Published , by Sam Chandler
Published , by Sam Chandler
Apex Legends Season 4 is here and with it comes the 4.0 Patch Notes. This new season is called Assimilation and it introduces a brand new legend for players to own: Revenant. There is also a new weapon to find, a season pass with more goodies to unlock, an update to the map, and a whole lot of tweaks to weapons. Please check out the patch notes below!
Over 100 exclusive items including Legendary skins, Apex Packs, Loading screens, Music Packs, and more! Check out everything in the Season 4 battle pass here.
Consumed by hate and obsessed with revenge, Revenant uses unnatural abilities to haunt his enemies and defy death. Check out his bio.
PASSIVE: STALKER - You crouch walk faster and can climb higher up walls.
TACTICAL: SILENCE - Throw a device that deals damage and disables enemy abilities for 10 seconds.
ULTIMATE: DEATH TOTEM - Drop a totem that protects users from death. Instead of getting killed or downed, you will return to the totem [with X health]
LOW PROFILE - Revenant takes +5% damage.
The Sentinel is a bolt action sniper rifle, effective at medium to long range. If a player presses the "fire select" with a shield battery equipped, the Sentinel will consume the shield battery from your inventory and temporarily enters an energized state.
While energized, the Sentinel fires projectiles that deal massive damage to shields. The projectiles use different VFX trails, and there is a unique energized firing sound, so all nearby players know that the Sentinel is firing these higher damage projectiles.
The Sentinel has a limited amount of energy that decays slowly over time, and loses a big chunk of juice for each shot. Once the energy runs out, the energized state ends.
Our main goal for a map update, on the design side, is to get players to make new decisions.
By the end of a season, you probably have your favorite spot, or spots, to land. You might prefer to rotate out of your drop location in a certain direction which in turns makes a lot of your games feel similar as the season progresses.
Our goal as Designers is to offer new ways for you to approach the game, and in this case the map, so that each drop, rotation, and gunfight feels as fresh as possible. Here are a few things we're doing in Season 4 to hopefully help achieve that.
You can read the full details of the changes in our blog here and you can check out the highlights below:
THE PLANET HARVESTER
With its large, multi-level design the Planet Harvester is unlike anything else on World's Edge and brings exciting new gameplay options to the game.
CAPITOL CITY SPLIT IN TWO
Capitol City was the biggest POI in Season 3, getting the most action right out of the ship. By sending the fissure straight through Capitol City and creating some dead space in between (swallowing up one of the construction buildings as well), we essentially split this area into two separate zones for players to land in and loot: Fragment East and Fragment West.
THE UPDRAFTS
If you jump into the fissure that cuts through Capitol City you’ll slowly be carried back up from the heated, pressurized air, and allowed to coast across and land on the other side. This is balanced by two things. First, you take 25 damage from the intense heat and embers floating inside. This is a consistent amount of damage every time you drop back down. Second, you travel very slowly, in third person, while moving in the updraft.
SURVEY CAMP
This is a new, small POI in the snowy fields between the Epicenter and Skyhook.
WEAPON RACKS
These are guaranteed weapons placed on racks in the small buildings of Survey Camp. You’ll recognize them from Training or the Firing Range. This should give players who prioritize a good weapon over a premier drop location a new decision to make.
For all the info on what's changing for Series 3 check out our blog. Highlights below:
For the first week of Season 4 - Assimilation (Feb 4, 2020 - Feb 11, 2020), anyone who logs in during that time will receive the Anniversary Gift, which includes:
NEW LOOT: SNIPER AMMO - [10 shots per pickup]
Designer Notes:
Our goal here is to create a deeper, more balanced long range meta. Since snipers shared ammo types with SMGs and LMGs, there wasn't a great way to put ammo scarcity on sniper rifles without really penalizing the more ammo hungry weapons that used the same ammo type. So for Season 4 we’ve added a new class of ammo that only applies to Sniper Rifles that we hope will have players being careful about the shots they take and limit how long they can pressure targets at long range before having to reposition.
All snipers now take new ammo type:
New attachment: extended magazine for Sniper ammo.
ENERGY AMMO
Now gives 30 ammo per pickup instead of 20. Most ammo players pick up comes from packs that spawn next to energy weapons on the ground. Now that there are only 2 energy ammo weapons in Apex, we needed to up the ammo per brick to keep energy ammo from being too scarce.
REMOVED LOOT: The following items have been removed from the game
GOLD BACKPACK
UI update to better convey to the player when they are using or being revived with the perk.
Designer Notes: We want to shift up what weapons are the strongest. Also, we're aiming to reduce the power of some weapons that seem too strong and give a little boost to some weapons that haven't been performing as well as we'd like.
UPDATE TO IRONSIGHTS ACCURACY
Apex guns move around subtly while ADS -- they rotate and sway as you move your aim, they bob up and down and side to side while moving, etc. We have special tech that makes sure the reticle on the optics stays centered even as the gun moves around a bit. However, until season 4, the ironsights on weapons didn't have this tech. That meant that the ironsights reticles could move around with the weapon and actually be slightly inaccurate -- they wouldn't point at the screen center where the next shot would fire. With season 4, we have updated most of the weapons' ironsights to properly stay centered now. Not all ironsights are upgraded yet, but we will be updating the remaining weapons as this season progresses. The weapons that will be updated for Season 4 are:
G7 SCOUT
Moved from “Sniper” to the “Assault Rifle” class.
L-STAR
DEVOTION
Designer Notes:
The Devotion was chosen to go into the crate for a couple of reasons. Mainly 1) it is an energy ammo LMG, and so is the L-STAR and 2) data shows us that a fully kitted Devotion is actually one of the strongest weapons in the game, and could work at crate power level.
HAVOC
Designer notes:
With the removal of turbocharger, we wanted to buff the base havoc. Most notably, we are reducing horizontal recoil and making it easier to control.
No longer accepts the Turbocharger hop-up [turbocharger has been removed from the game] but can still equip Select Fire.
Decreased time between shots when using Select Fire hop-up .77 -> .56
R-99
PROWLER
HEMLOK
WINGMAN
EVA-8
MASTIFF
GOLD WEAPONS UPDATE
The following will be the new set of Gold Weapons for Season 4:
BLOODHOUND
CRYPTO
There are some changes coming to loss forgiveness to reduce abuse of the system. Loss forgiveness when a teammate leaves or fails to connect is unchanged, and is working as intended. We will be limiting the RP loss forgiveness when you leave once per day. If you exceed once per day more than three times per ranked series, you lose all forgiveness for the remainder of that series. Once these limits are reached players will no longer receive RP loss forgiveness when abandoning a match, regardless of the reason for quitting. We will continue to display prompts that alert you that leaving will count, and now will alert you when you are about to run out of loss forgiveness games.The scaling penalties are the same as last Series.
Some player are experiencing an issue where Apex is crashing with a “DXGI_ERROR_DEVICE_HUNG” error message. We are working closely with NVIDIA to help determine the cause of the issue and provide gamers with a solution (via updated driver or game patch) as soon as possible.
Helpful Information When Reporting:
With this patch we’ll be pushing out changes globally to matchmaking that we’ve been testing in specific regions. We’re well aware that this has been a contentious topic among players and there’s been some misinformation out there so just to be clear: skill-based matchmaking has existed in Apex since launch and we’ll be continuing to improve it over time.
There’s a lot to love about these patch notes for Apex Legends Season 4. Revenant should shake up the meta a bit with his player-relocating ultimate. Depending on the in-game effects, it could be tough to tell when an enemy has resurrected instead of died. Let us know in the Chatty comments below what you think about the Assimilation season. If you’ve stopped playing Apex Legends, will this bring you back in? Check out the Shacknews Apex Legends page for more coverage!