Respawn Entertainment has done a great job at keeping Apex Legends relevant and fresh in the ever-changing landscape that is the free-to-play online multiplayer shooter. Alongside the start of the battle royal's ninth season, Respawn rolled out a new, permanent, never-before-seen team deathmatch mode called Apex Arenas. So far, Arenas has been received well with a steady player base that's been consistent since its launch. The new mode isn't perfect, however, and there have been plenty of suggestions on how to make Apex Arenas better.
One major thing Respawn could do to improve Apex Legends' Arena mode would be to look at another wildly popular online shooter: Overwatch. Similar to Apex, Overwatch is a class-based multiplayer team shooter that also has an extremely popular competitive scene. It's currently unclear if and when Arenas will join the battle royal mode as a competitive eSport, but before it does, it should take some of Overwatch's lessons to heart.
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Since its initial launch, Apex Legends has made one thing extremely clear: it is a team-based game that's not meant to be played solo. The main battle royal modes are comprised of teams of two and three with the option of dropping alone only recently added in Apex season 8. Even then, winning on a solo drop is highly challenging as so much of the game is designed around teamwork. Apex Arenas is similarly team-focused, having teams of three duke it out until only one squad remains. Something that could change Arenas up to create an even more exciting experience would be to add additional team members to create squads of five or six, mimicking Overwatch and Overwatch 2.
By adding these extra teammates, the less offensive playable characters in Apex might be able to find better use in Arenas. As the mode stands currently, it doesn't make a whole lot of strategic sense to pick characters that don't have offensive benefits like Loba or Wattson. Having more teammates opens the game up for players to really devote themselves to a class and stick to it, just like in Overwatch, while also opening the doors for much more interesting matches. It might allow for snipers to stay back while offensive characters push forward and healer characters stay somewhere in the middle jumping in to help out as they see fit.
This sort of change would, of course, mean that Apex Arenas would need some major rebalancing. Up to this point, the game has been tightly designed for teams of three players maximum so adding members wouldn't be as simple as just adding more open slots to a team. If done right, however, it could really open Arenas up for more complicated play than it currently is.
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Apex Arenas serves as something of a proof of concept for Apex's combat loop. Plain and simple, the gunplay is great and Arenas is the quickest way to experience it because there's no looting, there's no hiding, it's just pure combat training. That said because there's no variety to the mode in terms of objective, each match can start to feel very same-ey very fast. No-respawn deathmatches are fun, but they lose some of their excitement when they're the only name of the game. Overwatch really perfected the use of objectives to keep the variety going while also allowing the combat to shine. Adding simple payload escort or king-of-the-hill objectives could do the same for Apex.
One major difference between Overwatch and Apex is that Overwatch has the player respawn each time they die while Apex Arenas doesn't have respawning of any kind. The objectives included in Overwatch are clearly tailored for respawning which might make them unideal for a game like Apex where respawning in Arenas doesn't exist and in the battle royal is a labored process. Objectives could be modified for permadeath to look more like games such as CounterStrike, Rogue Company, or Valorant, which Arenas already clearly takes inspiration from.
There have been references to rotating playlists similar to those of the battle royale by members of Respawn in the Apex Legends sub-Reddit, but what exactly that might mean for Arenas isn't clear. The rotating playlists for the battle royale never change the overall objective of the game, they just modify different elements for a limited time, so it might not be that big of a change potentially coming to Arenas.
Each character in Overwatch serves a specific purpose for the team. Good team composition is essential to each team's success and while Apex Legends doesn't necessarily have classes based on what weapons each character uses, the characters all fall into discrete classes based on their individual abilities. Unfortunately, some characters are kitted for being far more aggressive than others as mentioned above. This causes them to be undesirable picks for the aggressive nature of Arenas reducing the viable options from Apex's roster of expanding characters down significantly.
Each of Overwatch's characters is good at one specific thing meaning that all of their abilities are designed to be helping them do the thing that they're good at. While Apex Legends shouldn't sand the edge off of all their characters to copy Overwatch entirely, reworking the less viable Arena picks to make them better at fitting the class role they're given, might help open the game up to mains of the less than desirable characters. This also would mean some major rebalancing would be needed to make that suggestion work, but it might be worth considering if Arenas wants to become just as popular and competitive as Apex Legends' battle royale mode.
At the end of the day, it is important to remember that, while Apex Arenas could certainly learn a thing or two from Overwatch, they exist as entirely separate games. Making suggested changes to Apex so that it might be more like Overwatch can potentially be a slippery slope as suggesting too much could cause Apex to lose its sense of identity that makes it so popular to begin with. It's entirely possible that fixes for Arenas are coming and that they might look nothing like Overwatch, but when trying to create a better experience, it's not a bad idea to look at what's already doing a great job.
Apex Legends is available now on PC, PlayStation 4, Switch, and Xbox One.
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