If you’ve played Apex Legends before, or any battle royale game for that matter, you’ll know how painful it is to be ‘third-partied’ during a gunfight. There’s nothing worse than being on the cusp of victory to find yourself being shot in the back by an unseen assailant. Apex Legends does give you ways to combat this – Gibby’s dome shield is a particularly useful tool to have – but it’s largely a fact of life that, at some point, you’re going to be third-partied. Well, until now. Speaking to press, Samantha Kalman, senior game designer at Respawn Entertainment, has revealed that Storm Point’s IMC Armory locations are actually going to be third-party proof.
We know that this is hard to believe, but it’s true. When you head into one of Storm Point’s four IMC Armory locations to loot, “you’re protected from being third-partied”, according to Kalman. However, this comes at a cost – as you might expect.
Players looking to loot these locations are going to have to lock themselves in and weather an intense minute-long storm of close-quarters combat with waves of deadly Spectres – automated infantry robots you may recognise from Titanfall.
The loot you can get your hands on if you survive this onslaught, though, is worth it. Through these select locations, Respawn Entertainment is introducing Smart Loot Bins to Apex Legends in Season 13. These loot bins will effectively ‘scan’ your equipment and ensure that anything you get from them will be an improvement on what you have. This is certain to make these popular locations at all stages of a game – if the loot can only get better, then there’s always a reason to check one out.
What makes these locations really interesting, though, is the fact that they were borne from gameplay innovations and not from narrative exploration.
Narratively speaking, Storm Point’s IMC Armories were “built to be automated conflict support structures filled with valuable cargo”, Kalman explains, during the Frontier War. We don’t know why, but they just weren’t activated back then – so, they remained dormant until triggered by the strange monstrous sea creature we see in the Saviors Launch trailer.
However fitting this narrative might be, it doesn’t appear to be the driving force behind this feature’s creation. When discussing this, Kalman expresses that the development team “really wanted to have a nice PvE feature that is safe from being third-partied… So, [it] built everything around this concept.”
We don’t know how popular this new Storm Point map feature will be – or how tough the Spectres are – but Apex Legends is once-again offering something new for battle royale players to enjoy and it’s hard to argue with that.
If you’re looking forward to the next update, but you need a refresher, check out our Apex Legends tier list for the latest information on who’s the best legend in-game right now. If you’re looking beyond this season, why not check out all the Apex Legends character leaks from earlier this year – Newcastle ended up being a legitimate new legend, so there’s a chance the other leaks will be true, too.