Apex Legends reduces battle pass grind... again
This time the changes are pretty promising, though
Apex Legends' seventh season added in lovely things like a new map and character. However, it also brought about some rather unwelcome changes to the game's battle pass, making it superbly grindy to level up. Respawn Entertainment made it so the XP required to gain a level was substantially higher than previous seasons.
After a lot of backlash, they recognised the issue and made attempts to improve it last week. It still wasn't quite enough, though, and now they've made further changes to lessen the grind - with even more on the way next week.
Back in Season 6, players could earn 54,000 XP a week to level up their battle passes, gaining a new level at 9k, 18k, 27k, 36k, then 54k. The changes at the start of Season 7, however, made it so players essentially had to earn 100,000 XP to get a single level. Respawn altered that last week, so players had to earn half the amount, 50,000 XP, for a level. But as you can probably tell, that's still pretty bad in comparison to the previous season.
The changes were an effort to implement a new Star system in Apex, where doing your challenges would award you with a certain number of Stars. Reaching 10 Stars would earn you a battle pass level, and each Star was worth 10k XP (5K after the last changes).
Respawn said this system was designed to make it all more "streamlined and rewarding". Unfortunately, to earn your Stars, you had to do daily challenges that were an awful lot more grindy than previous seasons. Harder challenges + asking for far too much XP = fewer battle pass levels and lots of unhappy players.
But the devs have recognised this (again), and in a patch yesterday they reverted the difficulty of the dailies back to how they were in Season 6.
Game director Chad Grenier tweeted a comparison showing that you'll still earn Stars, but most challenges are considerably easier. For example, rather than having to deal 1000 damage with a certain character for just one Star, you'll only have to deal 250 instead.
There's more to come, too, as next week Apex's weekly challenges will go back down to their Season 6 difficulty as well. They're also giving players 10 free battle pass levels to make up for it.
In my previous post, I mentioned that this all felt a little shady, like it was an effort to get players to buy battle pass levels with Apex Coins (the premium currency). I'm still not totally convinced this wasn't the case, but it's good to see them putting it right.
With these improvements I feel a lot better recommending giving Season 7 a go. The new map Olympus is lush, and we have an Apex Legends guide to teach you all the best locations to land on it.