[jwplayer rSmq5Fo4]
Skull Town isn’t completely dead yet as the Respawn Entertainment devs have indicated their ambitions to one day reintroduce the POI in a new way to Apex Legends.
Respawn design director on Apex, Jason McCord, told Gamasutra that he’s thinking of ways to reintroduce the location in a “more healthy” state that would benefit the overall game. For longtime Apex faithfuls, dropping into Skull Town was the default ‘shoot now, ask later’ tactic where action would spring up at a moment’s notice.
But players had to see their favorite location in the Arena disappear before their eyes at the start of Season 5 when the events of the story sank the town, along with Thunderdome, in lieu of the Broken Coast.
Though we’ve seen Skull Town come back in some capacity since then, such as the Kings Canyon After Dark LTM during the Grand Soiree in September, players have been clamoring for a more meaningful comeback.
Thankfully McCord gave everyone the lifeline they’ve been hoping for when talking about Skull Town and its reception from the larger Apex community.
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“What I take away from the whole experience is that Skull Town feels like, to some people, their favorite deathmatch map in one of their favorite games,” McCord said. “I want to think about ways to allow people to experience the location again, in a way that is more healthy for the game overall.”
To temper expectations, McCord did say that he has “no idea what that means” in terms of actually bringing Skull Town back, but he’ll “be thinking on it” as Apex’s development continues.
The Respawn dev noted how Skull Town’s popularity was a double-edged sword seeing as it was “hindering creativity” when thinking of Season 5 changes.
“When discussing how we want to update Kings Canyon in Season 5,” McCord explained. “Anything we could think of felt overshadowed by Skull Town. It’s such a popular drop – would anyone even care if we added all these other locations?”
It’s still unclear how the POI will ever come back to Apex if not in an LTM, but at least McCord still has the beloved location in his mind for a future season.
