After years of requests and feedback that span from Apex Legends launch to the current day, season 16 is finally delivering a vanilla Team Deathmatch mode for the title. It will be replacing Arenas, which is getting sunset after seven quiet seasons in the shadow of Battle Royale and Control.
The more traditional shooter experience will pit two teams of six against one another across maps previously built for both Arenas and Gun Run. Its addition is part of a wider effort from Respawn to enhance and evolve the experience for both Apex newcomers and its more casual audience, but it will only exist as an available mode for the first three weeks of season 16.
Initially, this might seem to be a misstep to not make it permanent, but in reality, it won’t be as much of a limited-time mode as it first appears. At the end of the three weeks, Team Deathmatch will instead become part of a different new permanent playlist called Mixtape: a rotating compilation of fan-favorite arcade modes like Control and Gun Run alongside the newly introduced TDM.
At a pre-season 16 press event last week, TDM was available across three maps: Habitat, Party Crasher, and Skull Town. No doubt the mode could easily function on the other Arenas maps currently available in Apex if Respawn so chooses to do so, but its release might come with a limited selection. Players pick their legend and their loadout in a similar fashion to Control, before engaging in a fast-paced best-of-three match where each round is won by the team that reaches 30 kills first.
Random spawns and occasional care packages with high-value loot make Apex’s version of TDM value mobility and teamwork above all else. Players are free to change their legend and loadout as they so desire to better counter the enemy strategy, and the mode is built as a low-stakes environment where death doesn’t matter and everyone has the opportunity to train themselves in various combat scenarios.
It’s finally making its way to Apex because Arenas, by Respawn’s own admittance, failed to be that. “It’s not hitting our goal for being a good place of practice,” said Design Director Evan Nikolich on the subject of Arenas being removed. “We have the BR as this high stakes, competitive place, and Arenas overlaps a bit too much with that space. We want to bring something that allows players a little more relaxed play.”
His statement was backed up by Game Mode Designer Marty Wong. “We’ve been hearing the community ask for this one for a while,” he added while breaking down its replacement by a traditional Deathmatch mode. “Arenas was supposed to be our ‘smaller slice of BR’ mode. What ended up being was that it was kind of a sweatier mode that felt high stakes. A lot of players would go into it feeling like they couldn’t make mistakes or couldn’t really experiment and they had to play really hard.”
“We’re hoping that TDM comes in and provides a place for players to die fast and feel comfortable making mistakes.”
Team Deathmatch will launch alongside season 16 on Feb. 14, and then will be available to play for the first three weeks until the arcade Mixtape playlist takes its spot on Mar. 7.
