Apex Legends Season 4 – Assimilation is finally here. From new weapons to a brand new Legend yet again, fans, including us at G FUEL, can’t wait to jump in. Here's everything you need to know about Apex Legends Season 4.

Revenant and Forge: Which One? 

By now, most of the Apex fan base has seen the new animated short put out by Respawn Entertainment, which details the assassination of Forge. Now, it appears that Revenant is going to be the new Legend for Season 4. But let’s take a step back and look at the confusion that was introduced. 

During the developer stream a few weeks ago when Respawn was talking about the new season, they formally introduced Forge as the brand new Legend for Season 4. James “Jimmie” McCormick was quite the broad character, as they even posted pictures with comparisons between Forge and other Apex Legends. A well-known Apex Legends data miner also revealed some of the abilities that the developers were working on for Forge. From what we could tell at the time, it appeared Forge would only be able to use hand-to-hand combat for his abilities. We were convinced Forge was going to be the new Legend for Season 4.

That is, until Respawn released “Up Close and Personal” on January 27th:

 

In perhaps the biggest surprise of Apex’s lifespan, the short video displayed Revenant creeping up behind Forge and stabbing him in the back. The video description was as follows: "Revenant used to be human. He was the greatest hitman the Mercenary Syndicate ever had. But when his programming eventually failed, he saw what Hammond Robotics had turned him into: a walking nightmare of steel and vestigial flesh." 

At first, fans did not know what to think of this. Some thought it would change nothing for the season and we would still get Forge. However, after going on Apex’s website, we can see it clearly shows Revenant as the new star for Season 4, and Forge’s picture is grayed out. So, this season we could get two brand new characters, or we are just going to get Revenant.

Now that the new Apex Legends Season 4 has started, here is Revenant’s full description from the Apex Legends website along with his abilities:

Revenent

Synthetic Nightmare

Revenant used to be human. He used to be the greatest hitman the Mercenary Syndicate ever had. He used to look in the mirror and see his human face looking back. But time changes everything, and when his programming finally failed, he saw what he had become at the hands of the Mercenary Syndicate and Hammond Robotics: a walking nightmare of steel and vestigial flesh. His masters resurrected him as a simulacrum, snatching him from death’s embrace again and again and programming him to forget

He swore he would hunt down every last person who did this to him, but more than two centuries have passed, and they're all gone… or so he thought. The return of Hammond Robotics to the Outlands has renewed his thirst for vengeance, and he won’t stop until anybody connected to Hammond is dead. Of course, he doesn’t mind eviscerating a few of the Legends along the way. He used to need a reason to kill… but he’s not that man anymore.

Real Name: Unknown
Age: Unknown
Home World: Solace
Tactical Ability: Silence - Throw a device that deals damage and disables enemy abilities for 10 seconds.
Passive Ability: Stalker - You crouch-walk faster and can climb higher than other Legends.
Ultimate Ability: Death Totem - Drop a totem that protects those who use it from death for a set amount of time. Instead of being killed or downed, users will return to the totem.

And just in case we do get Forge this season, here are his rumored abilities:

• Pull Shot: Short-range grapple that pulls enemies into you or can be used to launch yourself into the air.

• Ground Slam: Press crouch while airborne to slam into the ground below.

• K.O. Punch: Jump forward in a direction. Press crouch while airborne to slam into the ground below

• One-Two: Bull rush in a straight line. If you hit an enemy along the way, press again to do an upper-cut launching you into the air.

• On The Ropes: Enhances your melee to do more damage the lower your health is. Dealing melee damage gives you temporary overshield.

• Victory Rush: Killing a player with a melee attack restores your health and gives you a 30% speed boost for 10 seconds.

New Weapons 

Apex Legends Season 4 will also introduce a brand new weapon yet again: a sniper rifle called the Sentinel. In what has been described as a bolt-action sniper rifle with a charge mechanic, this will be the fifth sniper rifle in the weapon pool. During the developer stream a couple of weeks ago, the developers mentioned the Sentinel multiple times stating the following:

"The Sentinel is a new sniper rifle--it's a bolt action sniper rifle," Apex Legends design director Jason McCord noted during one of his streams. And Community Manager Jay Frechette said this about the new weapon: "I've enjoyed playing with [the Sentinel] a lot as well. It has that neat twist of almost having another fire mode."

Battle Pass

 

This season brings new legendary skins. Apex packs and weapon camos are all included in the Season 4 battle pass. Check out all the cool new gear here! 

Gameplay

 

The official gameplay trailer for Season 4 of Apex Legends was released yesterday, and it unveiled some pretty neat features coming this season, including various changes to weapons, brand new locations to explore on the map, and more. Check out the full gameplay trailer above!

Split Season: Return of King’s Canyon?

Apex Legends Season 4 will be over three months long. The reason they are opting for this is that they have plans to split the seasons up for both maps. That means the beloved King’s Canyon is set to return. This will be done for the ranked playlists as far as we know, so we do not know if regular public matches are also going to switch. The first half of Season 4 will be played on World’s Edge. After a month and a half, we will switch over to King’s Canyon. And yes, all your ranked rewards will carry over!

New Master Tier 

If you are an avid player of Apex Legends’ ranked mode, you will notice that it has become less of an accomplishment to reach that once elusive Apex Predator tier. That's because Season 4 introduced the new Master Tier. This new tier will be the final stepping stone between diamond and Apex Predator. As of now, we know that to reach this tier you will need around 10,000 RP points or rank points. Also, Respawn adjusted the cap on the number of players that will able to reach Apex Predator. Now, only 500 players per platform will be allowed to reach this rank. So, this should be a much fiercer grind to the top for die hard Apex players.

You Can No Longer Leave Matches Frequently in Ranked

This is common practice with competitive multiplayer games such as CS:GO and League of Legends. Leaving a match is usually frowned upon, and Respawn is reinforcing this during Season 4. Now, if you leave three matches in a row, you will be given a time out session.

Free Rewards

Since it's the 1-year anniversary of Apex Legends, from February 4-11, 2020, players will just need to log into Apex Legends and claim a free reward from Respawn.

Free rewards include the following:

• Cyber Sludge Caustic Outfit
• 5 Apex Packs
• Season 4 Win Trackers for all Legends

Map Updates

There will also be an ample amount of map changes to World’s Edge. As stated in the official patch notes “By the end of a season, you probably have your favorite spot, or spots, to land. You might prefer to rotate out of your drop location in a certain direction which in turns makes a lot of your games feel similar as the season progresses.”

Patch Notes

The full Apex Legends Season 4 patch notes can be found here, and we’ve shared them below for your convenience.

New Battle Pass

Over 100 exclusive items including Legendary skins, Apex Packs, Loading screens, Music Packs, and more! Check out everything in the Season 4 battle pass here.

New Legend: Revenant

Consumed by hate and obsessed with revenge, Revenant uses unnatural abilities to haunt his enemies and defy death. Check out his bio.

PASSIVE
STALKER - You crouch walk faster and can climb higher up walls.

TACTICAL
SILENCE - Throw a device that deals damage and disables enemy abilities for 10 seconds.

ULTIMATE
DEATH TOTEM - Drop a totem that protects users from death. Instead of getting killed or downed, you will return to the totem [with 1 health]

LOW PROFILE
Revenant takes +5% damage.

New Weapon: Sentinel Sniper Rifle

The Sentinel is a bolt action sniper rifle, effective at medium to long range. If a player presses the "fire select" with a shield battery equipped, the Sentinel will consume the shield battery from your inventory and temporarily enters an energized state.

While energized, the Sentinel fires projectiles that deal massive damage to shields. The projectiles use different VFX trails, and there is a unique energized firing sound, so all nearby players know that the Sentinel is firing these higher damage projectiles.

The Sentinel has a limited amount of energy that decays slowly over time, and loses a big chunk of juice for each shot. Once the energy runs out, the energized state ends.

Map Update

Our main goal for a map update, on the design side, is to get players to make new decisions. By the end of a season, you probably have your favorite spot, or spots, to land. You might prefer to rotate out of your drop location in a certain direction which in turns makes a lot of your games feel similar as the season progresses.

Our goal as Designers is to offer new ways for you to approach the game, and in this case the map, so that each drop, rotation, and gunfight feels as fresh as possible. Here are a few things we're doing in Season 4 to hopefully help achieve that. You can read the full details of the changes in our blog here and you can check out the highlights below:

THE PLANET HARVESTER
With its large, multi-level design the Planet Harvester is unlike anything else on World's Edge and brings exciting new gameplay options to the game.

CAPITOL CITY SPLIT IN TWO
Capitol City was the biggest POI in Season 3, getting the most action right out of the ship. By sending the fissure straight through Capitol City and creating some dead space in between (swallowing up one of the construction buildings as well), we essentially split this area into two separate zones for players to land in and loot: Fragment East and Fragment West.

THE UPDRAFTS
If you jump into the fissure that cuts through Capitol City you’ll slowly be carried back up from the heated, pressurized air, and allowed to coast across and land on the other side. This is balanced by two things. First, you take 25 damage from the intense heat and embers floating inside. This is a consistent amount of damage every time you drop back down. Second, you travel very slowly, in third person, while moving in the updraft.

SURVEY CAMP
This is a new, small POI in the snowy fields between the Epicenter and Skyhook.

WEAPON RACKS
These are guaranteed weapons placed on racks in the small buildings of Survey Camp. You’ll recognize them from Training or the Firing Range. This should give players who prioritize a good weapon over a premier drop location a new decision to make.

Ranked Series 3

For all the info on what's changing for Series 3 check out our blog. Highlights below:

• Moving to Splits per season, ~6 weeks of ranked play before a reset
• Adding Master Tier, Apex Predator becomes top 500 players by platform.
• Soft reset and scoring are the same, but soft reset is every split.
• Dive trails will be moving to a seasonal reward model, but Series 1 & 2 players are grandfathered in.
• The update to how assists are scored in Series 3 also applies to Revenant’s Silence ability.

Anniversary Login Gift

For the first week of Season 4 - Assimilation (Feb 4, 2020 - Feb 11, 2020), anyone who logs in during that time will receive the Anniversary Gift, which includes:

• Year 1 Origami Flyer charm (if you’ve got any ideas for cotton, please let us know)
• Year 1 Loyalty badge
• 10k XP for your first match of the day (available each day)

The Loyalty badge comes in 3 different flavors depending on when you took your first leap from the drop ship, so feel free to flex on all your latecomer buddies.

Loot

NEW LOOT: SNIPER AMMO
[10 shots per pickup]

Designer Notes:

Our goal here is to create a deeper, more balanced long range meta. Since snipers shared ammo types with SMGs and LMGs, there wasn't a great way to put ammo scarcity on sniper rifles without really penalizing the more ammo hungry weapons that used the same ammo type. So for Season 4 we’ve added a new class of ammo that only applies to Sniper Rifles that we hope will have players being careful about the shots they take and limit how long they can pressure targets at long range before having to reposition.

All snipers now take new ammo type:

• Sentinel
• Longbow DMR
• TripleTake
• Charge Rifle [now uses 1 sniper ammo per shot. Magazine holds 4 shots]

New attachment: extended magazine for Sniper ammo.

ENERGY AMMO

Now gives 30 ammo per pickup instead of 20. Most ammo players pick up comes from packs that spawn next to energy weapons on the ground. Now that there are only 2 energy ammo weapons in Apex, we needed to up the ammo per brick to keep energy ammo from being too scarce.

REMOVED LOOT

The following items have been removed from the game:

• Turbocharger hop-up
• Extended mags for energy ammo [this change went out earlier than intended in the last update and should make sense with other changes in this patch but we wanted to include it here as well for players returning for Season 4 that were not aware.]

GOLD BACKPACK
UI update to better convey to the player when they are using or being revived with the perk.

Weapons

Designer Notes: We want to shift up what weapons are the strongest. Also, we're aiming to reduce the power of some weapons that seem too strong and give a little boost to some weapons that haven't been performing as well as we'd like.

UPDATE TO IRONSIGHTS ACCURACY
Apex guns move around subtly while ADS -- they rotate and sway as you move your aim, they bob up and down and side to side while moving, etc. We have special tech that makes sure the reticle on the optics stays centered even as the gun moves around a bit. However, until season 4, the ironsights on weapons didn't have this tech. That meant that the ironsights reticles could move around with the weapon and actually be slightly inaccurate -- they wouldn't point at the screen center where the next shot would fire. With season 4, we have updated most of the weapons' ironsights to properly stay centered now. Not all ironsights are upgraded yet, but we will be updating the remaining weapons as this season progresses. The weapons that will be updated for Season 4 are:

• Longbow DMR
• TripleTake
• Charge Rifle
• Sentinel Sniper Rifle
• Havoc
• R-301
• Flatline
• Spitfire LMG
• R-99
• Alternator
• Mozambique
• Mastiff
• RE-45
• Wingman

G7 SCOUT

Moved from “Sniper” to the “Assault Rifle” class.

• Now only accepts AR optics and attachments [including barrel stabilizers and stock].
• Still accepts Double Tap hop-up.
• Contributes to progress for stats/challenges for AR’s moving forward.
• Reduced fire rate 4.5 -> 4.0
• Increasing time between shots for double tap 0.425 -> 0.475
• Fixed bug where G7 had 0 ADS air spread, making it the only gun that was perfectly accurate on ziplines, etc.

L-STAR

• The L-STAR is no longer a crate weapon and can now be found around the map.
• Uses energy ammo.
• Reloading has been removed and the L-STAR will overheat after sustained fire so best to fire in short bursts to manage overheating and recoil.
• Damage reduced per shot 19 -> 18
• Rate of Fire decreased 12 -> 10
• Less horizontal viewkick when the weapon fires.

DEVOTION

Designer Notes:

The Devotion was chosen to go into the crate for a couple of reasons. Mainly 1) it is an energy ammo LMG, and so is the L-STAR and 2) data shows us that a fully kitted Devotion is actually one of the strongest weapons in the game, and could work at crate power level.

• Removed from normal loot pool and is now a crate weapon.
• Magazine size: 54
• Total ammo stock: 162
• Turbocharger functionality.

HAVOC

Designer notes:
With the removal of turbocharger, we wanted to buff the base havoc. Most notably, we are reducing horizontal recoil and making it easier to control.

• No longer accepts the Turbocharger hop-up [turbocharger has been removed from the game] but can still equip Select Fire.
• Decreased time between shots when using Select Fire hop-up .77 -> .56

R-99

• Reduced damage per shot 12 -> 11
• Increased magazine size for the first 3 tiers:
• Base: 18 -> 20
• Common: 20 -> 22
• Rare: 23 -> 24
• Epic: 27 -> 27

PROWLER 

• Increased damage per shot 14 -> 15

HEMLOK

•  Increased single-shot rate of fire 5.6 -> 6.4

WINGMAN

• Adjusted magazine sizes:
• Base: 4 -> 5
• Common: 6 -> 6
• Rare: 8 -> 7
• Epic: 10 -> 8

EVA-8

• Double Tap hop-up: reduced the delay between bursts: 0.85 -> 0.80

MASTIFF

• Fixed an exploit that players discovered and reported where you could rapidly fire the Mastiff.

GOLD WEAPONS UPDATE 

The following will be the new set of Gold Weapons for Season 4:

• Havoc
• P2020
• Sentinel
• Prowler
• R-301

LEGENDS

BLOODHOUND

•  Downing (not killing) players adds 5 seconds to Beast of the Hunt timer. It is possible to exceed starting time with successive kills.

CRYPTO

• EMP no longer destroys friendly Gibraltar Dome Shields.
• Dome Shields no longer can stick to Crypto’s Drone.

BUG FIXES

• Fixed bug that was causing players that reached account level 500 to crash or access their inventory or store.
• Fixed bug where player level text would appear on the badges of level 100 badge when it wasn’t supposed to.
• Fixed bug for some cases where players were unable to equip weapons from care packages when attempting to swap it with an existing weapon.
• Fixes for a few bad spots in World’s Edge where players were getting stuck or getting to places they shouldn’t - thank you to everyone that’s been capturing and reporting these issues and keep them coming!
• Fixed bug where sometimes when the Jumpmaster disconnects then the followers in their squad would float in mid-air and be unable to unfollow.
• General stability fixes.

QUALITY OF LIFE

• Fixes for cases where approaching the edge of the Circle would make the players screen turn almost all white.
• Updated colorblind settings based on player feedback.
• Increased the timer for when you can still be credited for an assist after dealing damage: 5 seconds -> 7.5 seconds.
• Community Request: added a Random Favorites option for unlocked skins that can be found in the Legend customization menu.

You’ll see an option to “favorite” skins you’ve unlocked [Y button on consoles]. Choosing Random Favorite option from the skins menu will randomly cycle your chosen favorite Legend skins in between matches.

Nerfed the Roller that falls from the Loot Drone.

• Reduced damage.
• Decreased radius of splash damage. Updated the visual FX to the explosion for better visibility.
• “Target Compensation” and “Melee Target Compensation” options have been moved to the “Advanced Look Controls” menu.

PENALTIES AND LOSS FORGIVENESS IN RANKED MODE

There are some changes coming to loss forgiveness to reduce abuse of the system. Loss forgiveness when a teammate leaves or fails to connect is unchanged, and is working as intended. We will be limiting the RP loss forgiveness when you leave once per day. If you exceed once per day more than three times per ranked series, you lose all forgiveness for the remainder of that series. Once these limits are reached players will no longer receive RP loss forgiveness when abandoning a match, regardless of the reason for quitting. We will continue to display prompts that alert you that leaving will count, and now will alert you when you are about to run out of loss forgiveness games.The scaling penalties are the same as last Series.

PLAYERS CRASHING WITH DXGI_ERROR_DEVICE_HUNG

Some player are experiencing an issue where Apex is crashing with a “DXGI_ERROR_DEVICE_HUNG” error message. We are working closely with NVIDIA to help determine the cause of the issue and provide gamers with a solution (via updated driver or game patch) as soon as possible.

Helpful Information When Reporting: Graphics card vendor/model (ie: ASUS ROG STRIX RTX 2080) Driver version: (ie: 441.66) Any pattern to repro? (specific location, certain duration of gameplay, etc.)

MATCHMAKING UPDATE

With this patch we’ll be pushing out changes globally to matchmaking that we’ve been testing in specific regions. We’re well aware that this has been a contentious topic among players and there’s been some misinformation out there so just to be clear: skill-based matchmaking has existed in Apex since launch and we’ll be continuing to improve it over time.

 

Will you be playing Apex Legends Season 4?

Let us know what you think about the new season in the comments below!

 

Top image via Apex Legends/Respawn Entertainment

This article was written by Nick Farrell, a full-time university student who loves talking and writing about video games.