Apex Legendsseason 18 skipped adding a brand new character and, instead, introduced a massive rework for Revenant. Dubbed Revenant Reborn, players had to say goodbye to his silence abilities and his Totem and hello to a new leap and his Forged Shadows Ultimate ability. It’s not just gameplay, though, asRevenant’s story and his rivalry with Lobais moving forward (with some assistance from Eduardo Silva).
Game Rant recently attended a roundtable interview to learn Legends' Revenant Reborn, with writer Jaclyn Seto and designer Evan Funnell leading the discussion. Of course, things like Revenant’s rework and story expansion don’t happen over night. According to Funnell, planning and prototyping his abilities began about a year ago, while Seto joined the narrative work about six or seven months ago (though plans were in motions well before). All that work is paying off now, but just as with any game dev project, some things were left on the cutting room floor. While Seto couldn’t share much in the way of narrative without spoiling what’s coming, Funnell was able to talk about some of the gameplay iterations Revenant saw during his rework than didn’t make it intoApex Legendsseason 18.
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Game development is an iterative process, and Revenant Reborn is no different. The overarching goal of the rework was to make him more aggressive and more of an in-your-face assassin, and that resulted in some of the more significant chances to his kit. For many, his Death Totem was an iconic part of the character, and some iterations tried to maintain it. However, the Death Totem didn’t really mesh well with the current gameplay meta ofApex Legends,nor did it really accomplish this goal effectively. Funnell also revealed that one cut aspect of his passive wasthe ability to wall run, akin toTitanfall.
“We tried a bunch of different things, one of them being giving him wall running to let him traverse the maps a little bit more. We found that it was super situational.”
The reason this ability didn’t make it into the final product comes down to how situational it is. While many fans would have likely been ecstatic to see it work, Funnell reveals that gameplay tests showed how situational such an ability is. After all,Apex Legends' mapsare not designed with wall running in mind, and it’s the kind of feature that heavily relies on the environment. This means fans should keep expectations in check; while the prospect may be exciting, this doesn’t mean it’s any likelier than the feature does actually come to the game some day.
Another interesting Ultimate ability would have seen Revenant Reborn drag an enemy into a shadow realm where they would be forced to duel 1v1. This idea works conceptually given Revenant’s Assassin motif, but there were some issues with it in gameplay. While the winner of the duel (Revenant or the enemy) would come out of it with recharged health and shields, there were concernes over counterplay reagarding it, making sure the duels were fair, and ensuring that Revenant players feel like they get value out of the ultimate.
Not to mention, the winner would return to theApex Legendsbattlefield where other things happened in real time, and it would be quite disorienting and disruptive to the flow of a firefight.
We had a goal to give Revenant the ability to pick out a singular target to fight, and focus all of his attention taking out that one enemy without any distractions. We had a really cool prototype where Revenant could target an enemy and bring them into another realm to fight them 1v1, and the winner of the duel would come out of it with some benefits like recharged health and shield. It was interesting, but there were a lot of concerns about how to make that something the enemy had counterplay to avoid, or how to give them a fair chance once in the duel, while also making Revenant feel like they had gotten value out of their ultimate.
Of course, fans have already seen the end result of this gameplay iteration. Revenant can see when enemies are low on health, climb and crouch efficiently, leap forward in pursuit of the enemy, and summon protective shadows as he tries to single out and destroy a target. It’ll be interesting to see howRevenant Reborn fits into theApex Legendsmetaonce the dust is settled, but it’s just as intriguing to see how he got this far.
Apex Legendsis available now on PC, PS4, PS5, Switch, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X.
