Apex Legends 2 will never be a thing if Respawn has its way

apex legends characters — Apex Legends – legends never die, but will Apex Legends? (pic: EA)

Respawn has no plans to ever make a sequel to Apex Legends sequel, with plans to keep it running so long that players’ kids get into it.

While we’ve seen plenty of live service titles meet an early demise (many of which had their plug pulled in just the last couple weeks), there are those that remain so popular that’s it difficult to imagine them ever shutting down.

Case in point: Apex Legends. Even when EA announced that it was giving up on the game’s mobile equivalent, developer Respawn blamed this on a lack of consistent new content rather than it being unpopular.

As such, EA isn’t in any rush to put out a sequel even four years after its launch, which is good for Respawn since it has zero interest in making an Apex Legends 2 anyway, preferring to keep the original game running for as long as possible.

On the face of it, the idea of any game lasting forever seems impossible, even for something as popular as Apex Legends. Although game director Steve Ferreira acknowledges this, he and his team at Respawn are so far treating Apex Legends as ‘never-ending’ and have not discussed any potential end date for the game.

He even goes so far as to call a potential Apex Legends 2 their ‘anti-vision’ and yet they also don’t want to be putting out new content just for the sake of it.

‘One, we want to have an impact on the game, but two, we want to make sure that we haven’t forgotten the game holistically,’ he explains in an interview with GameSpot.

‘[We don’t want to] slowly put the game into a state where the only option for us to do the next thing we want to do is to refactor the whole thing and shut the live game down and then launch Apex Legends 2. That’s our anti-vision.’

apex legends season 16 — Apex Legends – Respawn believes appealing to the game’s competitive audience will keep Apex Legends going (pic: EA)

Design director Evan Nikolich agrees, adding that what will ensure Apex Legends’ longevity is its competitive nature.

‘As long as we do our best to keep tending to that [competitive side of players], focusing on the core of the game and building the systems around it to keep growing it and keep it engaging, [Apex Legends] could last forever,’ he says, hoping that its player-base will eventually teach the game to their children.

‘I often talk about how, one day, I want to have somebody teach their kid to play [Apex Legends],’ Nikolich continues. ‘I played Counter-Strike in college, and that was 20 years ago. And now, people are teaching their kids to play Counter-Strike, teaching their kids to play their first MOBA when they played the original Dota mod on Warcraft 3. That’s the vision. That’s what we want to get to. It’s the hobby you want to pass down to your children.’

Respawn’s goals are similar to Ubisoft’s own vision for its Rainbow Six Siege service title. Back in 2018, it pledged to support it for another 10 years and eventually have 100 playable characters.

Five years later and it has stuck to its guns, with the game currently offering 65 characters.

Other competitors, however, have gone the opposite route. Activision recently launched Call Of Duty Warzone 2.0., although the original is still playable. Overwatch fans, meanwhile, had no choice but to switch over to Overwatch 2, with the first game now completely shut down.

Fans know that Respawn still has plenty of ideas for Apex Legends thanks to a major leak from last year, which gave away the next two years of playable characters.

Surprisingly, though, Season 16, which kicks off in less than a week’s time on February 14, looks to be the first one to not add a new character and will instead include a new team deathmatch mode.

Apex Legends is available for Xbox One, PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, Xbox Series X/S, PlayStation 5, and PC.