Respawn CEO Vince Zampella discussed Apex Legends' cadence of updates at the GamesBeat Summit this week, noting that the studio's schedule is designed to give the team a strong quality of life. While he didn't mention the competition, this is in contrast to Fortnite, which has more frequent updates but is also facing accusations of brutal crunch.
Seasonal updates were always the plan for Apex Legends, according to Zampella, and its sudden success hasn't changed that.
“Our intention was to always be seasonal, so we’re kind of staying with that,” Zampella said. “The thought was ‘hey we kind of have something that’s blowing up here, do we want to start trying to drop more content?’ But I think you look at quality of life for the team. We don’t want to overwork the team, and drop the quality of the assets we’re putting out. We want to try and raise that.”
Unfortunately, Apex Legends' first season has been a bit disappointing, and it's in dire need of some better cosmetics. After all the leaks and rumours and build up, the launch of the first battle pass didn't make much of an impact, or at least not a positive one. Perhaps as a result, viewing figures have dropped by 75 percent.
Season 2 will be larger, apparently, but Respawn has yet to decide how long seasons will be, and it's not going to make lots of changes before then.
Cheers, Gamasutra
