Apex Legends' Legacy season got off to a popular but rocky start
Down for a Fuse hours.
The much-anticipated Legacy update for Apex Legends arrived last night, and while Apex saw record numbers of Steam players and a huge audience on Twitch, it wasn't exactly a smooth launch. The high demand meant many couldn't get into matches, while players also reported problems with the in-game menus and marketplace.
Legacy went live at 6pm UK last night, but as you can see from the Twitter thread by Respawn below, it took about eight hours for Respawn to iron out all the problems with the servers. Following matchmaking problems across all platforms, the marketplace went down, while some players found that their cosmetic preferences had been reset to default skins. Respawn explained this was a "minor side effect" of a fix, and told players to re-equip their cosmetic items through the menus.
Hilariously, there were some other strange side-effects to all of this in-game, including some extremely low-poly versions of Apex Legends characters. Or is that just the leaked mobile version?
Players also found that the legend select screen had been greyed out in some cases, and that the game would sometimes randomise their legend selection. "Somehow in one of my arenas we all got queued as Bloodhound, then we all finally got switched to the correct legends after two matches," said one player.
roblox is having a crossover with apex from r/apexlegends
love the new legend select screen from r/apexlegends
As of this morning, it seems these issues have largely been solved: I popped on and was able to get into a match without any problems. Looking at the number of people playing Apex Legends on Steam yesterday evening, perhaps it's not entirely surprising that the servers experienced issues. According to Steam Charts, Apex hit a new concurrent player peak of 277,417 players last night - and that's not even including other platforms like Origin, PlayStation, Xbox and Switch. On Twitch, meanwhile, Apex peaked at 366k viewers last night, up from last month's peak of 178k (via Twitch Tracker). It's currently still sitting at a healthy 120k, putting it above games such as GTA 5, Valorant, CS:GO and Fortnite.
The reason for the influx of interest (aside from the addition of jetpack-wielding character Valkyrie) is that this season introduces a new permanent mode to Apex Legends called Arenas: a competitive 3v3 experience with reduced RNG and intense gunfights. It's been described as the first step in taking Apex Legends "beyond battle royale", and as I found out in a recent interview with director Chad Grenier, we might eventually see further experiments in Apex Legends such as single-player PvE content. Or more of it, at least.