Apex Legends Season 24 is getting big and buff

thesixthaxis.com:

Apex Legends Season 24 marks the sixth anniversary of the breakout battle royale hit, taking the genre by storm in early 2019. Six years is a long, long time to keep a game running and to keep a large audience of players engaged, but you know what people love? Buffs. Lots of buffs. That’s what Season 24 is bringing to the table when it launches next week on 11th February.

As the rumblings coming out of EA higher-ups seem to vacillate between Apex Legends needing a full sequel and needing to keep a hold of what it’s got, and the work for Season 24 has certainly looked to refine and hone the game further. There’s no new Legend characters this time around, with Respawn recognising that, when you’ve got more than two dozen characters, it’s difficult to create something that’s tangibly different and exciting. So the team is pushing toward making more systemic changes with quality of life changes and improvements prioritised alongside new content through the year ahead.

So let’s start with those QOL changes. Matchmaking is getting another overhaul to prioritise fairness, now making use of ranked placements to impact unranked play – so less ability to go and smurf some lower players – and will display the skill width to give you an idea of where you stand in relation to the rest of the lobby.

Speaking of Ranked, anti-cheat will be a continuing priority, but Respawn has also come up with an intriguing way to help disincentivise cheaters with a new Road to Ranked system. This system of in-game challenges will replace the simple account level check, making it so you need to prove skill and teamwork to play Ranked, getting new players up to speed, and adding a hurdle that bot accounts cannot bypass simply through time. Existing ranked players will keep access, though.

And then more broadly points of interest will be highlighted when you drop, letting you easily scope out loot tier and zones, you’ll get even more granular detail through the end of match summaries, and weapon