With a four-chapter-long quest left to represent the majority of Apex Legends’ seasonal narrative offerings in season 15, questions have surrounded Respawn’s plan for the storytelling and lore heading into the future of the battle royale.
Ahead of season 16‘s launch on Feb. 14, the developers dropped a small teaser on what we can expect from their lore delivery engines in a recent press event. It’s unclear if quests will remain in the way that they have existed since season five, but Apex lore itself will continue to exist as a foundational part of the seasonal experience. Going forward, they want to explore new ways of telling that lore in the hopes of re-engaging the playerbase as the narrative ramps up.
As a live service battle royale title, Apex has had difficulty with telling the stories of its complex political structures and character relationships for a while. After the wildly successful premiere of the quests system with The Broken Ghost in season five, the game has struggled to produce similarly significant narrative beats each season with the limited time and resources available to do so. The quests themselves have also switched from being a hybrid text and mission-based experience, to a comic, to exclusively text-based again over their existence.
With season 15’s four-chapter quest, released toward the end of the season and covering a smaller-scale story between Seer and Catalyst, the format has felt like it’s on its way out to many players. When Game Director Steve Ferreira was directly asked if there were plans for changes or improvements to storytelling based on the short quest, he didn’t shy away from discussing it.
“So, this season we’re going to start teasing a different way of telling stories both in and out of game,” Ferreira revealed, pointing toward some major shifts coming lore delivery in the near future. However, whether or not players will see the fruits of that shift soon is up in the air as he then adds that Respawn will “share more of that as the next few seasons roll out, and that’ll develop.”
A long term evolution of the narrative is a promising sign that the characters will remain at the heart of Apex Legends, and the worldbuilding that its constructed from the foundations of the Titanfall universe won’t be falling to the wayside anytime soon. Despite recent criticisms of the quests, other methods of narrative delivery, such as the Bangalore and Bloodhound Chronicle events or the community comics, have been much more successful.
With only the confirmation that change is coming, it’ll be up to the lore enthusiasts in the Apex community to theorize what those changes could be and what it might mean for the future stories told in this universe.
