Apex Legends’ new season lets you fight inside a ‘loot piñata’ kaiju carcass

polygon.com:

Apex Legends’ next season, “Saviors,” will double down on the Storm Point map that the hero battle royale introduced just six months earlier, adding a beached kaiju as a new point of interest, and letting everyone fight it out in, on, and around the beast’s carcass.

“This thing is kind of like a big, stuffed, loot piñata,” Jeff Shaw, a lead level designer for Respawn Entertainment, said during a media preview last week. “And all the best loot is inside the belly of the beast.”

So, no, the monster seen in last week’s launch trailer doesn’t represent some kind of new PvE threat or limited-time game mode. Its rotting and deceased presence is actually an attempt to make Storm Point a more competitive map, Shaw said. “And we really wanted to do this additively, without removing anything that we felt was important.”

As seen in last week’s trailer, the jumbo shrimpbeast attacks Storm Point and all the Legends put aside their differences to bring it down, peeled, deveined, tail-on. As far as it concerns the map, the Downed Beast (as the point-of-interest is known) rests between two high-value loot areas — the North Pad and The Mill — and a third, Checkpoint, which is a medium-tier loot location. Players can land atop it (or depart) via gravity cannon, or ziplines, or make their way inside through its mouth or four large wounds. Inside and around the dead hulk, players will find tents and platforms left by the Ecological Cleanup and Hazard Outreach folks (their work has been seen on King’s Canyon), providing both cover and opportunity for gear.

“We’re really hoping that this is going to pull some of the action away from Barometer,” a popular, mid-tier loot location on Storm Point, Shaw said.

As last week’s trailer hinted, the