Chad Grenier, the game director of Battle Royale Apex Legends, published a blog post on the official site of the game in which the devs take a look back at where it all started.
As a part of Titanfall’s post-release content, the developers at Respawn Entertainment were exploring ideas for another game. Almost two years before the release of Apex Legends, the team had the first company-wide playtest of a new Survival game mode. It would have pilots and Titans duke it out until only one remained standing, Battle Royale style.
In October of 2017, the team saw the first versions of Gibraltar, Bloodhound, and Wraith in the game. A month later, they successfully did their first 50 player game and begun playtesting the map that would eventually be known as Kings Canyon.
“The gameplay improved over time, with Titans and wallrunning being removed to slow down the pace of the game and bring more balance to the gameplay. Of course, we tried to keep Titans in the game for many months, but once we accepted that we were making something fundamentally different from Titanfall, we entered a new phase. Company playtests were happening weekly, and often running late into the night. We couldn’t stop playing!”
Eventually, name of the game turned from “Survival” to “Apex Predator”. The team began prototyping new mechanics like respawning teammates and legend abilities.
“It became clear to us that we had something great on our hands, and our plans for the other project were scrapped. We were then all-hands on what would eventually be called “Apex Legends” and would never look back.”
Additionally, the team at Respawn had revealed the Apex Legends Nintendo Switch release date: March 9th, 2021.
Porting Apex Legends to its smallest screen is a major achievement, and the team is very proud of the achieved optimizations.
Apex Legends will launch on Switch with support for cross-platform play, our latest seasonal content, and full feature parity with the other versions of the game.
