It's a very big week for Respawn Entertainment and its highly popular battle royale game, Apex Legends. The free to play shooter just launched Season 9 this week and added the strongest link to Respawn's other major franchise with Valkyrie, the daughter of Titanfall 2 villain Viper. Valkyrie's legacy translates to other aspects of the game as well as she incorporates a number of moves from her father's Northstar class Titan including a missile volley, being able to hover in air, and even allowing her team to redeploy on the map while marking targets.
To go along with Valkyrie, Apex Legends also added a brand new permanent mode to the game called Arenas. Stepping away from the traditional battle royale style, Arenas is a 3 vs 3 style match where teams attempt to down the other players first. Each round has a buy phase similar to games like Valorant or CS: GO before unleashing both teams on the smaller maps. These elements have created a huge amount of excitement among fans, even pushing the game beyond previous play records.
As noted by Respawn's Director of Communication, over the past 24 hours have seen a massive player spike within Apex Legends on Steam. In fact, the number of players jumping in to check out the latest update has crushed the game's previous all-time player peak record, a similar situation to what Titanfall 2 was able to pull off this past weekend. While Rigney originally reported the number at 241,882, based on data from Steam Charts, the record continues to set new records seemingly on an hourly basis.
As of the morning of May 5, the number continues to grow and is currently settled in at 304,263 players. It's worth noting that these numbers are only for the Steam version of Apex Legends, though it's easy to assume that player numbers across each of the platforms have risen thanks in large part of the Season 9 update. While this is undoubtedly good news for Respawn Entertainment, the sudden influx of players has had other unexpected consequences.
Following the launch of Season 9 and the crushing weight of those attempting to log in, Apex Legends has seen plenty of server issues over the last 24 hours. The crashing servers have left many unable to play the game, though late in the day on May 4, the developer seemed to have a handle on the situation. However, reports continue to appear online on May 5 that login issues are starting to appear again, with some seeing messages saying that there are no servers found. Many attribute this to the sudden rise in player numbers again. Thankfully, Respawn is well aware of this issues and is working on getting the situation resolved.
Apex Legends is available now for PC, PS4, Xbox One, and Switch.