With season seven less than a week away, EA and Respawn are finally detailing the new content and features that we can expect from the latest update to the popular battle royale game Apex Legends. Thanks to a series of previews, it’s now common knowledge that Apex will soon host a third map, Olympus, plus a new “charmingly eccentric” Scottish astrophysicist called Horizon who comes complete with a pretty harrowing backstory. But that’s just the half of it. Season seven will also see the game deploy its first ever vehicle, gain a new Clubs feature and tune loot tables to make gunning down rival players even more fun.
Horizon — aka Dr. Mary Somers — is a master of gravity. Her spacesuit allows her to move a lot more freely than most of the other legends, which includes the ability to fall from great heights without taking a momentum hit. Her tactical ability lets players deploy her robot friend N.E.W.T to lift players to higher areas, providing teams with a new angle of attack. Her ultimate, a mini black hole, is capable of sucking in all players within its radius, giving you the chance to wipe an entire squad with a well-placed grenade or burst of fire. If you’ve played Overwatch, it’s a lot like Zarya’s Graviton Surge.
Olympus will join the rotation in place of King’s Canyon, bringing with it a number of new opportunities and challenges. Located high above the clouds, Olympus swaps the rocky terrain of King’s Canyon and lava-rich locales of World’s Edge for a rich, sprawling environment full of lush green grass, flowers and futuristic buildings that haven’t (yet) been ruined by battle. Olympus is also home to a number of research facilities and industrial complexes that hide Phase Runners, which teleport players to different locations much like a Wraith portal (although you will take storm damage). To give you a sense of its size, Dave Osei, Senior Level Designer at Respawn, noted that while Olympus is slightly bigger than King’s Canyon, it isn’t doesn’t quite reach the area of World’s Edge.
The new map will also be the only place you will be able to utilize the Trident, Apex Legends’ first ever vehicle. This three-person hovercraft is set up for trios who land at the very edges of the map and want to freely scavenge for loot and engage in firefights without fear of being eliminated by Ring damage. Jump towers are still a thing, but the Trident will make encounters a lot more interesting, simply because deployable abilities like Rampart’s minigun, Gibraltar’s Dome of Protection and Caustic’s Nox Gas Traps can be attached to the vehicle, turning it into a fast-moving defensive battlement or a toxic death machine. That said, you can’t mow anyone down with it, so it’s all about the high IQ plays.