Here’s Everything In Apex Legends’ Underwhelming Season 1 Battle Pass

Today, Respawn Entertainment announced the much-anticipated Season 1 Battle Pass for Apex Legends, following in the footsteps battle royale sensation Fortnite with 100 tiers of unlockable cosmetics. And there’s a lot riding on it, as well: this is a crucial piece of the game’s monetization strategy, and so there needs to be enough fancy weapon and character skins in there to get people to open up their wallets. So how did Respawn do here?

Pretty bad, unfortunately.

The pass kicks off with some of the only character skins in the lot: we’ve got Mirage, Lifeline and Wraith with some warpaint on. Not much to write home about, really.

Things actually get worse from there, however. Most of what we can see in the pass are weapon skins, which are fine but not all that exciting. They don’t do much to make the weapon feel particularly different or strange, and nothing in here really goes much past the wraps that we can see in Fortnite.

Halfway through we get our next skin, for the still-unreleased Octane:

This one is even worse than the Tier-1 skins. It looks basically like what we’ve seen of Octane, just with less color? A pretty low-level transformation, and not particularly preferable to what we assume is the base skin.

There’s a ton of filler in here, from badges that display your pass level to a ton of loot boxes. Theoretically, the loot boxes could contain good stuff, but that’s not really the idea behind a battle pass: we want to know what we’re getting so we can work towards it. Some of the later tiers go a long time without giving anything interesting:

In Fortnite the Tier-100 skin is the grand prize of the season, something you work towards for weeks and that typically comes with some of the most intricate character design the game has to offer. Here we have a sort of arctic camo weapon skin and another badge:

Overall, this is a weak performance from a game already struggling with its comsetics. Apex Legends will probably still sell some of these based on people that will buy it because they’re fans of the game and want a grind in there, but nothing in the pass will be driving purchases on its own. Respawn needs more artists working on skins, and quickly.