Apex Legends is one of the best and most skillful battle royale games out there. Period. The game has been out for more than 4 years and now includes 20+ legends and a ton of additional content. However, that doesn’t mean Apex Legends is a perfect game and has seen a fair share of bugs, audio issues, and other complaints from the community. So, when Counter-Strike 2 was released earlier this year based on the new Source 2 engine, the community began to question if Apex Legends would ever get such an upgrade.
Well, I recently got a chance to playtest Apex Legends Season 19 and decided to pose this very question to the developers. Well, the short answer is NO. Apex Legends won’t get a Source 2 engine upgrade.
Now, it’s but natural for you to ask, why? It’s quite simple actually. Apex Legends is based on the Source engine, yes, but Respawn forked the Source engine a LONG time ago to suit their development needs. It was even before the original Titanfall game was released.
They have “modified the engine heavily since,” Evan Nikolich, Design Director at Respawn (Apex Legends), told Beebom over e-mail. He added that “the version of Source that was used for Portal 2 was not built with the intention to support a Battle Royale with large open spaces!”
In response to Beebom’s query about future plans and whether a Source 2 engine upgrade for Apex Legends is on the cards, Nikolich said, “We have changed the engine technology in so many ways and will continue to grow the engine to serve the needs of Apex. No plans to integrate Source 2 at this time.”
This is not the first time we have heard about Respawn’s decision to stick with their heavily modified Source engine for their beloved BR game. Previously, in a tweet, Respawn’s tech director, Michael Kalas said that their engine will “never be replaced in the Apex/ Titanfall universe.”
So, unfortunately, for fans who were expecting the launch of Apex Legends 2 sometime in the future, that will likely not be the case. The statement, however, tells us one thing. The developer team at Respawn is constantly evolving the engine to enable new features, like the recently launched Cross Progression. So, we can expect the team to continue making advancements to their engine to fix issues with the audio, latency, and more.
For now, don’t forget to hop into the newest Season 19 update of Apex Legends. Try out the cool new shield healer Conduit and the map changes on Storm Point. There’s a cute surprise waiting for you in Wattson’s Town Takeover.
