Apex Legends season five, titled Fortune’s Favor, launches next week. It will feature a new battle pass, a new progression system called Quests, and new character Loba, everyone’s favorite orphaned thief turned teleporting valkyrie on a quest for revenge against a psychotic murder robot.
The season five reveal trailer, which was released today, gave fans their best look yet at Loba and her abilities, as well as what exactly she’s attempting to accomplish in the Apex Games. It also hints at some big steps forward in Apex’s lore, furthering the Revenant storyline introduced in season four, as well as some of the mysteries the game may challenge players to solve. But for many players, the most important thing the trailer showed was another seasonal tradition in Apex: map changes. And boy, did this trailer give us a map change.
Skull Town, or at least Skull Town as we know it, is no more.
In the trailer, Loba’s mission to kill off Revenant’s human head—presumably the thing that keeps the simulacrum ticking and murdering his way across the Outlands—goes awry and a large portion of the map sinks into the ground, including a familiar giant skull. We knew from previous teasers that something would be happening around the Skull Town area in season five, but the trailer and producer Josh Medina’s subsequent tweet seem to indicate that the location, whether partially or totally, will be destroyed in the new version of Kings Canyon.
This isn’t a foreign concept at all for Apex. Season two saw the destruction of Bridges and large swathes of Cascades, and new structures like The Cage were introduced. In season four, Capitol City in World’s Edge was effectively split in two by a giant river of lava, creating Fragment East and Fragment West.
But this is Skull Town we’re talking about.
Skull Town has been one of Kings Canyon’s most popular locations since the game launched—and it’s easy to see why. Massive dinosaur-like skeletons stretch over one of the largest collections of buildings on the map. There are open spaces, tight corridors, and verticality. If you drop into Kings Canyon, there’s a good chance you’ll get into a fight in Skull Town and the map terrain and buildings provide endless options in combat. Oh, and loot—lots of loot.
Loot, or the lack of it, has been a sticking point for players and Kings Canyon for some time now. Where World’s Edge had plenty of loot, players dropping back into Kings Canyon after the map was reintroduced to ranked and unranked modes in March felt the map simply lacked loot density. And that felt bad for many players.
Apex has built a reputation for trying to create a more fair, competitive battle royale—a difficult task given the RNG inherent to the BR genre. The chances of landing in a spot on Kings Canyon and simply dying without getting the opportunity to find guns or armor felt high enough that Respawn actually buffed the loot density of Kings Canyon in April with the introduction of The Old Ways event. Still, many players felt the buff didn’t go far enough, suggesting the map needed entirely new spawn points for loot as well.
Skull Town, at least, was a place where you could find loot. And if you saw a team or two landing at your exact spot, there were enough loot spawn points where a quick course correction could land you in another decent location for guns and armor. You might still die quickly, sure. But it felt a little fairer than, say, two or three teams landing outside Singh Labs, where winning a fight turned more into the looting competition of latency and button mashing.
With season five, we’ll see what becomes of the Skull Town area and if any of those sweet, sweet loot spawn locations survived Loba’s revenge plot. We’ll also see what type of terrain and structure rise up to take its place since there might be underground sections to explore and fight in. The Loba vault teaser on World’s Edge already put players into the Revenant storage facility below Skull Town last week, so there’s a good chance that the area will become playable. And given the previous major map changes to hit the game, very rarely are locations destroyed without new areas being added.
But for now, we salute Skull Town and thank it for its service. Get into the game and hot drop there while you still can.
