The current season in Apex Legends has proven to be incredibly popular with players. As developer Respawn Entertainment reported, the launch of season 9 broke multiple all-time player concurrent records on the Steam version. However, the increased player spikes also had the unfortunate side effect of placing a huge strain on the servers. In the first 24 hours and sporadically after that, players were met with all sorts of strange behavior, disconnects, and errors.

Server issues aside, players have continued to flock to the free to play game thanks in large part to one of the biggest new permanent additions this season. Arenas offers something different from the typical Battle Royale experience as it is a 3v3 team based mode where players attempt to stay alive and eliminate the enemy team. Maps are on the smaller side, but retain a few elements from it's sister mode with an expanding storm as well as loot scattered around. However, Arenas was almost wildly different to what it ultimately became.

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During a recent Ask Me Anything session on the Apex Legends subReddit, Lead Game Designer Carlos Pineda provided a bit of behind the scenes insight into the development process for Arenas. Originally, Arenas was more objective based where teams were fighting over a bomb that would need to be planted. Obviously, for fans of games like Valorant, Counter Strike GO, or even some of the objective style modes from Overwatch, this bomb style mode will likely sound familiar.

 While a mode like this may appeal to some Apex Legends players out there, Pineda admitted that it ultimately wasn't as fun as it seemed on paper. The main reason is that much of the current roster of characters aren't built for an objective-based mode like this. Respawn placed a priority on making character abilities feel valuable and important in Arenas, so the bomb-based mode was scrapped and redesigned into more of the team deathmatch style mode it is now.

It seems the move paid off, though for Respawn, Arenas remains a work in progress with consistent updates planned just like its battle royale counterpart. One issue that many in the community have begun report are people quitting a match early. As it stands now, players can quit and requeue without a penalty, though ruining the experience for the other players. Pineda again touched on this subject, hinting that the studio is looking into adding some sort of penalty for those who quit before a match is over while also adding loss forgiveness for those impacted.

Apex Legends is available on Nintendo Switch, PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One.

MORE: Apex Legends' Arenas Could Use a Few Improvements, But It's a Good Step in the Right Direction