowering the level requirement to Ranked but also because we made pre-made parties unlimited in terms of no Ranked tier restrictions. We’ve reintroduced the rank tier restriction already, and that’ll roll through into season 21. The premade squad has to be within three Ranked tiers of each other; we find that strikes the best balance between those two things.

The next major change deals with rewards in that we’re reintroducing a Split reward in Season 21. Players did not like it when we removed it. We want to value the players’ time and the Split. That’s going to come back similar to previous Split rewards, in that your season and badge can be an animated version or a normal, unanimated version. To achieve the animated one, you have to achieve or exceed your Split 1 Rank in Split 1. If you got Gold in Split 1, in order to get the animated badge, you need to get Gold again or higher for that. Your badge, though, that you do get at the end is going to be determined not by your season-ending rank, which it is now, but it is going to be based on your highest rank achieved throughout the season. If you hit that high point early on and suffer some demotions, you’re still going to be rewarded for that peak, that high point that you hit throughout the Rank season.

The last major one that we’re really trying to address is Split timing. Right now, Splits are coming a week after the dot-1 patch, so we’re looking to align those things so that players have a real mid-season start. Not every dot-1 patch lands right in the middle of the season, but we want to align those things. I can’t really say why. There are some other reasons why we want to do that, hinting towards future seasons and what we’re doing with Ranked and competitive, but yeah, we’re trying to align those things.

Q: ALGS is taking place soon. I was curious if, as devs, you all cheer for certain teams or how something like ALGS impacts your workload, especially with a new season launching right after it?

Nikolich: For me, it’s seeing the best of the best pushing the limits of the game, right? They play at the game at a level I’ll never play at, but, yeah, they serve as the aspirational goal for our players, right? The biggest thing is they show us where the meta is. It shows us where the weak points are, what’s dominant, and then we go in, break it up, change things, and try to build the best competitive experience that we possibly can.

Larson: Yeah, I mean, I’m stoked for LAN. I watch scrims nearly every day. I’ve always been in tune with the comp scene, and this will be my first LAN event. As a player, I have my preferences on teams I’d like to see succeed, but as a dev, obviously everyone’s created equally and I’m just happy everyone’s here. Yeah.

Nikolich: I always try to pull for people who are playing off-meta and trying to be innovative. Those are the ones where I’m like, “Okay, come on, show us something new.” I really appreciate those teams that take the risk. Sometimes it pans out, sometimes it doesn’t, but I really like seeing that.

Q: What would you say to players as they get ready for the new season? What kind of message would you like to share with them about this new season?

Nikolich: Well, first off, if you’ve played in season 20 and you’ve been on the journey with us, thank you. We really appreciate you coming along and trying out the wholly revamped legend system, the armor and crafter changes, the Ranked system. With Season 21, we’re all about taking lessons from that. As you can see, we have a lot of healthy updates coming, both to our legend meta and our weapon meta, continuing to evolve our Ranked play and particularly our Map Play.

We’re really excited to introduce Alter; she’s been cooking for a long time. I remember the first prototypes we saw of her were in May or June of last year. We were just like screwing around. She wasn’t even a person at that point. It was just the portal ability itself. It’s great to finally see it come to fruition, and we’re really looking forward to our best players showing us where she’s strong, where she’s weak, and how we can keep growing the Legend sandbox.

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