Apex Legends rolls out further tweaks to ease grind of controversial Season 7 battle pass
And more changes are coming next week.
Developer Respawn Entertainment has rolled out a second series of tweaks designed to further alleviate the grind in Apex Legends' unpopular Season 7 battle pass.
While much of Season 7 - which includes new hero Horizon and the new Olympus map - has been well-received, Respawn's overhauled battle pass system quickly drew ire. Although the developer claimed its changes were designed to make Apex Legends' battle pass "more streamlined and rewarding", many in the community felt the massive increase in XP demands for levelling had resulted in an unreasonable grind.
"Proud to announce that after all five daily challenges, 20k XP, three top fives, and one win with eight kills," wrote one peeved player on Reddit, "I have finally hit battle pass level two".
In response to the escalating backlash, Respawn moved to adjust its new battle pass system, reducing the amount of XP required to acquire a star (of which 10 are needed to climb a battle pass level) from 10k to 5k. It also pledged that more changes were on the way.
To that end, the next batch of alterations to Apex Legends' battle pass are now live, reverting the difficulty of Season 7's daily challenges - which many players felt had been raised to ridiculous levels - to that of Season 6, while retaining the same star rewards for completion. Game director Chad Grenier has posted a side-by-side comparison on Twitter.
That's not quite the end of it, however, and next week will see another patch designed to push even more changes. Weekly challenges will, for instance, also be reduced to Season 6 difficulty levels, and players will have the opportunity to complete them with more than one Legend.
Grenier also says players will be granted 10 free battle pass levels as part of next week's update.
Whether or not that will be enough to placate Apex Legends fans remains to be seen, but it's certainly another welcome step in resolving an issue Respawn has insisted wasn't nefarious. "We actually just screwed this one up", it admitted to players last week.