New seasons of Apex Legends always bring with them new plot developments and narrative threads to tug at. In this season, for instance, a new haute couture-themed event has just gone live, and to promote the game’s latest premium cosmetics, Respawn has posted a set of four in-universe magazine covers, each featuring a different playable Legend in their new high-fashion digs. But a closer look reveals that each magazine also contains some pretty wild articles with the potential to have equally wild effects on the game’s storyline.
Once upon a time, I looked forward to these lore drops, because they always led to something good. But lately, they just make me sad. The narrative payoff isn’t there the way it used to be, so as much as I want to take these little lore tidbits seriously and get excited to see them explored during the lead-up to Season 26 (or during Season 26 itself), I just don’t enjoy Apex Legends lore drops the way I used to. Mainly because lately, we get fewer lore drops, and they aren’t executed with nearly as much mindblowingly cool finesse as they once were.
Let me take you back to the golden age of Apex Legends lore. It’s late January 2020. The world hasn’t yet fallen apart, and the current concern of the Apex Legends lorehounds on the /r/ApexLore subreddit is the identity of the next Legend to join the Apex Games. According to Respawn — which has created an official biography page on its website listing the new Legend’s in-game abilities, as is standard for all new Legend debuts — the next Legend will be James “the Forge” McCormick, an award-winning fighter with an ego the size of the enormous metal gauntlet he wears in combat.
Although Respawn devs have left traces of Forge’s impending arrival in the game’s files (which the studio knows the game’s lorehunters will promptly datamine the hell out of in search for answers), fans still have their doubts. Something seems off.
Then, on January 27th, the latest episode of Stories From The Outlands (the once-active Apex webseries) airs. Stories From The Outlands is usually updated with a new episode each season, sometimes giving insight into newly added Legends, other times focusing on Legends who have been there since day one.
This particular episode of Stories From The Outlands features Season 4’s debut Legend, the aforementioned Forge, being interviewed by an Outlands TV journalist. But moments into the interview, this happens:
This is how Respawn announced that a new Legend was arriving. It would not be Forge. No, Forge’s killer — a deadly robot assassin named Revenant — would be taking his place. Even for fans who saw it coming, the plot twist was exciting, shocking, and — at least to me — fascinating.
Three days later, the Season 4 launch trailer dropped, revealing Revenant’s equally fascinating backstory, while also priming the audience for the arrival of the next Legend: Loba, a woman who was understandably seeking revenge for the murder of her parents (as seen in the aforementioned trailer).
By the time Loba showed up as a playable Legend in Season 5, players were treated to the game’s magnum opus: “The Broken Ghost.” “The Broken Ghost” questline was updated regularly throughout the season and allowed players to team up with their friends to complete challenges and, ultimately, put together a familiar faceplate: Titanfall 2 fan-favorite badass, Ash.
Sadly, Apex Legends players would never see another jaw-dropping bait-and-switch like Forge’s murder and Revenant’s arrival, nor would another playable questline like “The Broken Ghost” ever make another appearance in the game.
But all wasn’t lost. “The Broken Ghost” questline was replaced by seasonal in-game radio plays that were fully voiced, if not fully animated. Ash herself would later join the Apex Games as a playable Legend in Season 11, and Valkyrie — the daughter of another Titanfall 2 antagonist, Viper — would join the games in Season 9. She arrived alongside a new, very compelling seasonal plotline that featured a deadly alien virus and focused on Valkyrie’s precarious position in a love triangle with Bangalore and Loba (another lore drop Apex lorehunters went wild for). Although Respawn would go on to experiment with a different quest format called Apex Chronicles, it was short-lived and underwhelming in the wake of The Broken Ghost’s thrilling plotline.
Apex’s writers use a method called “breadcrumbing”: leaving little hints both in-game and on social media for eagle-eyed players to stumble across, allowing them to piece together a small part of Apex’s sprawling narrative. But despite the breadcrumbs featured in the recent social media post showing the Legends on magazine covers surrounded by headlines with serious lore implications, I just don’t feel the same excitement I once did, because the lore drops don’t actually pay off the way they used to.
Respawn hasn’t uploaded an episode of Stories From The Outlands since Conduit arrived in 2023, and has significantly cut down on the number of trailers it releases each season. For Season 25: Prodigy (which is currently in progress), it released two trailers: the “Prodigy Anthem” trailer (which gave players a surface-level introduction to the game’s latest Legend, Sparrow,) and a seasonal gameplay trailer. No Stories From The Outlands trailer, no hilarious launch trailer that lets us see the Legends interact, no narrative payoff.
Up until fairly recently, Apex’s season launches meant players would get a new episode of Stories From The Outlands (with a second episode sometimes dropping mid-season), a lore-packed launch trailer, loads of pre-season Easter Eggs and teasers, a battle pass trailer, and possibly more, like the Revenant-focused Kill Code animated webseries Respawn released over the course of 2023.
Obviously, the studio has faced obstacles like layoffs, game cancellations (including an in-production Apex Legends spin-off), and the departure of key staff, like lead animator Moy Parra and writer Manny Hagopian. After failing to meet monetization targets last year, due in part to poor player reception of the game’s new dual battle pass system, Apex Legends is reportedly undergoing “large systematic changes.”
I just wish those changes didn’t have to come at the cost of the game’s story, which for a while there, had myself and plenty of others perched on the edge of our seats over things like the legal name of an unidentified rat. The game’s latest breadcrumbs have interesting implications — Loba insists the love triangle between her, Bangalore, and Valkyrie is over; a Hammond Robotics whistleblower is giving a tell-all interview — but sadly, I no longer have a reason to believe those breadcrumbs will lead me anywhere nearly as exciting as they once did.
Apex’s story is still going, I just miss the days when it felt like that story was going somewhere interesting.
