Players are becoming disinterested in the shooter due to its repeated seasonal events and technical problems.

Apex Legends still maintains its reputation as one of the greatest battle royales available; its fast-paced gameplay and unique heroes have captivated many players. Despite the delight brought to gamers when the title launched with great success, it appears to be starting to lose some of its momentum after four years of remaining in the limelight. There seems to be a dearth of fresh content hindering its longevity.

Apex’s seasonal launches are generally quite remarkable, providing fresh weapons, Legends, or levels. However, there is rarely anything significant in terms of content in between seasons. Once in a while, downloadable content will be available about a month or two after the season commences - for instance, season 14 launched on the 9th of August, introducing a new Legend, Vantage - and then the Beast of Prey Collection event would come out two months after.

Events that take place over a span of two weeks usually offer a few beauty items that can be obtained and earned, which often include a Heirloom – an item of legend that changes your strike with a weapon that specifically belongs to a certain Legend.

These Collection events occasionally offer limited time modes such as Gun Run (like Gun Game in Call of Duty) and Control (Domination). Unfortunately, they aren’t very attractive to the gaming community, and players like myself are growing weary. Over the years, we’ve been faced with the same limited time events over and over again. The Winter Express train domination mode event has been identically repeated for the last three years, which although it is still enjoyable, players want something different. The Halloween event is also nothing new. Even though these timed events last for two weeks, many individuals lose interest after only one week.

The local population has been demanding a permanent variant of the game, identical to Control, where two nine person teams compete against each other. This has already featured in earlier brief sessions and has offered a pleasant departure from the usual Battle Royale and Arenas.

Last week, Control made its comeback with the Spellbound Collection event, which was exciting. Unfortunalely, the event updates had a lot of problems. When I tried to enter Apex, I faced a lot of difficulties, not being able to pass the loading screen most times. Even after making it to the main menu, I was forced to shut down the game due to a “fatal error” or Code Net.

Since significant changes to the game are made during big Season updates, such as new maps, weapons, and Legends, it has become a common occurrence for players to get disconnected at this time. I have suggested before that Apex might take a break for a day or two to give themselves time to address some of the underlying issues with the game, as Fortnite does between seasons. This, however, is not as easy to put into practice. Despite this, the community have continued to ask Apex to stabilize the servers, particularly as many find themselves penalized with a time-out when they become disconnected during a ranked game.

The locals really appreciate it if there were clear and frequent communications regarding the problems, especially when these grievances are aggravated because of the introduction of new face and body items or repetition of short term gaming modes.

Respawn shared on their official Twitter account (not the Apex one) that they were looking into the problems experienced after the Spellbound launch. Unfortunately, there was no update from Respawn the next day, despite multiple people commenting about the money they had wasted on event skins due to server issues. Finally, after almost a day had passed, they tweeted a notification that a fix had been put in place to stop the instabilities - they posted this on the Respawn account.

I’m a huge fan of Apex, it’s my go-to Battle Royale. But I’m not blind to its faulty aspects, such as few content updates and Respawn’s inadequate communication. One remedy to this could’ve been to open custom private lobbies to all players, as the Spellbound event did. Still, it was necessary to have a full team of 30 players to begin the lobby - with fewer, it wouldn’t work.

Developing a game is by no means easy, since there are multiple dynamics that must be taken into account, especially with a service that runs in real time. Evidently, Apex devs inspect data from current and temporary modes, in addition to player movements, to upgrade the game accordingly. If that is correct, why do we persistently receive the same holiday events, even when their popularity has dropped off? Additionally, technical problems that obstruct users from signing in are inexcusable.

Epic Games made a bold decision to take Fortnite offline for a period of time to enable a complete reboot on a new system, which unbelievably cost them a fortune in lost income. Nevertheless, this provided the gamers with an astonishningly better gaming experience when it returned online. Maybe Respawn could consider the same for Apex Legends? The playerbase has been asking for major improvements to the sound and server structure for years due to the recurring audio errors and server lag, however, the situation appears to have not improved much.

Due to the lack of recent updates, many individuals who used to play Apex Legends have slowly started to shift to other games. Reports from SteamDB confirm this, pointing to an especially drastic 70% decline in Twitch viewers from 285,383 on November 21st to just 83,838 on December 19th. The Apex player base also decreased by 12%, going from 413,000 on Steam to 360,000 throughout the same period.

Notable Apex streamers like LuluLuvely have traded in the game for its sequel Overwatch 2. On January 10th, ex-Apex Pro Rocker of NRG tweeted that he was not just done with the competition, but finished with the game in full.

He stated that he was finished with apex, admitting that he had tricked himself into believing he was enjoying the game and wanted to continue playing it; however, in honesty, he was unable to savor the experience, being unable to do more than two hours at a time.

I stepped away from Apex for a little while, only a month, to play Warzone. It was a nice change, but I still think that nothing can compete with Apex’s smoothness and its guns. I really enjoy Apex and the way it plays but if the developers don’t make some changes soon, the game will suffer.

Apex Season 16 is expected to start sometime during the first part of February. With the winter festivities now finished, there is potential for more updates to the game. I sincerely trust this is the case, for I thoroughly enjoy Apex and would love to watch it remain successful, yet if nothing changes I may have to divert my principal focus to another FPS.