Apex Legends season three comes with a brand-new map, and it has a moving train

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Image: Respawn

Respawn made a bombshell announcement for its Apex Legends battle royale shooter this morning, revealing a brand-new map for its upcoming third season. The new destination, called World’s Edge, is “where molten heat and chemical ice collide,” indicating players will be facing off in an extreme temperature environment.

In a teaser trailer for the map, we can see both icy and lava-filled battlefields. In a twist on the existing drop ship, there is also a moving train, which should add a very interesting mobile element to World’s Edge. Respawn says the location, alongside its new legend Crypto, will be arriving with season three next week on October 1st.

Beyond the news of a new arena to compete in, the reveal of a secondary Apex Legends map also highlights a shift in strategy for Respawn. Although the studio may have been planning a second map for quite some time, it had never openly talked about whether Apex Legends would be modeled more like Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds, which features multiple maps in rotation, or Epic’s Fortnite, which has one constantly changing setting. (There are some rumors Fortnite may shake up that formula with its upcoming season 11.)

Now, with the World’s Edge reveal, it’s pretty clear Respawn is taking the former approach. And that’s probably a good thing. Apex Legends is at its core a competitive first-person shooter, and it relies less on the environmental storytelling that has made Fortnite so appealing to players both hardcore and casual. It’s less necessary for Respawn to build out a single, ever-evolving environment and more imperative the studio give players dynamic locations to fight in.

Here’s hoping Respawn comes up with clever ways to keep both maps fresh and popular simultaneously, which can be a struggle if World’s Edge proves far more fun than the game’s initial Kings Canyon location.

John Jason Fallows

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