Apex LegendsThe 15th season, Eclipse, will delve deeper into the lore of one of its most popular characters by establishing the origins of its most recent. That’s because the Apex Games are heading to the Boreas system, the broken home of Seer, along with its new rival, Catalyst.
Boreas gets his big shot with a card called Broken Moon, the fifth battle royale card for Apex Legends since its launch in 2019. It takes place on Cleo, the moon referenced in Seer lore. A catastrophic meteor impact split the satellite of Boreas, which is responsible for frequent and destructive meteor showers on Cleo’s surface.
In fact, Seer is persona non grata on Boreas, and while the Apex games somewhat came to this system with his help, staging them on Cleo ended the colonists’ attempts to terraform the moon’s reclamation. That’s where Catalyst comes in, as fans saw it last week during its original trailer.
Broken Moon isn’t a sorry asteroid punching bag, said Jeff Shaw, lead map designer at Respawn Entertainment. Almost everything has blue skies, proof of the atmosphere and a major terraforming operation that the Apex games interrupted. Huge chunks of ejecta just happen to be lying around on the horizon, that is, evidence of Cleo’s violent history. A set image (below) suggests that Broken Moon is itself a massive chunk of Cleo floating among the moon’s remnants.
![The complete overview of the Broken Moon map in Apex Legends. It's a large chunk of moon floating among other rocky chunks, the moon itself shattered by a massive asteroid collision years ago.](https://oponame.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Apex-Legends-designers-shake-up-their-battle-royale-with-a.jpg)
Image: Respawn Entertainment/Electronic Arts
Shaw said Broken Moon is “roughly in scale,” if not slightly larger than, World’s Edge, the massive battle royale map that dates back to Season 3. “We felt like this scale really provides a solid foundation for the pacing and feel of the game and the player matter,” Shaw said during a press briefing last week. Players will find 14 great points of interest on Broken Moon, each suitable for an intense and decisive exchange of fire, he said.
Players can quickly travel among points of interest in Broken Moon with Zip Rails, a map feature that works like existing ziplines, but on a larger scale. Shaw said the Zip Rails were introduced to “shake up the traditional flow or feel of a match”, which the designers observed in the game’s fourth year.
“We found that, typically, squads land on the outer POIs, or ‘outer POIs,’ and move toward the center, on a very common trajectory from that starting POI,” Shaw said. The Zip Rail system “allows you and your team to quickly cover very large distances, and even reach multiple edge points of interest early, early in the game.”
While Zip Rails will be great for getting past a shrinking ring, Shaw and his colleagues hope it introduces players to more Broken Moon before it begins. “The interconnectedness of this system really helps change the trajectory of your team from your starting point of interest,” he pointed out, “so it’s not always the same, from one match to the other.
The points of interest themselves are also an attempt to upset the pace of a Apex Legends battle royale match, Shaw said. Developing larger landmarks for players to explore means they won’t all land in the same place and struggle to eliminate each other, instead enjoying the scenery and getting familiar with the field of battle.
Shaw called the usual POI melee a “hot dog stack,” which eliminates a group of players immediately. “We really wanted to give the teams a chance to go to this point of interest, but be a little more comfortable,” Shaw said.
The 14 points of interest in Broken Moon are explained in more detail in a Respawn blog post published on Monday. They range from a massive Terraformer (described as a ‘King of the Hill’ type location that can comfortably accommodate four teams) to a ‘Perpetual Core’ powerhouse, whose turbine airflow can quickly take fighters out of an ambush, Shaw said.
Overall, “I wouldn’t say [Broken Moon] would be flat”, but it’s not like Storm Point, which is “only a mountain map”. Still, as the POI descriptions attest, there’s a lot of verticality and height for players to exploit, and Shaw said the designers took a lot of inspiration and learned from what they learned after bringing Storm Point in game with season 11 a year ago. .
Separately, Respawn designers noted that Apex Legends: Eclipse will introduce two quality of life features: gifts and stickers. Gifts, as the word suggests, allow players to purchase an item with Apex Coins (the currency that is purchased with real money) and transfer it to another player. Design director Evan Nikolich says the giveaways help bring a new person into a team and ensure they have the latest gear everyone else is already wearing, for example. It’s also a way to tip the hat to others at the end of a round for their skillful play, whether as a teammate or opponent.
The stickers are a fun, purely cosmetic addition, Nikolich said. “If you’re committed to the game, you’ve noticed that we’ve changed some of the animations around shield cells and healing items,” he said. “And so we’re going to let you personalize that with stickers. We want players to be able to express themselves and show what they are passionate about. The launch of Stickers is an early iteration towards a larger goal of increased personalization and personalization, but Nikolich said it’s a permanent feature going forward.
Apex Legends: Eclipseseason 15, will launch on November 1 on all platforms – Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Windows PC, Xbox One and Xbox Series X.
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