After being briefly teased yesterday, Apex Legends' very first Battle Pass has now arrived alongside the new character Octane and numerous balance changes. As for the Battle Pass itself, it will set you back 950 Apex Coins and offer you the ability to acquire a variety of cosmetics for both your characters and weapons (including an evolving Havoc skin), as well as an option to essentially refund your purchase by climbing through all 100 of the experience-based Battle Pass levels.
While I don't exactly consider the Battle Pass to be anything special, the new character Octane is definitely something I am having a ton of fun messing around with. You can find all of the details over at the official website, but long story short, Octane is all about speed, to the point that he is even capable of sacrificing his own health in order to zoom around the battlefield! It's about as fun as it sounds, as you'll quickly see in the recently posted trailer right below:
When it comes to the balance changes and quality of life updates, they are mostly centered around three things: improving stability, combating cheaters, and ensuring that the bigger characters are a bit less fragile in a straight up firefight. You can find the full patch notes over at Reddit, but for now, allow me to share with you some of the most important ones:
STABILITY
• Improved stability for various GPU configurations.
• Capped PC FPS to 300 to balance improving stability but still letting you folks enjoy those sweet frames.
• Addressed issue with PS4 crashes due to running out of memory.
• Introducing better reporting when Apex crashes on PC without error message.
ANTI-CHEATER MEASURES
• Added Report a Player feature for cheating and abuse on PC.
- Players can now report cheaters they encounter in-game and it’ll be sent directly to Easy Anti-Cheat. You can do this from either the spectate view after dying or when looking at your team’s Banner Cards in the Squad tab.
• We have lots of other work going on behind the scenes and this remains high priority for us. We won’t be able to share many specifics of what we’re doing but we’ll strive to provide updates on progress for the things we can talk about.
- As I'm finishing the notes this morning, 499,937 accounts and counting have been banned for cheating.
Speed hacking: We do currently have anti-speed hacking in Apex Legends, but it’s not being as effective as intended due to a bug that we believe we’ve identified and will be addressing in our next server update. Will provide ETA for it when I have it. Working to get it out ASAP.
• Added Report a Player for abuse on Consoles
- You can report players from the spectate view after dying or when looking at your team’s Banner Cards in the Squad tab.
• Optimized skydiving to improve overall server performance.
Fixed bug where sometimes the client could crash when opening Apex Packs one right after the other.
HITBOX ADJUSTMENTS
• Adjusted hitboxes for Gibraltar, Caustic, and Pathfinder to better align with their shapes.
CAUSTIC
• Reduced cooldown of Traps 25 -> 30 seconds.
• Increased radius and proximity radius by about 10%.
• Removed a 1 second delay on the smoke dealing damage to players.
• Reduced cooldown of Gas Grenade 2:30 -> 2:00 seconds.
PATHFINDER
• Grapple
- Increased distance 850 -> 900.
- Added indicator near crosshair to show when player is in range of grapple-able geo
-- this part of the patch has been pulled back for the time being
- Improved mantling from a grapple point.
- Pathfinder can now grapple ziplines.
• Insider Knowledge
- Increased the number of beacons in the world 10-> 12.
BANGALORE
• Double Time
- Reduced move speed bonus to 40% -> 30%.
GIBRALTAR
• Defensive Bombardment
- Fixed a bug where your teammates wouldn't be affected by Shell Shock. This was meant to be the same as Bangalore's ultimate.
While these changes alone are unlikely to make some of the bigger characters less of an easy target, it is still a solid step in the right direction, especially for Pathfinder as his old hitbox was comically large. Interestingly enough, the previously announced Wraith nerf hasn't made its way into these patch notes, but I think that's just a small error on Respawn's part as pretty much every other change made an appearance.
Once Respawn releases another major announcement I'll make sure to let you know, but until then I hope you have fun messing around with Octane!