Apex Legends Season 28 is also the start of the battle royale’s Year 7, and the Respawn team is keeping to tradition by implementing a substantial gameplay change for the game’s birthday. Season 28, titled Breach, introduces breakable windows and skylights to Apex Legends called Hardlight Meshes. These surfaces can be breached by squads trying to find additional ways into a building, or reinforced by players bunkering inside who are trying to hold a point-of-interest. These new mechanics sound like some you might find in Rainbow Six Siege (or Highguard, the recently released raid shooter from former Apex Legends developers).
This isn’t a small change, either. Hardlight Meshes will be added to all of the maps rotating into the battle royale playlists this season (World’s Edge, Broken Moon, and E-District). Save for Olympus, these three maps have the most urban environments of all of Apex Legends’ maps. That means there are plenty of buildings that have been remade by the sole conceit that they now have multiple breach points, making them significantly harder to defend.
“As with all new additions to Apex, community feedback will certainly drive the conversation and inform our future updates and tuning,” senior game designer Connor Monahan told me. “Playtesting internally, the places where we feel Hardlight [has] the most [impact] fall into two big categories. The first category is buildings previously very difficult to assault that now have narrow weaknesses you can exploit to break in. Examples that come to mind are some Lunar buildings–the tube-shaped structures–on [Broken] Moon, four-story buildings and Powerbank on E-District, and Lava Siphon on World’s Edge. There are now new choke points and entries that make pressuring teams bunkered inside much more viable.”
