Apex Legends may have been in active development for several years now, but some players feel the game is still missing some features that could help it stand out. A recent post from one of the developers may be hinting at such requests being fulfilled.
Since Apex Legends' inception, the main focus has remained on the battle royale game mode. The game supports smaller battles in its Arenas mode, but some players feel Arenas does not change enough about the core gameplay to be worthwhile to an audience that prefers objective-focused games.
In a response SoaR Gaming player "hollow" expressing interest in more traditional game modes, Josh Medina, the producer of Apex Legends, left a GIF of a person writing on a pad of paper. Some Apex Legends community members are interpreting this response as note-taking, and hoping it indicates that Respawn is listening and plans to add some requested game modes.
Adding more modes to Apex Legends would be an interesting strategy to attract more players, but it could also alienate the current playerbase. Apex Legends is not an objective-focused game, so adding other modes would mean creating divisions in the playerbase and potentially harming player-developer relations as attention is split between players who play for different reasons. This would be especially troublesome coming off the abundance of technical problems in Apex Legends from last year.
While the response may be exciting to fans of other franchises like Halo, which implement more objective-focused gameplay, an important aspect to remember is Respawn's history with objective-focused games. Titanfall 2, which shares a universe with Apex Legends, had multiplayer with design much closer to a traditional competitive formula instead of a battle royale. Since Apex Legends is still primarily focused on being a battle royale and the Titanfall series has remained relatively dormant for a long time, a Titanfall comeback as opposed to the addition of objective-based Apex Legends modes would not be completely unexpected.
Even with all the possibilities that could arise from the reply, it is equally likely that Josh is just looking to keep up community interaction instead of planning to make changes to the game. Being involved in a prominent project leads to a large amount of public scrutiny, so communication from Respawn is key to make sure players are getting what they want out of the game. If SoaR's ideas are implemented, they will take Apex Legends in a very different direction from its current course, and only time will tell whether that will be positive or negative.
Apex Legends is available now for PC, PS4, Switch, and Xbox One.