Respawn Reveals Why Small Arenas Maps Won’t Come To Apex Legends
Apex Legends' newest game mode, Arena, has hit the ground running in Season 9: Legacy. Coming in as the first permanent game mode to be added alongside the typical battle royale, Arena's has gifted players a chance to test new legends, compositions, and weapons, in a thrilling 3v3 round-based combat.
Of the five maps that landed, three of them come from parts of Kings Canyon, Worlds Edge, and Olympus, with Artillery, Thermal Station, and Gardens coming respectively.
With the downscaled designs, many fans have now been calling for other popular areas such as Skulltown and Octane's Gauntlet to be copied and pasted into the new format.
However, Respawn Entertainment's Lead Game Designer, Daniel Klein, has spoken out that some of the smaller areas won't be making their way to Arenas.
Respawn On Small Maps Like Octanes Gauntlet?
After a viral Reddit thread surfaced, asking for Octane's Gauntlet to be added, due to the entertaining bounce pads, Klein was quick to throw his 50 pence into the hat. He first noted that the size is too small for Arena's. He said "It would be too small! It's important to have multiple POIs in an Arenas map, ideally POIs with direct line of sight between each other."
Comments began to fly in around Klien's comments, with one fan, in particular, quizzing the developer on a possible rework of the area, building it up to a more suitable size for Arena's gameplay.
Responding, Klein added, "Now we could copy-pasta it into a custom map and develop it further that way, but at that point, we might as well build a map for Arenas from scratch. If you've played a bunch of Arenas already, you will probably have found that Phaserunner and Party Crasher play a lot better than Artillery--that is because they were built from the ground up for Arenas gameplay"
Phaserunner and Party Crasher both came in as the other two maps built especially for the new mode. According to Klein, both maps make for a better experience than the cut-and-pasted versions from the battle royal variant.
What Makes A Good Apex Arena Map?
Backing up fellow Respawn dev, Designer, David Bocek (yes, Bocek like the new Bow), explained that the familiarity of the battle royale POIs takes away from the experience on Arena.
He said "We experimented with lots of stuff! Lots of spaces in BR maps and also lots of custom map prototypes. We learned a lot about what works and what doesn't, and unfortunately, small maps just didn't really work."
Click to enlargeHe continued to say, "In my personal experience they felt like they got too same-y really quickly, you lose most of the interesting and meaningful decision-making about where to go based on where you think the enemy will go, weapon loadouts, etc. The POIs like the health bins and the cash stations and the care package just felt all too close together too."
From the developers comments, it seems apparent that any future maps will be designed from the ground upwards, and we may never see Skulltown return to its former glory.
Image via Respawn Entertainment
