Apex Legends’ Season 4 is now live. There’s a new character and weapon, changes to the map, and lots of tweaks.
After some dramatic misdirection regarding which new Legend would be added to the game, robot assassin Revenant is the newest playable character. His passive, called Stalker, lets him crouch-walk faster and climb higher than other Legends. His tactical ability Silence throws “a device that deals damage and disables enemy abilities for 10 seconds,” while his Ultimate Death Totem keeps players from dying.
Revenant launches alongside a new weapon, the Sentinel bolt action sniper rifle. The Sentinel can use shield batteries in your inventory to deal extra damage to enemy shields.
As detailed yesterday, there are changes to the World’s Edge map. Central location Fuel Depot has been replaced with a giant structure called the Planet Harvester (Correction, 2/5, 11:47am—This post initially misnamed the POI as Plant Harvester), with lots of corridors and hallways developer Respawn hopes will “make 3rd parties a little more predictable and hopefully easier to defend against.” Landmark Capitol City now has lava running down the middle of it; falling in the lava will slow and damage the player but not kill them, which sounds like it’ll be a lot of fun to experiment with. Season 4 also brings Weapon Racks, which can be found at the new location Survey Camp.
Map changes and Revenant are the biggest changes, but there are lots of smaller tweaks as well. Sniper rifles now get their own ammo type, and energy ammo packs give more ammo upon pickup. The G7 Scout is now an assault rifle instead of a sniper, and the once care package-only L-STAR can now be found in the world, along with having its damage and rate of fire decreased. The Devotion light machine gun, meanwhile, is now a crate-only weapon. The turbocharger hopup has been removed from the game, and the Havoc rifle has gotten some buffs in response.
In other tweaks, there’s now a “random favorite” option for skins. Skins you’ve unlocked can be favorited, and “choosing Random Favorite option from the skins menu will randomly cycle your chosen favorite Legend skins in between matches.” As someone who never remembers to go through all my skins, this sounds like a nice option for getting the most out of the cosmetics I’ve unlocked.
A new season of Apex Legends means a new ranked season as well. There are some changes here too, which Respawn previously announced: ranks will be reset approximately every six weeks going forward, and a new tier called Master has been added. There are also changes to the penalties for leaving a ranked match: Respawn writes “We will be limiting the RP loss forgiveness when you leave once per day. If you exceed once per day more than three times per ranked series, you lose all forgiveness for the remainder of that series. Once these limits are reached players will no longer receive RP loss forgiveness when abandoning a match, regardless of the reason for quitting.”
A new season, as ever, means a new battle pass. I’ve never been that taken with Apex Legends’ cosmetics, though I like the look of the punk rock level 50 Wattson skin. There are plenty of bug fixes and smaller changes too, which you can read in the patch notes. From now until February 11, players who log in will get some “anniversary gifts,” which include a charm, a badge, and 10K bonus XP in their first match of the day.