As confusion looms over Control’s upcoming removal from Apex Legends Season 12, a Respawn dev explained why the studio takes down limited timed modes despite them being popular with players.
Respawn Entertainment Analytics & Data Science engineer ‘eriddy’ shed some light on why LTMs like Control, unfortunately, get the ax after a while.
While devs and players both benefit when an LTM pops off, keeping up multiple playlists in Apex generally results in a technical burden to maintain especially once data from the LTM starts to show waning interests.
Eriddy described what Respawn keeps an eye on when launching playlists like Control and why “keeping a mode around isn’t impossible.”
Apex Legends LTM removals
Despite the positive feedback around Control already, it’s still scheduled to leave a few weeks after the Season 12 patch. Though it’s not ideal for people enjoying the mode, Respawn have a few things to consider when these LTMs drop.
“Adding modes fractures the playerbase from that point forward,” eriddy said, listing the reasons why Apex would disable an LTM. “It would be really hard to maintain all the game systems at our standards across modes (think legend balance across different modes).
“Most importantly: we can see that there’s a sweet spot for the durations of most LTMs (see: the McRib). If you’ve been getting good at standard BR, it’s common to see that player go back to their main jam after a period of time.”
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Keeping a healthy infrastructure to support the main battle royale along with other modes that might crop up takes a lot of resources.
Beyond that, buffing and nerfing Legends gets complicated when issuing a single patch that changes a character across different playlists.
Making Apex Legends’ Control permanent “isn’t impossible”
Apex players have been loving the new 9v9 playlist that takes after Call of Duty’s Domination mode, but there’s a dark cloud over all the fun. Even though it was introduced at the start of the Defiance patch update, Control is only going to be live for the first three weeks of the season.
That gives players a deadline of around March 1 before Control gets removed from the game. Though it’ll make a couple of appearances throughout Season 12, Respawn are already seeing calls from the Apex Legends community to make it permanent.
For what it’s worth, Eriddy gave players hope that it wasn’t out of the realm of possibilities for these LTMs to stay long after their intended lifespan.
“That said, new modes provide new data, and depending on factors like those I discussed, keeping a mode around isn’t impossible.”
