Apex Legends season 13 preview: That kaiju is part of a reworked map

Apex Legends‘ next season, “Saviors,” will double down on the Storm Point map that the hero battle royale introduced just six months earlier, adding a beached kaiju as a new point of interest, and letting everyone fight it out in, on, and around the beast’s carcass.

“This thing is kind of like a big, stuffed, loot pinata,” Jeff Shaw, a lead level designer for Respawn Entertainment, said during a media preview last week. The best loot can be found in the stomach of the beast .”

So, no, the monster seen in last week’s launch trailer doesn’t represent some kind of new PvE threat or limited-time game mode. Shaw explained that the monster’s decomposing and rotting presence was actually an effort to make Storm Point more competitive. “And we wanted to do it additively without removing any that we thought was important.”

As seen in last week’s trailer, the jumbo shrimpbeast attacks Storm Point and all the Legends put aside their differences to bring it down, peeled, deveined, tail-on. The Downed Beast, as the point of interest is called, rests between two loot locations with high value — The Mill and North Pad — and one, Checkpoint which is a middle-tier loot area. Players can land atop it (or depart) via gravity cannon, or ziplines, or make their way inside through its mouth or four large wounds. Players will find shelter and gear opportunities around and inside the hulk.

“We’re really hoping that this is going to pull some of the action away from Barometer,” a popular, mid-tier loot location on Storm Point, Shaw said.

Last week’s trailer indicated that the kaiju’s seismic presence activated an inactive security protocol. This raised three Interstellar Manufacturing Corporation Armories near it. These are support structures, filled with weapons and gear, put in place long ago. That’s the canonical explanation. These armories can be used to trigger PvE missions and loot large amounts of money. Entering one starts a 60-second fight against waves of Spectre robots awakened to the infiltrators. Importantly, the door to the armory shuts when this PvE fight begins, so that opposing human players can’t get in.

” Loot is provided in […]new types of bins which are filled with loot that’s based on scanning the equipment and weapons you have.” Samantha Kalman (respawn senior game designer) said. The loot can be used to upgrade or add new weapon attachments and equipment. Either it’s upgrading what you have already, or it’s supplementing your equipment and weapon attachments that you don’t yet have.”

Strategically speaking, players “can hot drop to one of these armories for a decent random weapon and a great starting kit,” Kalman suggested, “or you can drop nearby, boot up a little, and then rotate to the armory. And then you’ll get upgraded versions of equipment and attachments that you bring into it.”

Elsewhere on Storm Point, developers added a new Prowler den near Cenote Cave, and built up an existing den near The Mill, as part of a “global tuning pass” Respawn designers gave to Storm Point, said Keith Jensen, senior level designer. He said that hundreds of QoL improvements were made to improve the user experience on the entire map.

“[Storm Point] was created through the lens of looking ahead […]. Building it using this method allowed us to add new content and not be destructive, Shaw stated. We didn’t have to sacrifice or eliminate anything we felt was important to the map with the Downed Beast POI. And we really, really hope to continue this trend with the future of Apex maps.”

Apex Legends season 13, titled “Saviors,” launches May 10 for the game across all platforms — Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Windows PC, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X. In addition to the reworked Storm Point map, it will bring a new Battle Pass of content, and a new Legend, Newcastle, the long-lost brother of mainstay legend Bangalore.