Apex Legends’ new event begins this week, plus early S2 Battle Pass details

If you’re like me and considered Apex Legends to be the best battle royale game they’ve ever played, but stopped due to the dull Battle Pass and content drought… well, we’re both about to be happy Legends.

Respawn recently unveiled a limited-time event that begins Tuesday (June 4th) and lasts two weeks. It’s called ‘The Legendary Hunt’ and it brings a whole host of features and cosmetic goodies to Kings Canyon.

The Elite Queue

One of the new features introduced with this event is the Apex Elite Queue. It could be considered a mini-competitive mode, where players go to for a real challenge. How it works is that players have to fight their way into the Top 5 of a game to earn the chance to play in a queue of other Top 5 winners.

There is a catch, though. The only way you can keep playing in the Elite Queue is to keep placing in the Top 5 for every subsequent game. If you fail even once, you’ll be kicked out and have to start from scratch. Finally, a game mode the good players can flock to, leaving the terrible ones like me a fighting chance. Yay!

Challenges, cosmetics, and challenges for cosmetics

A limited-time set of challenges are also coming with the event, offering up new Rare, Epic and Legendary skins as rewards for completing them. Unfortunately, it’s likely that we’ll be getting more weapon skins than character skins. The Battle Pass did the exact same thing, giving away maybe 4 uncommon character skins and at least 20 weapon skins. Everything’s going nice and easy in Apex Legends until you get a Mozambique skin.

In addition to these challenges, there will also be new Legendary Hunt-themed skins rotating through the game store every three to four days. I suspect these will be the same skins received for doing challenges, for players that would rather buy their way through them.

There’s also good news for Battle Pass owners! New skins are dropping with the event as well, to be added into the Battle Pass. Anyone who owns the Battle Pass will immediately get the Legendary ‘Honored Prey R-301’ skin. On the other hand, players who reach Battle Pass level 15 as long as the event lasts, will get the Legendary ‘Wraith Night Terror’ skin.

XP bonuses

It’s not easy to reach level 110 on the Battle Pass and reap all the rewards it offers right now. It’s extraordinarily difficult, actually, requiring you to put 100 hours into the game over the course of three months. If players quit playing out of burnout or irritation because of this, I can’t blame them. But if you’re still looking to get that legendary Havoc skin, here’s your chance!

Apex Legends will host a double XP weekend running from Friday, June 7 at 1 am through Monday, June 10 at 1 am (Singapore times). As you might’ve guessed, you’ll be grinding out the Battle Pass and getting double the XP for it during this time. You also get double XP for normal progression, meaning you can get those loot boxes twice as fast!

Respawn aren’t stopping there, either. Once per day, you can earn an entire Battle Pass level by finishing Top 5 in any match, for the duration of The Legendary Hunt event. Hey, while you’re trying to break Top 5, why not give the Elite Queue a shot as well?

The Season 2 Battle Pass

It’s safe to say at this point that players have generally been disappointed with Apex Legends’ Season 1 Battle Pass. Fortunately, Respawn appears to be heading in the right direction with Season 2, addressing many of the problems players had with the game.

The first thing to note is that Season 2 will see the introduction of Fortnite-style daily and weekly challenges. These challenges will offer extra Battle Pass XP, improving the grind while at the same time, not going the wacky route these challenges normally go. Hopefully, that means we won’t see team members breaking off during games just to complete some challenges.

More Legendary items will also be added to the Battle Pass, with a guaranteed drop every 25 Battle Pass levels, including at purchase (meaning you get one at level 1, level 25, level 50, level 75 and level 100/110). That already makes the Season 2 Battle Pass a way better buy than Season 1, with much better rewards coming more often.

Badges and stat trackers won’t be cluttering up the rewards anymore either, with the seasonal badge being kept free and all win trackers in the first 10 levels only. New cosmetics will replace those items, although we’re not sure just what they might be yet. We’ll also be getting Crafting Metal rewards to replace the Voice Lines, with a total of about 1,200 metals in the Battle Pass.

More rewards + less grinding = more fun?

Respawn is certainly going all out with this event as a last hurrah for Season 1, and building up anticipation for Season 2 with it. We don’t know a whole lot about the specifics of S2 so far, but we do know that we’ll learn more on June 8th during EA Play.

Images: Respawn Entertainment/Electronic Arts