The Big Changes of Apex Legends Season 20

Buckle up Legends, it's a whole new battlefield.

As someone who has spent five years and twenty seasons with Apex Legends, I don’t say the term game-changing lightly. Over the past few years, the team at Respawn has made several choices that defined a clear new path for their wildly popular battle royale Apex Legends. From changing level caps for modes, adding and removing crafters, completely changing the kits players drop in with and so much more, Respawn is invested in the long-term success of its game. In Season 20 they are making game-changing choices again.

With Season 20 starting the year five content cycle and being a celebration of the launch of the game, it only makes sense that things get exciting. While we unfortunately are not getting any new BR maps, weapons, or legends we ARE getting a lot despite that. Let’s take a look at some of the biggest changes of the season.

Craft Faster

Crafting is changing in Season 20 of Apex Legends. There will no longer be weapons in the crafting machines around the map, and players will no longer need to grab crafting materials. How it all will work now is the crafters functionally have key items; shields, banners, health, and ammo. The crafted item will spawn almost instantly, and you can now only use the crafter once per game. So if you go to Fragment and craft ammo, you as a singular player can not use that machine in particular again. You will have to go to another one at a different location.

This is intended to provide a balance as other systems are introduced that I talk about later regarding body shields. This is also to help combat cheating that occurred in past ranked seasons where there were exploits to hide in the ring and not fight to get high placements in matches.

Body Shields Are Gone From Floor Loot

This change originally worried the player base, but I am glad Respawn was able to clear it up and it is a great conceptual step forward for the game. We all still get body shields, they just no longer exist in the manner we are used to. You used to be able top open a bin, see a better one on the floor, or yoink one off a dead body, but that is largely gone.

In place now is called a Shied Core. Your shield is attached to you exclusively and will upgrade as you and your team revive each other, wipe squads, deal damage, interact with the new EVO Caches/Harvesters, and more. This effectively changes the game to make red armor harder to obtain and to change how the end game can typically play out.

Now the entire community was seemingly running around like chickens with their heads missing when this leaked a few weeks ago. (One of the many reasons I hate leaks is because information spreads like wildfire with it.) You can still shield swap on a downed enemy. You can kill them and take their shield core just like you used to grab their body shield in the past. The caveat now is that if you grab a shield of a different level than your shield the bonus shield is temporary. For example, if I have a blue shield and quickly jump in and grab a purple off of a body, I’ll have purple shield core levels, temporarily. This will degrade over time back to the blue I had, until I do enough to earn that purple shield level.

By and large, this is a fantastic change and coupled with what I am about to talk about is enough to keep the game fresh going forward. I think this will also help retain that casual audience that Apex Legends struggles to keep engaged. With live service games like Apex, you have to find ways to tinker and change the game both the players and devs love so it can keep going, which brings me to the next point.

Perks Are Here

Before Apex Legends Mobile was sunsetted I liked the concept of bringing its perk system to the main game. It offered a lot of flexibility to the gameplay structure of the base game. With the changes to armor from the previous section, it also brings in a brand new perk system for the main game, as well as ranked mode.

As players level up their armor in matches, they will get two opportunities to add perks to their character. I appreciate that Respawn seems to have taken the time to consider how the character’s popularity ties to these perks. Horizon’s perks, for example, enhance her abilities, but nowhere to the extent of some of the lesser-picked Legends. Some of the perks are downright zany when thought about in a match. One of my favorites by far is that Mad Maggie can light her ultimate on fire and when it finally explodes it sets off a thermite charge. Another one allows Lifeline to self-revive. Mirage has the opportunity to now revive people with some of their HP back. It is going to be beautifully chaotic.

The developers brought up how this new perk system allows them ways to balance and nerf legends much faster than they have in the past. Previously, it would take weeks, with changes to character meta often occurring halfway or not at all until the start of the new season.

Now they can tinker with the perk system to help change the tides of the battlefield. I do hope this doesn’t get used in excess. I think players need ample time to get used to the new system and what it brings. I trust Respawn to have already thought of that but I do know from a player standpoint if characters changed too frequently it would take away from the game’s flow significantly. I do see this being used to help out some of the legends who may have one particular perk just not get picked regularly.

As Gaming Access Weekly’s resident washed-up pro player from the ALGS, I’m looking forward to what is to come in Season 20 and beyond for Apex Legends. I sincerely hope this season launches with no issues. The developer team deserves that win. As for you go easy on yourself, Season 20 is going to be a huge learning curve for everyone, regardless of skill level. It’s a lot of new changes and if you want to read more I have linked the article from EA about it below. You can see more of the stuff I didn’t mention there like how Mix Tape mode has a brand new map called Thunderdome that is getting added to all modes, and ranked is finally getting changes to something that makes sense. There’s a brand new LTM that looks to speed up the battle royale formula even faster. The patch notes drop Monday, February 12th so keep an eye out for that.

You can read more about the changes here: Season 20 Breakout Changes