Apex Legends Season 16 will usher in a mode players have been asking for since launch: Team Deathmatch. The highly-anticipated game mode will launch on February 14 alongside Revelry, the newest season in battle royale, and will focus on “improving the core experience,” says design director Evan Nikolich during a preview event.
“We’ve been hearing the community asking for this for a while,” says game mode designer Marty Wong. Team Deathmatch on Apex Legends will look like TDM in any other game, really: a fast-paced 6v6 mode with no downs, just deaths and quick respawns. First team to 30 kills wins the round, if you win two rounds you win the game. At the start of the game you are given a loadout selection similar to that in Control Game mode: melee, heavy, assault, specialist and long range, with two weapons and a grenade in each loadout. You can change your legend and gear throughout the game, and you can pick up some weapons around the map.
But Apex Legends not only adds Team Deathmatch but removes another non-battle royale mode entirely. Arenas will be gone with Season 14 as the 3v3 mode “fell short of our goal of being a good place to practice the core combat loop apex‘ explains Nikolich, who also suggests it overlaps a bit too much with the BR experience. The idea behind Arenas and other non-BR modes is that if you can get used to the game’s rotating weapon pool, its unique movement mechanics, and its roster of characters with their unique abilities, you can probably put what you know into battle royale – instead attempting to enter a BR match only to be rolled and eliminated within the first few minutes.
“Arenas was meant to be our smaller slice of BR mode,” explains Wong. “It ended up being a bit more sweaty mode with more high stakes. Many players went in feeling like they couldn’t make mistakes or really experiment, they always had to play very hard. We hope that TDM will come into play and give players a place where they die fast and feel comfortable making mistakes, and we hope that will be the case apex much more accessibility for new players.
Instead of arenas, Apex Legends Season 16 kicks off with Team Deathmatch and then brings Mixtape, a rotating playlist of community favorite modes. Apex Legends Season 16 Revelry starts on February 14th.
