Apex Legends just started its first season, which gives players access to the new Legend on the roster, Octane, and the features included in the Battle Pass. If you've played Overwatch or any of the clones it has out in the video game wild, you know how hard it is to switch off your main. If you're rocking Widowmaker seven games in a row, you aren't really playing the game very efficiently . Apex Legends has a similar problem, where players connect with a Legend and stick with them. Whether you prefer the tankiness of Gibraltar or the zipline of Pathfinder, don't pigeonhole yourself with just one character. Respawn, the developers behind Apex Legends , realize this is an issue in the genre and implemented a new feature that should encourage players to try out the other eight Legends in the game: the Legends Bonus. Apex Legends Legends Bonus When you play a Legend, you'll get double the experience, up to 25,000 extra bonus XP for your Battle Pass. The bonus increases depending on how long you last in a match, giving players with survival as their main objective more rewards. After you cap out a specific Legend, you'll be able to earn bonus XP by trying out a different Legend. You'll also get an extra 500 XP for the first kill you get with each Legend. These bonuses are reset after a week, meaning players won't have to stay away from their main for too long. This is a fantastic way to get players to move out of their comfort zones and try a class they might not have attempted otherwise. I originally despised Lifeline, but after a few games I fell in love with her healing drone. I'm a terrible shot so if I stand in the back of a fight and heal people to keep their damage up, I feel like I'm contributing to the group. How far have you made it in your season one Battle Pass? Tell us in the comments.<doc-sep>Apex Legends’ battle pass is out tomorrow, and publisher EA has revealed its contents in full. The highlights include new skins for Lifeline, Wraith, and Mirage; dozens of new weapon skins including a gorgeous ‘evolving’ skin for the Havoc energy rifle at tier 100; and free rewards for everyone who plays during season one. The battle pass is named Wild Frontier and looks themed around the rugged outdoors, with the new Legend skins mainly in earthy greens and browns (see featured image). It’s not quite as colourful as Fortnite’s current season of dragons and volcanoes, but then, nor is Apex Legends itself. The free rewards include one Wild Frontier Legend skin and 18 Wild Frontier stat trackers, which presumably can be redeemed on any applicable Legend or item. You can also grab five Apex Packs – loot boxes which can drop random cosmetics, or the materials to craft those of your choosing. Anyone can earn these items for free by playing over the course of the season, irrespective of whether you’ve bought the battle pass. The battle pass itself contains 100 tiers of further cosmetic rewards, culminating in a lovely silver-blue design for the Havoc energy rifle at tier 100. Apparently, this skin will ‘evolve’ as you score kills with it, gaining glowing red eyes and smoking nostrils. Nonetheless, reaction on Reddit has been mixed given that the Havoc isn’t all that popular – some players are calling for an evolving Peacekeeper skin instead, which seems much more in keeping with the meta so far. Read more: the best multiplayer games on PC Head over to EA’s blog here for a full rundown of all 100 tiers and their rewards, plus a handy FAQ. The battle pass will cost you 950 Apex Coins (roughly $9.50), though you can get the pass plus its first 25 levels if you’re okay with splashing out 2,800 Coins. In a nice, consumer-friendly twist, the battle pass tiers include bonus Apex Coins – community manager Jay Frechette explains that these bonus coins total 1,000. In other words: play enough this season, and you don’t have to spend any (more) real money on the season two pass, assuming its price doesn’t change. It looks like the final coin drop in the Wild Frontier pass is at tier 97, though, so expect a hefty grind.<doc-sep>It is bad, grindy, and, above all else, wants you to pay to unlock rewards. If Respawn Entertainment had any hopes of keeping players entertained with Apex Legends through its new season one battle pass, then it failed at the first hurdle. A battle pass, by design, is a paid subscription service which rewards players with in-game items for naturally playing games and completing tasks. The rewards are usually only offered during a limited time, like a couple of months, as a way to entice a player to continuously play a game over a long stretch of time. But the system is never meant to be that grindy, it's meant to be achievable within the time-limit— something which doesn't resonate in Apex Legends' battle pass so far. Leveling up is a chore To get from level one to level two of the battle pass, a player must collect an eye-watering 29,500 XP. In retrospect, a level 28 player going to level 29 needs only 2/3 of that amount (18,000 to be exact) to get to a new profile level. That's not to say that there aren't other ways to get Battle Pass XP—far from it. Respawn added a new system called "Legends Bonus," which rewards a player bonus Battle Pass XP for each different Legend that they play as. The problem with this, however, is that it's limited to just 25,000 Battle Pass Points per character per week. So even if you were to max out the total amount of points for that character, you wouldn't even get close to going up from level one to two just from that character's bonus points alone. Other games, like Fortnite, give players alternative ways to level up their pass by completing missions and questions that reward the player with additional battle pass tiers. Respawn decided not to take this approach with Apex, however, and instead focused solely on XP. Because of this, the whole system feels grindy and it definitely doesn't feel fun or rewarding like a battle pass should feel. The rewards are not rewarding Just one look at Apex Legends' season one battle pass in comparison to something like Fortnite: Battle Royale or even something like Realm Royale will tell you everything you need to know about the rewards on offer. Other games have a theme for their passes, such as Realm Royale's dinosaurs or Fortnite's current pirate theme that differentiate it from the base game and previous seasons to offer something exciting and fun—something actually rewarding. Related: Early impressions of the rewards in the Apex Legends’ Battle Pass Apex's battle pass rewards, however, are stale and seemingly thoughtless. The skins for champions don't offer any distinct differences and everything else on offer is just a badge or worthless cosmetic that really don't do anything for the game as a whole. Sure there are a couple of cool cosmetics options available to unlock, such as the level 100 reward, but with the amount of work needed to unlock them, it just makes the whole process trivial. It incentivizes paying real money to level up Respawn added an option for players to pay real money to gain an additional level of their battle pass without needing to get the XP naturally. By paying 150 Apex Coins, which comes to about $1, you can level up your battle pass by a single level. So if you wanted to go from level 1 to 99 within an instant, without ever playing the game, you can fork out around $99 —that's after already spending 950 Apex coins to get the thing in the first place. With how grindy the battle pass, it honestly feels like the battle pass was designed to be bumped up through additional purchases. Of course, buying these upgrades with real cash is entirely optional, but by the end of the season if you've only been able to grind through a couple of levels and don't want to miss out on your rewards, some players would happily spend the extra cash to get everything. This feels like something EA would devise to try to get a free extra bucks off of you in the long run, Just like how EA once let players pay to level up their classes in previous games like Battlefield 3, or how EA created an entire game around the prospect of buying loot boxes to give you an advantage over another player (Star Wars Battlefront 2). Respawn has talked multiple times about how little EA was involved in creating Apex Legends. But now, it sure feels like EA has had a lot of influence on the battle pass.<doc-sep>Despite having only been out for two and a half weeks, Apex Legends’ Twitch Prime deal came as quite a surprise. Respawn and EA seem to have managed to turn the deal with Amazon around in a little over a fortnight, but there’s just one problem – you currently don’t need to have Twitch Prime in order to get your free cosmetics. If you head to Origin and click through to Apex Legends, a screen appears before you enter the game which, among other things, gives you access its launch options. According to CS:GO community creator Adam_THR on Twitter, entering the code “+twitch_prime_linked 1” will make the client think you’ve linked a Twitch Prime account with the game, even if you don’t actually have one. We verified that code for ourselves, and confirmed that entering it will credit your account with five Apex packs and any rewards you earn from them. Presumably, this will only work if you’ve not already claimed your rewards, and I’d suggest that if you do actually have Twitch Prime, this is the less-safe option. The Twitch Prime bonuses offer five lootboxes, each offering three rewards, and a legendary skin for everyone’s new favourite robot, Pathfinder. They’ll be automatically applied to your Origin account once you link it to your Twitch Prime. To anyone who plays Apex legends, if you put "+twitch_prime_linked 1" in launch options you get 5 free packs lol — Adam|Quzga (@Adam_THR) February 20, 2019 This particular trick isn’t likely to be around for long – it’ll probably be patched out as soon as possible, so if you fancy that swanky purple Pathfinder skin, I’d move quickly. Fire: Check out our Apex Legends weapons guide Elsewhere on King’s Canyon, the new Havoc assault rifle is now available. On its own, it’s nothing special, but add the right hop-up to it and it quickly becomes much more entertaining.<doc-sep>
It should take about 100 hours of gameplay for Apex Legends players to level up their Battle Pass to the maximum level if they take advantage of bonuses, a Respawn developer wrote on Reddit. The developer said that “if you use the bonuses and get a few kills here and there” you would be able to reach level 100 in the season one Battle Pass by playing a little over one hour per day. He said that “for the average player leveraging Battle Pass bonuses,” leveling the Battle Pass from levels one to 100 is faster than increasing player level from one to 100 by about 25 hours. The Respawn developer mentions the bonuses of playing with friends, playing with more characters, and naturally getting more experience from the XP boosts unlocked as you level up the Apex Battle Pass. Apparently, players who can take advantage of all these boosts can get all the rewards from the Battle Pass by playing the game every day for at least one hour. The developer also said that it should take players 1.3 hours per Battle Pass level “if you do literally nothing in the match but live and never do a point of damage ever” if players have the character bonus active since it means they would get six points of XP per second. That means the minimum Battle Pass experience a player can get if they survive 20 minutes in a match with the character bonus is 7,200 XP. “That assumes you do zero damage, don't get top three, don't play with friends, etc,” the developer wrote. Related: The Apex Legends Battle Pass is the most EA thing Respawn could have done The math may vary, and the time players take to level up may also vary considering each individual’s playstyle. Aggressive Apex players are more likely to die early in a match and spend more time in the lobby, but they're also more likely to get more XP points for eliminations and kill leads. Several players have contested the Apex developer’s math, saying it might actually take even longer considering the time spent waiting for new matches in the lobby. Some said it feels more like it would take twice that time, while others think 100 hours is already way too much time to spend on a single game. If you have an Apex Battle Pass and want to go for level 100, be ready for the grind.