The Apex Legends battle pass was overhauled for the game's seventh season, with an eye to making progression "more streamlined and rewarding." The actual effect, however, was to dramatically slow progression and increase the grind, a real problem for all but the most dedicated players.
Players complained, and EA quickly changed course by halving the amount of XP required to earn the stars needed to gain battle pass levels. In a subsequent AMA, game director Chad Grenier said developers "have more changes planned in the future to give players more agency on challenge completion."
Today, Grenier unveiled the next step in that plan: A reversion of season 7 daily challenges to season 6 levels. Some of the changes, particularly regarding damage targets, are dramatic. The damage per character target, for instance, has been reduced from 1000 to 250, while the damage per weapon class has been cut from 1250 to 125. Rewards are unchanged.
In last week's Reddit AMA, I said we had more changes to the S7 Battle Pass planned.Starting today, we're reverting the difficulty of the daily challenges to S6 levels while keeping the number of stars rewarded the same.See image below for the before-and-after comparison: pic.twitter.com/Bbcp6NUKUXNovember 10, 2020
A patch coming next week will make even further changes, Grenier said. Weekly challenges will also be reverted to season 6 difficulty levels and will give players an opportunity to complete them with more than one character, and all players will be granted ten free battle pass levels.
Not everyone is happy with the changes, based on the responses to Grenier's tweets—some players feel the XP requirements per level are still too high, and of course there are a few who say that it was all too easy to begin with—but the reaction to the changes seems quite positive overall. The impact of these changes over the long term remains to be seen, but at a minimum it seems clear that Respawn is committed to ensuring that all players have a fair shot at a worthwhile battle pass.
Thank you for this. As a player who only gets about an hour a day some of those challenges were brutal and made trying to complete the pass take fun out of playing the gameNovember 10, 2020
Thank you! pic.twitter.com/YyFABy1YX6November 10, 2020
Really appreciate you all listening and making these changes on top of giving people some compensation levels to make up for it.November 10, 2020
Thank you for changing the battle pass :)Personally i would like the see the old bp system back but i'll happily take this and get used to star system.Thank you for listening to the community hopefully theses changes are enoughNovember 10, 2020
