When the official Arby's Twitter account started posting Apex Legends memes, Respawn's lead producer Drew McCoy knew the video game had beaten all expectations. Maybe it wasn't exactly Fortnite levels of cultural permeation, but if 835,000 Arby's Twitter followers were on board, it sure as hell was getting there.

Back on February 4, 2019, Respawn announced the release of a new battle royale, first-person shooter called Apex Legends. Within hours, the game was available to download and play. Ninja, the most famous gamer on the sticks today, hit up Twitch to stream a demo—and cashed an alleged $1 million paycheck in return. In its first month, more than 50 million people had downloaded the game. Hackers capitalized on this target-rich environment and started raking in thousands of dollars selling cheat codes. Respawn, emphasizing open dialogue with players, turned to Reddit to promise fans it was kicking out bad actors. Dataminers plunged into Apex looking for hints about upcoming releases, prompting Respawn to take to Reddit again, this time begging players to please not believe every possible tidbit pulled from the data files.

After this whirlwind month-and-a-half, with the gaming community hungry for more, Respawn has released Apex Legends: Season 1—Wild Frontier and its first Battle Pass today, along with a brand new character, Octane. And with what McCoy says is months' and even years' worth of new content in the hopper at Respawn, there's proof enough that Apex won't go belly-up anytime soon, nor will it let itself become just another free-to-play battle royale.

This content is imported from YouTube. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site.

"I think one of my biggest fears would be is if we said, 'All right, cool. We got our 50 million users. We're good. This game's great, let's just make more of this,'" he explains. "Because someone else is going to come and eat our lunch. We can never rest on our laurels."

Esquire caught up with McCoy before the release of Apex Legends: Season 1 and the Battle Pass to talk about Octane, buying loot and levels, and being endlessly compared to Fortnite.

This content is imported from YouTube. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site.

Introducing Octane, the newest Legend.

Octavio "Octane" Silva is like a speed demon adrenaline junkie, a maniac looking to rocket into action. According to Respawn, he's "heir to the preoccupied CEOs of Silva Pharmaceuticals," and he used to "entertain himself by performing dangerous stunts for his fans to gawk over." The Apex Games are his next challenge. But speed comes at a price.

"He's got a tactical ability where he injects himself with a thing called Stim that makes him run really fast," explains McCoy. "It takes a little damage to do it, so there's a little bit of risk/reward there. None of our current Legends really have that dynamic of gameplay where you've got to give something up to get something."

On the flip side, his ability to Swift Mend helps regenerate his health. As some players discovered last week when Respawn covertly dropped jump pads around the map, Octane also can get vertical real fast—those launch pads are for shooting him and his teammates skyward. Octane isn't included with the new Battle Pass, and he can be unlocked with 12,000 Legend Tokens or 750 Apex Coins.

This content is imported from {embed-name}. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site.

This content is imported from YouTube. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site.

The Battle Pass gets you new loot and more levels, but it can't buy your way to the top.

Apex Legends: Season 1—Wild Frontier includes a free update with some new loot to snap up, an exclusive Battle Pass with access to over 100 unique items for 950 Apex Coins, and a premium Battle Pass Bundle that skips 25 levels for 2,800 Apex Coins. Anything you earn during Season 1, you keep. But no amount of money can get you past level 100. To get from level 100 to the highest level, 110, you need to put in good, old-fashioned playing hours.

"For the highest level reward, you can purchase your way straight to a level 100 on Day One, if that's really what you want to do. But to get from level 100 to 110, you have to put in the time," McCoy says.

On level 110, an exclusive reward awaits you: "We're calling it a reactive legendary weapons kit. It's this really cool metallic dragon skin for a weapon; for every kill you get during a match with that weapon, it starts reacting. Its eyes start glowing, and fire and smoke start spewing out if its nose. It looks really cool."

But you gotta play to earn it.

Courtesy

The Battle Pass model won't overshadow gameplay.

Even with the Battle Pass, Apex Legends won't prioritize money over gameplay experience, or so McCoy says. For Respawn, respecting the players is of the utmost importance.

"I feel like our primary responsibility for all of our players is that they feel like any time and/or money they spend is a valuable spend for them," he says. "What's valuable to us is people are entrusting us with time in the game. And if we're doing things that feel scummy or slimy or nickel and dime, they're not going to want to do that, and we've just shot ourselves in the foot."

When Apex Legends launched, two of its eight characters were locked. You could either pay to unlock them, or you could play hard enough to earn them. The same goes for Octane. McCoy uses this as an example of Apex emphasizing play over over pennies.

"A lot of free-to-play games would say you have to buy the character. It was really important to us that if you're a free-only player, you don't want to spend a dime, you can still experience all aspects of gameplay in the game," he says. "You're really only paying money to look good, if that's what you want to do."



Respawn also prides itself on matching price points for characters with other shooter games, even when those shooters might cost $60 to purchase off the bat and Apex Legends is totally free. As for the existing pricing model, McCoy said it "won't change in the near future." So toss your microtransaction arguments into the void.

Courtesy

Respawn is going to war against cheaters.

With great popularity comes a thriving cheat market. Respawn has openly acknowledged the problem, and its anti-cheating system is trawling through the game, flagging accounts and doling out bans—upwards of 355,000 as of March 8. The team is also working on more covert defenses in what McCoy calls "an ongoing war, a down and dirty cycle" of staying one step ahead. But we can't know the details, because if we did, so would the cheat makers. Sneaky.

Respawn is working with other EA teams to uproot cheat-like behavior, because it's not just hackers and modifiers messing shit up in matches. Some people have even created bots to function essentially as annoying door-to-door salesmen.

"[The bots] just join a server, they spam the chat with advertisements, and then they leave once the match actually starts," McCoy says. "They're actually a pay service. People are paying for these cheats, which blows my mind."

They're also considering actions against players who just kinda suck to play with—"You have bad teammates; we put them in a squad with people they don't know, and they berate them to let them choose the character that they want, and that's also not sportsmanlike behavior," McCoy says—although nothing they're ready to announce.

Courtesy

The ping feature is revolutionary in multiple ways.



The thinking behind Apex Legend's ping feature was simple: allow players to communicate sans voice comms. Respawn developers spent hours upon hours playing the game without texts or voice chat to perfect it, McCoy says. And it's a stellar feature. It also had an unintended—and happy—consequence.

"The amount of people that I talk to or articles I've read about women gamers who are usually berated by toxic people online. They're like, 'Finally, I can play a team-based shooter without getting yelled at, because I don't have to talk all the time, because the ping system,'" he says. "To then have that live on in a way that is affecting people with disabilities—maybe they can't talk, or the stress of talking during gameplay is too much for them, as well as people like women gamers or trans gamers. I think that's one of those huge benefits that we didn't really see coming."

Courtesy

The game will always feature diverse characters.

Apex's character lineup might be the most diverse out there. Bangalore, the main "soldier" archetype, is a woman of color; another character, Bloodhound, is non-binary; and, well, there’s a robot. Until Octane joined the Legends, the only really obviously white male character was Caustic, a guy who poisons everyone and everything around him with toxic gas—subtle.

"With Apex specifically, we have a really diverse cast of characters. We're trying to elevate that kind of inclusiveness without beating people over the head with it," McCoy says. "It's definitely a tenet of the game that we are going to continue to uphold."



He did not share details on how often new characters will be introduced after Octane, but said Respawn is "trying to find every way we can to make them quicker or make more of them at once."

Fortnite and Apex Legends can coexist.

Apex Legends wasn't created to take Fortnite's crown. It was created to be the best game it could be, McCoy says, with more emphasis on core gamers.

"We care a lot about the competitive integrity of the game. We do a lot of play testing and iteration on any gameplay-affecting element that goes in the game, whereas Fortnite's trying to be more timely. They're trying to play off of what their community's saying on a day-to-day basis. This is not a value judgment on them at all, but they put in stuff in the game way earlier than I think we would, and you can see the effects when they have to take some stuff offline because it's kind of buggy, or it's overpowered, or whatever."

This content is imported from YouTube. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site.

Which isn't to say he doesn't find Fortnite's reign to be revolutionary. When Fortnite hosted an in-game concert with EDM DJ Marshmello, McCoy woke up his wife and kids to watch.

"That's like Ready Player One stuff," he says. He admires how Fortnite has become an entertainment platform. And though they're often compared, he contends each game is trying to accomplish something different.

"We just happen to kind of rub up against each other because we're both battle royale games," he says. "But in my mind, they can both exist and have huge thriving communities on their own."



Sarah Rense Sarah Rense is the Associate Lifestyle Editor at Esquire, where she covers tech, food, drink, home, and more.

This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io