The inaugural start to the fifth year of Apex Legends is rapidly approaching and today we are here to give you a run down on everything you need to know, in one easy place. Season 20, also known as Breakout is releasing on Tuesday, the 13th of February 2024, you can check how far away that is by visiting here.

Image: Respawn Entertainement

Armor Changes

The first major change you will experience when loading into your matches will be the armor changes. Starting in season 20 armors will no longer naturally spawn on the ground, instead it will be entirely up to you to level them up by either doing damage to enemies, or by doing class specific tasks such as opening Class-bins such as the Assault or Support bin, or by scanning Recon Beacons and Controller Consoles or finally by scanning the Care Packages as a Skirmisher. All these activities reward you with Evo Points, which level up your armors and allow you to unlock your new legend specific Perks.

Alongside dealing damage and doing legend tasks, you can also find Evo Harvesters in and around the map, these appear later on during the game inbetween POIs (Points of Interest), you can interact with them to acquire 400 Evo Points for you and your teammates. If you're lucky you can also find Evo Caches, a super rare item which gives you a whole 1500 Evo Points for you and your teammates, potentially sky rocketing you all to Red Armors. Image: Respawn Entertainement

The amount of Evo Points you need per armor changes per each armor, as before you start with a white armor, and leveling it up to blue will take 500 Evo Points. Fromblue to purple armor takes 1000 Evo Points, and from what I've seen, it is1500 Evo Points from purple to red armor.

Here's a quick run down on all the Evo Points and how you can earn them, there will certainly be more than just this, but these are the important points:

  • Knocking a Player -100 Evo Points
  • Assisting a Knock -75 Evo Points
  • Underdog Bonus -100 Evo Points per "tier difference" (i.e. you have white shield and the enemy has a blue, you gain 200 for a knock instead of 100 Evo Points)
  • using a Recon Beacon or Controller Console -200 Evo Points
  • using a Support or Assault Pill -100 Evo Points
  • Dealing Damage - 1 Evo Point per 1 damage dealt

Because armors are now tied to you as a player, and not simply a lootable and equipable item, you cannot take the armor off a deathbox as previously, instead you can loot their "Armor Core" which works as the armor swap stand-in, offering you all the shield as you'd usually get, but if you have a purple armor and the box has a Red Armor Core, you can the extra 25 shield as "overshield" (just like conduit's Radiant Transfer) which dissipates after 30 seconds. So all your muscle memory armor-swapping mid combat will not go to waste.

Legend Perks

The second major change alongside the armor changes, and the reason that armors are being changed as a whole, are the new Legend Perks. These entirely revamp the in-game experience for everyone. Once you have leveled up your armor from White to Blue, you'll get a new prompt "Hold ---- to upgrade", leading you to a whole new piece of UI which shows you two choices, both of which can impact your gameplay, either passively such as Ballistic's "Ammuvision" which allows you to see the Ammo types from outside a deathbox, or actively like Catalyst's "Prolific Piercings" which gives her one extra Piercing Spikes charge.

You gain a second Perk once you upgrade your armor from blue to purple, providing you with an often even more impactful change to your favorite legends kit, a stand out legend at this level is Wattson, who has the choice between "Power Pylon" which doubles the health of her pylon and how much shield it can regenerate, or "Full Coverage" which allows her to place two separate pylons, at the cost that they both have half HP and half the amount of shield it can regenerate.

Crafting Changes

Crafting is being streamlined entirely, removing the seasonal, weekly and daily crafting rotations (this means no weapons, attachements or the convenient purple bag in crafting) and instead is being turned into a "one-time use" per player, per crafter. You will no longer need to find crafting materials by opening pills, using the canisters or by killing wildlife, instead you just walk up to the terminal, choose to either craft some ammo, a battery/medkit or you teammates banners (if you have a support character. Image: Respawn Entertainement

Ranked Changes

For a lot of players, the recent ranked changes from Season 17 onwards was quite polarizing, a shift to a "Hidden MMR" style lead to players finding it harder to climb up the ladder, because it felt like you were fighting players off a similar skill level, but in a wildly different rank. This season, the Apex team has decided to revert back to the glorious and well respected Season 13 style, whilst still tweaking to bring it more in-line with how the ALGS system works.

The first part is that there will be a hard reset on everyone's RP, so everyone is back down to 0, there will be no more placement matches meaning everyone will have to grind up all the way from Rookie 4, but luckily for everyone, they've removed the promotional trials, so no longer will you have to get stuck at the top of a rank, clawing away for a win so you can promote to Diamond.

To move as far away as possible from the Hidden MMR matchmaking system, they appear to be match making on everyone's Ranked Point (also more commonly known as RP) value, so if you have 12,478 RP, the players who you queue into a match should have a very similar RP value to you, no more dying to high level masters players when you're still in Diamond II. They'll be implementing the same previous ranked entry fee based off your rank, starting from Silver the entry fee will increase by 20rp per rank. I.e. 20rp in Silver, 40rp in Gold, 60rp in Plat, etc...

they'll be shifting to a more aggressive, elimination focused style, where up to your sixth kill or elimination they'll be worth their full value, and then after the 6th they will be worth half. Elimination's values will be dependent off your placement, but no scale has been officially announced yet.

There will be several bonuses awarded to a player aswell, first will be consistency bonus "Top 5 Streak bonus" where for every game you come top 5 in a row, you'll gain an extra X amount of rp:

  • 2 Match Streak - +10 RP
  • 3 Match Streak - +20 RP
  • 4 Match Streak - +30 RP
  • 5+ Match Streak - +40 Rp

this is to encourage players to consistently make it to late game, and not to only keep pushing for more and more Eliminations and die 7th. The other bonus will be "Challenger Bonus" where if you kill an enemy of a higher rank, such as a gold killing a plat, you will gain an additional 50% of that Elimination's value.

This was all the highlights from the Apex Legends: Breakout Game Update, the gameplay video should be releasing today (Thursday 8th February at 7pm CET) and the patch notes will be coming on Monday 12th February aswell.