Apex Legends Dev Explained Why They Don’t Bring The Loot Pool of Locked and Loaded

Apex Legends gained much appreciation with the Locked and Loaded LTM that came with Anniversary CE, because when this mode was active, the loot quality of the game was significantly improved. Literally, all level 1 loots were removed from the loot pool. And because of that, the players really loved the Locked and Loaded, they even offered Respawn to apply the same loot pool to normal games. The lead designer of Apex Legends, Daniel Zenon Klein, told that they are considering it.

Of course, having high-tier loots will improve the players’ confidence. But when you look at it from the devs’ perspective, the changes might not be as good as expected. Naturally, the devs will always want to make the game fun and make players enjoy more of it. However, in the long view, we can see some negative feedback about it.

Klein told Reddit users that why they are hesitating to bring the loot pool of Locked and Loaded.

“There Are Actually Many Reasons Loot Exists on Apex Legends”

This is one of those things that may not even be a problem at all, but we, game designers, tend to get all wrapped up in anticipating it.

Basically, there’s a reason loot exists in Apex Legends. There are actually many reasons. Some of those reasons are that the journey from low-level loot to high-level loot gives you things to do that aren’t just “find and kill the enemy”, it makes teams organically spread out, it adds RNG to soften skill differentials (sometimes you run into a better player, but you have a better loadout, and that’s good), etc.

We soften the impact of all of these good things by shortening the journey from low-level to high-level loot. Now you could say “but it was fine” during the three weeks the takeover was up (and I agree! It was fine!), but we wouldn’t expect these negative effects to manifest on that timescale. One way this could manifest is, say we remove a lot of loot tiers, and a year into playing with this new loot game suddenly for no reason anyone can specifically point to, Apex feels a lot sweatier, there are a lot more fighting and less downtime all the time, maybe late-game circles feel dead because so much fighting happened in the early game–or maybe the opposite happens! Because teams need to spend less time looting they can set up defensively in a competitive environment much sooner and maybe now there’s even less action in the ALGS?

Daniel Zenon Klein

“We Have Got To Be Very Careful and Deliberate About This”

I’m not saying all or even any of these things will definitely happen if we just remove white gear. They probably won’t! But because this is a change that feels so good at the moment (“hell yeah, I get blue everything on the ground and I start with white everything”) it will be extremely hard, if not impossible, to undo if it turns out one of those negative things happens. That’s why we’ve got to be very careful and deliberate about this.

We want to hit the right balance between putting obviously good things into the game in a timely manner and making sure the game is healthy for many, many years to come. We firmly believe Apex will still be played a decade from now. Unless we f*ck it up. So we try not to f*ck it up ;P

Daniel Zenon Klein

The RNG is one of the most essential factors in a battle royale game, I think. The loots you own and the loots your enemy owns are also an example of the RNG. When the strong one eliminates the weak one, it won’t feel that rewarding as the weak one feels when they eliminate a stronger player. Because the weak player will get the loots of players that they eliminate, and they also gain confidence. If the devs decrease the difference between high-tier loot and low-tier loot, the winner of any fight would be the more skilled one, that rule applies to every battle royale game too, not just Apex Legends.

We all loved the Locked and Loaded mode. But I’m pretty sure some players are thankful for not seeing those changes on tournaments and high-level competitive scenes. It’s also true that the better loot pools make us feel like the game is much more fun. Instead of implementing it on the game, I think Respawn can add the mode like they do with the map changes. So, the players who want to participate in those changes can join the games at specific times.