Apex Legends Season 19 is a big one. A new Legend enters the fray, the game’s biggest map gets a trim, and ranked play has been adjusted to counter players ratting to the top of the leaderboard. But the most exciting change is the implementation of cross-progression, so players can merge their accounts across multiple platforms.
“It’s been very difficult,” explains experience design director Aaron Rutledge. “Just technically, it’s taken way longer than we ever thought. But we’re finally there now, we can finally put it to rest.”
Rutledge explains how the system works: your highest level account will become your ‘master’ account, but all of your cosmetics and currencies will be merged together. If you’ve got Bloodhound’s Heirloom on your PC account which is at level 451, and Fuse’s Heirloom on your Xbox account which is level 19, your new master account across both platforms will be level 451 with both Heirlooms on both platforms. From there, you can even log in on your Nintendo Switch and have access to the same cosmetics, the same Heirlooms, the same everything.
Apex Legends Season 19: Storm Point Map Changes Explained
While your accounts on different platforms might now look identical, the same can’t be said for Storm Point. Apex Legends’ biggest map is nearly unrecognisable in Season 19, thanks to six major POI changes and a serious downsize.
“This is one of our most ambitious map updates,” says world director Eduardo Agostini. “We wanted to do a really big, impactful change to it. [Lead designer] Michael Shannon probably started about a year and a half ago, figuring out what were the design goals, what we wanted to do, and how we wanted to approach it.”
"The passive player problem is something that was emergent from previous seasons," Aaron Rutledge, experience design director at Respawn
The changes are instantly obvious when you drop into the new-look map, in part thanks to the candyfloss clouds and rainbow-filled skybox that now gives the map a sugary sweet aesthetic. On the ground, however, things aren’t quite so cosy. Storm Point has been ravaged by a major, well, storm, which has shifted some POIs, wrecked others, and removed a couple completely.
Armouries are all gone. Their cracked hulls still contain good loot, but the PvE minigame has been removed. Ship Fall is gone too, the wreckage washed away in the extreme tides, and Fish Farms is now a ruined coastline. However, there is light in the darkness. Wattson has lent her scientific skills to try to restore power to the planet, resulting in a major town takeover at Antenna, and an unknown entity known as Echo has revitalised other areas of the map, including the empty central zone known colloquially as Jurassic Park. Gone are the Prowlers, replaced by new structures. Highpoint has become Zoo Station, a POI that aims to pull players to the north of the map.
“Zoo Station is like one of my favourite new POIs because of how attractive it looks from the sky,” says Agnostini. “We wanted to draw people to the north. High Point had the big balloon – and it still has the big balloon there – but this now has those four big towers that are glowing and that helps catch your eye, maybe draw your attention, and maybe people will be curious and say, ‘hey, let's drop there and see how good the loot is.’ And it's got a nice little connection in the back that goes to Lightning Rod. If you find it, there's a nice cut through the mountain that wasn't there before.”
Agnostini describes the cuts to Storm Point’s perimeters as “surgical”, and explains that the team had to make some big calls in order to create a better experience for players. “We brought things like Lightning Rod in closer physically, even though it realistically wouldn't have magically shifted. We had to make that call. We brought it in a little closer for the health of a map. And then on the south coast, obviously all the new POIs are a little bit closer to the centre, so everything is just a little tighter. I still think it's the largest map in the game, but it definitely was a deliberate choice to reduce the footprint.”
Apex Legends Season 19 Ranked Update
Aside from the electrical current that now courses through Storm Point’s cliffs, there’s another major change to dropping into the map, but you’ll only notice it the second time around. Players who respawn now drop in with some of their loot, including weapons and ammo. This is a major change that allows respawned players to contribute more in fights and wards off those immediate pushes when you see a dropship flying overhead.
While respawned players need to be pushed with care, Apex Legends Season 19’s ranked changes encourage fights. Rutledge doesn’t like the term ‘rat’, preferring to call them “passive players”, but whatever you call them, their time ascending the Apex Legends ranked system without even a sniff of a fight is up.
“The passive player problem is something that was emergent from previous seasons,” he says. “Partially made aware by scoring decisions that we made, but also partially being, people just discovered, ‘oh, it's a battle royale, just staying alive is the main point.’ And so some people leaned into that.”
However, Respawn wanted to reinforce more aggressive behaviour to ensure that the highest levels of ranked were almost like a “bridge” between regular play and the ALGS. Therefore, when you’re at the required LP to rank up, you have to complete challenges in order to do so. Going from Silver 1 to Gold 4, for example, might require you to win a match or get three kills or assists three times. These challenges have a time limit, starting at five matches and increasing to a maximum of ten before you’re pushed back down the ladder to climb again. The closer you are to completing the challenges, the less far you’re pushed down.
There are also no restrictions to what ranks your party is in Season 19, so Apex Predators can squad up with Bronzes if they’re a lot better at the game than their friends. Don’t worry if you’re a low level player, though, as the Predators won’t be stomping around your lobby.
“We're not gonna allow Masters players to queue up with two Bronzes and just stomp the lobby, right?” explains Rutledge. “Those Bronzes are going to be in the hardest match of their life, is what's actually going to happen. If you want to try that, go for it, but we're not gonna give high skill players a way to sandbag and get easy matches, we will pull the lower level players up and ask them to step up to a higher skill level.”
Apex Legends Season 19 New Legend Conduit: Abilities, Lore, And More
With all these changes, it’s almost easy to forget that we have a new Legend joining the Apex Legends roster in Season 19, too. Conduit launches with all the usual Respawn efforts to create a diverse range of characters. Her writer, Christal Rose Hazelton, was one of the only Filipino people on the design team, so she assembled a team of around ten other Filipino Respawn employees as well as an external consultant to create a design document to help the devs make Conduit as authentic as possible. From Tagalog tongue twisters that voice actor Frankie Kevich nailed on the first try, to references on her outfit, Conduit wears her heritage with pride.
Having played as her for a couple of hours pre-season, I can safely say that Conduit’s abilities are strong. Respawn usually tunes Legends up when they first release, but I can see a patch coming to tone Conduit down before too long. Here are her abilities in full:
- Passive: Savior's Speed – gives Conduit a burst of speed when running toward allies out of Tactical range
- Tactical: Radiant Transfer – Conduit sends out a surge of energy to a teammate, generating temporary shields while also receiving a similar buff
- Ultimate: Energy Barricade – Conduit deploys an array of seven shield-jamming devices that damage and slow enemies
The Passive works similarly to Bangalore’s, except you don’t need to be under fire for it to work. It makes Conduit a speedy Legend, but it’s her Tactical that feels extremely powerful. Temporary shields can change the flow of a fight completely, and it can get a little confusing when you’ve cracked an opponent only for them to suddenly have another shield appear. It’s especially brutal when combined with Revenant’s Ultimate that was reworked last season, and makes Conduit a brutal fighter.
However, there’s one thing that Hazelton wants to clear up about Apex Legends’ newest recruit. “She does not have superpowers!” the writer laughs. “That was something I didn't expect to see in the fan reaction to the trailer. [...] The veins are the physical representation of her sacrifice; the battery is taking a toll on her body.”
Apex Legends Season 19 Patch Notes, Legend And Weapon Changes
The battery in question is a Titan battery, another reference to the FPS that preceded Apex Legends. However, that’s not the only Titanfall nod in Season 19. Respawn’s game designer for balance, John Larson, explains that the newly Care Packaged Wingman (which replaces the L-Star) and its Skullpiercer Elite hop-up is a reference that Titanfall 2 players might understand.
“Anyone who was familiar with the Wingman Elite [from Titanfall 2], I think this is us paying homage to that in terms of thinking about what that could look like in Apex,” he says. There are no bouncing bullets, but the souped-up Skullpiercer ignores enemy helmet modifiers, hitting for a cool 95 damage no matter what your foe is wearing.
This season, all Care Packages will contain weapons, so watch out for those headies in even the earliest stages of the game. Full patch notes are still to come, but the Hemlok and 30-30 have been nerfed a little, alongside Bangalore and Catalyst, two proponents of the ‘can’t see sh*t meta’ currently holding the game in a chokehold.
Put simply, Bangalore’s smokes don’t hang around for as long, her Ult doesn’t stun for as long, and Catalyst’s Ult starts cooling down after the wall comes down, while her spikes can’t be thrown as far and no longer block bullets. To supplement these changes, the crafting rotation sees the R-301 and Volt available in Crafters, and the Digital Threat has been removed from the rotation completely. You’ll be able to read more about these changes and the ALGS’ influence on them later in the week.
There’s no such thing as the calm after the storm, but the wreckage that the Storm Point changes leave behind is going to have a profound effect on Apex Legends Season 19. Combine that with a new character, respawning with your weapons, and the dissolution of the smoke meta, and we’ve got a whole new experience on our hands. Plus, we’ve finally, finally, got cross-progression.
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