Apex Legends 2 ruled out by EA despite player count struggles

EA have confirmed that they have no plans for an Apex Legends 2-style game as Respawn is going through a “systematic rethink” of the battle royale.

Over the past year or so, Apex Legends has seen plenty of players walk away. Some have quit the battle royale due to constant server issues, others because of hackers, and others have just simply had enough and want to play something new. 

Respawn has attempted to reinvigorate Apex with a swath of new updates, including gameplay changes, fresh game modes, and even anti-cheat overhauls. Yet, the player count has continued to drop.

While the game isn’t in as dire a situation as some players would have you believe, Respawn and their publishers, EA, have confirmed they’re going through a “systematic rethink” of things. Yet, they’ve ruled out an Overwatch 2-esque release of a new game. 

“Anytime we call a global player community to have to choose between the investments they’ve made to date and future innovation creativity, that’s never a good place to put our community in,” EA CEO Andrew Wilson said in their October 29 earnings call.

“And so our objective will be to continue to innovate in the core experience, and you’re seeing that from season to season now as our seasons get progressively bigger, and we’re changing kind of key modalities at play within those seasons and then build additional opportunities for engagement in different modalities of play beyond what the current core mechanic delivers.

“And we think we can do those two things together, and we don’t believe we have to separate the experience in order to do so. But again, the team is working through this now.”

Wilson also noted that “in the context of live service driven games at scale is the version two thing has almost never been as successful as the version one thing.”

Apex’s rivals, Warzone and Fortnite, have both experienced different successes with overhauls. Fortnite saw a resurgence by returning to the OG style of gameplay that fans loved. However, Call of Duty suffered when moving from Warzone to Warzone 2 and hasn’t hit those original heights.