“Maybe We’ll Go Back To Self Res,” Says Apex Legends Developer

thegamer.com:

“We didn’t bring back Skull Town,” Respawn’s lead level designer Jeff Shaw explains to me when I incorrectly call new POI Relic ‘Skull Town 2.0’. “It’s very much inspired by Skull Town, but it’s not Skull Town, and we want to be clear on that.”

Apex Legends Season 14 feels like a blast from the past. We’re back to Kings Canyon, a smaller iteration of Skull Town has returned, and players who hit the level cap of 500 can start over to begin the grind all over again with second, third, and fourth prestiges. Season 14 has plenty of new changes though, so I caught up with Shaw and his colleagues to get the lowdown on managing third parties, why Skull Town went away, and whether self-res will return in the future.

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Skull Town was removed nine seasons ago because it was “unhealthy” for the game, Shaw explains. Respawn’s data backed up what we all saw – that practically the entire lobby was landing on the iconic drop spot – meaning it had to change something. “The decision was made to just say, ‘okay, let's just make the map a bit smaller, annihilate this POI that is causing a lot of problems and start rebuilding parts of the map from there,’” he says. “And so we found after that was done, that the dispersion of where people were landing was a lot healthier.” When asked whether Respawn would remove Fragment in a similar manner, Shaw said, “no comment.”

Relic’s smaller size seems unlikely to repel the majority of players, especially early in the season when excitement is highest. So why bring it back at all? “Apart from bringing it back for nostalgia, this is the type of gameplay people really love and that they miss