Apex Legends Season 27, titled Amped, is imminent. Players are scrambling to finish the current battle pass and make a last-minute push up the ranked leaderboard before a swathe of changes hit the game. As one of the best battle royale games around, the developers at Respawn like to make pretty serious changes each season, and Amped is no different. If you missed the wild new Care Package weapon and the devs’ promise to Octane mains, check them out before reading further. But if you’re a hardcore ranked grinder, this is the article for you. With loot and KP being redistributed, as well as a long-anticipated feature perfect for solo queuers, Apex Legends Season 27 ranked mode could be the best it has been for a long time.
First things first, the loot. Since switching out the classic dropship for drop zones, players have complained about poor loot distribution. If the game decides you’re landing at a dead spot, you’re at a disadvantage in every subsequent fight. Thankfully, that’s being addressed in Season 27.
“Players felt that the game was a bit unfair when they were dropping on a POI that has less loot or less quality loot than another POI,” Apex Legends‘ lead ranked designer, Clement Bachellerie, tells me in an interview. The distribution isn’t completely flat, and there are the same number of items on the map in total, but Respawn has “reduced the spike between different POIs in order to be a bit more fair.”
There’s more good news when it comes to gaining Ranked Points. Season 26 put the emphasis on placement, meaning that matches often got a little stale in the mid-game as players jostled for position on the map instead of taking fights.
“Placement was a bit too strong and players were feeling that kills were not valued enough,” Bachellerie explains. “To answer that concern, we rebalanced a bit the KP that you get from placement. It’s not completely back to Season 25. It’s taking what we think is good from Season 26 but readjusting it a little bit, trying to find our right balance between the two.”
Hopefully this should encourage some more aggressive plays in Season 27, but solo queuers are also getting a much-needed quality of life improvement. As a keen ranked grinder whose friends have long since moved onto other games, I’m personally very happy to hear that solo players will now be able to re-queue as a team after a successful match.
Before now, if you wanted to play with a teammate you met in the solo queue, you’d have to quit out of ranked mode, add them as a friend, request them to join your party, and then start queueing all over again. Now, you can do the same thing with the click of a single button. Bachellerie admits this is a “a pretty standard feature” for live-service games, and is happy to finally improve the solo queue experience.
As players across the world hold their breath for the Season 27 patch notes, which should arrive later today, these ranked changes should offer a smoother experience than last season-which wasn’t half bad in its own right.
Apex Legends Season 27 releases on Tuesday, November 4.
If you can’t wait until then, why not check out our list of the best multiplayer games, or browse our picks of the best FPS games instead?
What do you make of the ranked changes? Let us know in our community Discord server, where staff and readers humor my terrible Fuse impressions and keep up with the latest gaming news.
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