Apex Legends to introduce Legend Upgrades in Season 20

Apex Legends is adding a Legend Upgrade system in Season 20 and heralding a new era for the game. The fifth anniversary of the free-to-play battle royale marks a radical change in all aspects of gameplay. This brand new system will allow players to tailor each Legend to their preferred playstyle.

Season 20: Breakout also brings new LTMs, an updated crafter system, tournaments, major changes to Ranked, and more to Apex Legends.

The Legend upgrade system is a new perk system. This new feature will allow players to upgrade and modify their Legend throughout the course of a single match. As you progress through a game of Apex, you will be able to upgrade your Legend according to your preference. 

All of the core abilities of the Legends will remain the same. However, certain enhancements will become available the longer you fight, survive, and upgrade your armor. With the current roster of 24 Legends, there are endless possibilities for unique combinations and loadouts!

Legend upgrades will be heavily tied to your shield in each match of Apex Legends. Season 20 is also bringing major changes to the EVO shield, as the shields and the upgrade system are intrinsically tied together. 

As you upgrade your shield through a match, you’ll be given Legend upgrade options. This will also make it easier for players to tell if an enemy player has upgraded abilities, since you could safely assume an enemy with red shields has the maximum amount of upgrades. 

Since there is a cap on how upgraded your shield can be, there is also a cap on Legend upgrades. The maximum amount of upgrades a Legend can have is two.

Legend upgrades will be contained to each match of Apex Legends. So if you’ve upgraded your Legend to a specific set of skills in one game, you’ll be able to choose a completely different style of upgrades in the next game. 

Yes, the new Legend upgrade system will be in public and ranked matches. However, it will not be in the Mixtape game modes (Control, Gun Run, and TDM) as far as we know. 

It will be interesting to see how this new system impacts the Apex Legends Global Series. These massive changes will drop right in the middle of Split 1 of ALGS and may shake up multiple metas.

The Legend upgrade system will provide small, but significant, changes to your Legend. For example, you may be able to choose between reviving your teammates with more health or choose to improve the stats of a certain weapon. A more specific example is for Wattson and her Ultimate, the Interception Pylon. 

As Wattson, you could choose to either revive your teammates with more health or to upgrade your Pylon. These Pylon upgrades could mean having more than one Pylon active at a time, buffing the health of a single Pylon to make it much beefier, or even having the Pylon spawn Arc Stars whenever it destroys an incoming ordinance. These upgrades could drastically change the outcome of a game and give every player a new edge to their gameplay. 

Respawn developers made it clear that the Legend upgrade system should not wildly change the core gameplay of Apex Legends. The goal of the new system is to let players personalize their Legend to their preferred playstyle, not to radically shift the gameplay of Apex Legends. 

Additionally, the devs stated that there would be tells for the special abilities, including unique audio and visual cues. Since there may be a significant number of new abilities when the season drops, this may be confusing at first but will hopefully become easier as players learn each cue. However, this could prove to be another unhelpful step in the steep learning curve for new players that Apex Legends already has.