XSET’s Apex Legends squad discuss battle royale esports, Arena Mode and more

July 6, 2021

by Mitch Reames

In May, Respawn Entertainment, the developer of Apex Legends, announced a new permanent mode to the popular battle royale. Arena Mode is a 3v3 matchup with a format much closer to other popular FPS esports. But the core of Apex Legends is still battle royale and the growing esports league, the Apex Legends Global Series (ALGS), involves competition in the main mode. The question is, for the upcoming ALGS Circuit beginning in September, will Arena Mode take over given the similarities to other top esports?

“I don’t see a transition [to Arena Mode] in the near future at least,” said Kenan “Keni” Colakovic, an Apex Legends pro for XSET. “The competitive side of Apex Legends will stick to battle royale. But, if they do properly execute Arena Mode, I feel like it could have a league of its own in the future.”

Battle royale esports are difficult to operate just due to the nature of the genre. In the ALGS North American Championship Finals which took place in early June, teams accrued points for placement in game and amount of kills. Once a team got above 50 total points, they became “Match Point Eligible” and the next game the team won would win them the championship. Then every other team finishes by the points they have at that moment.

“I feel like Apex has done a great job with the scoring system,” Keni said. “The only thing I would change is upping the placement points just a little bit because there are some teams who play on the edge and just hunt for kills to get all their points. Upping placement points would benefit teams that rotate more.”

Since battle royale esports began taking off, a balance between placement points and kills has become the go-to scoring mode. With only one team actually winning each match, some balance has to be found where teams are rewarded for how well they do. When only placement is rewarded, the game moves incredibly slowly. When only kills are rewarded, the game moves too quickly. Somewhere there has to be a balance, but it has been a hard balance to find.

“Rotating teams don’t get as much worth sometimes as the teams that just kill on edge,” said Charles “Clane” Lane, Keni’s teammate on XSET and the player who brought the squad to the org. “The whole point of a BR is to literally be the last team alive, and kills naturally come along with that. Placement points could be a bit higher than they are right now, but it’s pretty equal for every kind of playstyle right now.”

Clane and Keni joined Nerd Street’s podcast Esports Meta to talk about Arena Mode, joining XSET and competing in Nerd Street’s upcoming Summer Championships in August.

XSET’s new Apex Legends team, signed just a few weeks before the ALGS Championships, finished 24th in a group stage where the top 20 moved on to the finals. Only eight points separated XSET from the mark needed to move forward.

Just the sheer number of teams competing at once is unique in battle royales. Most of the top teams at the ALGS are already signed to recognizable orgs, with Cloud9, TSM and Sentinels all finishing in the top 10. The winner was Team Kungarna, an org founded by The Fortnite Guy that focuses on battle royales. Although the top finishers were signed, about half of the teams in the 40-team finals were unsigned. Compared to other top esports, that’s a rare sight. It’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it does prevent teams from building more distinct rivalries with other teams.

“There’s not many rivalries in battle royale because there’s 20 teams competing against each other,” Clane said. “I would love to play Arena Mode in a tournament just for the sole fact of having a matchup like XSET vs. TSM. It’s easy to root for, it’s easy to understand what’s going on for the viewers. So I do think Arena could be a competitive mode, but I still don’t think it will ever overtake battle royale.”

The other big benefit of Arena Mode would be reducing RNG (aka randomness), a big problem for battle royale titles. Still, compared to other battle royales, Apex already does a decent job of putting the best teams on top. When looking at the ALGS Finals, the big orgs are all in the top 10, the unsigned teams are almost all from 20-40.

Although that’s a simplified view, it does show that the teams good enough to be signed by major orgs consistently place in the top of major tournaments. Another indication that Apex operates differently from other battle royale titles was TSM’s dominant run that saw the team win major after major.

“Back in the Pathfinder, Wraith, Watson meta when Apex first came out, TSM won five major championships during that meta,” Clane said. “That’s unheard of in battle royales. That meta made the game feel like it wasn’t a battle royale. It made it feel very competitive. You look at any other battle royale and there’s no single team winning every tournament.”

That may be the most interesting part of the Arena Mode debate. Other battle royales could have actually used a mode like this, especially Fortnite, more so than Apex Legends actually did. The pool of operators in Apex already add another dimension to the teamplay. Despite the inherent RNG in all battle royale titles, the best teams seem to rise up in Apex.

For the immediate future, Apex Legends’ ALGS will likely continue to focus on battle royale. The scene is already growing on its own with the North American finals peaking at around 250,000 viewers. In comparison, Rocket League’s RLCS North American finals held around the same time peaked at about 193,000 viewers. There’s no need to fix a problem that doesn’t exist, so Arena Mode is more likely to be an addition, not a replacement, to the Apex Legends esports scene. Still, it would be fun to see some tournaments in the mode during this upcoming offseason.

Lead image credit: XSET