According to Apex Legends developers, Storm Point, the latest map shipped to the game with Season 11, will feature a new expansion plan.
In an interview with DotEsports, Rodney Reece, an Apex level designer, explained how the maps within the game changed overtime behind the scenes. He stated that any significant changes made to Kings Canyon or World’s Edge were primarily unplanned. This is set to change with Storm Point as the team moves toward a more deliberate, plotted course.
Meet Ash, the simulacrum assassin and overseer of the Arenas who’s ready to cut through the competition and put them in their place ⚔️ pic.twitter.com/OsS6xdtxWl
— Apex Legends (@PlayApex) October 28, 2021
“There was never an expectation that we would change the maps,” he said.
Instead, map changes came from a challenge to keep the areas interesting to the Apex Legends player base. Some were even meant to be fixes of problematic locations after live playtesting. One highlighted example was the chokepoint in the dead-center of World’s Edge. Reece pointed out that while this problem didn’t appear in internal testing, it became something of a hallmark of the map once it launched to the public servers.
After a few years, the team had a “huge list” of potential design pitfalls ready to go for the next map.
Storm Point will take from these lessons and follow its own plan when it comes to changing things up. It is meant to “grow more naturally and with some more forethought,” according to Reece. For example, Barometer was purposefully built with an extra layer of lore to avoid a Skull Town-like fate. Storm Point is also 15% larger than World’s Edge and features a few cleared areas that could host new interesting shifts in the coming months.
Clearly, having the knowledge that updates will inevitably be coming has impacted the way Storm Point performs. All that’s left to do is see how the public players take to it.
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