Apex Legends Won't Make Solo Mode Permanent, Yet

Apex Legends, a game that’s still going strong despite my repeated failures to report on it in the past few months, recently made one of its temporary modes, the Duo mode, a permanent addition to the traditionally three-party game. However, despite the fact it’s been run a few times through the game’s lifetime, the game’s solo mode will not be getting the same treatment.

EA_David, EA’s community manager, explained:

Now, what about Solos? When we introduced Solos as a limited-time mode last year we saw it actually negatively impacted the game, especially when it came to new player retention. We’ve also purposely designed Legends and their abilities to compliment teamplay and squad composition, but when played Solo some Legend abilities become useless. These are just some of the reasons we decided not to include Solos in today’s update. We’re still exploring ways to allow a Solo experience, but for now grab a friend (or two) and jump into the arena.

That seems like a reasonable approach. It’s easy enough to make the best of some Legend abilities, like Bloodhound’s stalking ability, Banglore’s orbital strikes, and Caustic’s gas grenade, while you’re playing alone. But others, like Crypto, Wattson, Pathfinder… It’s not like you can’t use it solo, but it’s not nearly as useful when you don’t have other people to take advantage of them. Heck, it can even be used against you, since your enemy can use most of that stuff as well.

In the same post where David explained why Solo mode was nowhere to be found, he also announced that the old map, Kings Canyon, would also be returning for good, allowing people to pick which of the maps they want to play on. This move is also probably a sign that EA is comfortable enough with Apex Legend’s player base that they’re willing to split them up and risk longer ques, so, that’s nice for Respawn, at least.