Apex Legends Adds Breachable Windows In Season 28, And Gives Fuse A Rocket Jump

Apex Legends Season 28 is also the start of the battle royale’s Year 7, and the Respawn team is keeping to tradition by implementing a substantial gameplay change for the game’s birthday. Season 28, titled Breach, introduces breakable windows and skylights to Apex Legends called Hardlight Meshes. These surfaces can be breached by squads trying to find additional ways into a building, or reinforced by players bunkering inside who are trying to hold a point-of-interest. These new mechanics sound like some you might find in Rainbow Six Siege (or Highguard, the recently released raid shooter from former Apex Legends developers).

This isn’t a small change, either. Hardlight Meshes will be added to all of the maps rotating into the battle royale playlists this season (World’s Edge, Broken Moon, and E-District). Save for Olympus, these three maps have the most urban environments of all of Apex Legends’ maps. That means there are plenty of buildings that have been remade by the sole conceit that they now have multiple breach points, making them significantly harder to defend.

“As with all new additions to Apex, community feedback will certainly drive the conversation and inform our future updates and tuning,” senior game designer Connor Monahan told me. “Playtesting internally, the places where we feel Hardlight [has] the most [impact] fall into two big categories. The first category is buildings previously very difficult to assault that now have narrow weaknesses you can exploit to break in. Examples that come to mind are some Lunar buildings–the tube-shaped structures–on [Broken] Moon, four-story buildings and Powerbank on E-District, and Lava Siphon on World’s Edge. There are now new choke points and entries that make pressuring teams bunkered inside much more viable.”

And conversely, there are also plenty of buildings that have had former weak points shored up by a Hardlight Mesh. “The other category of impact is places that were previously dangerous to hold that have been made safer with Hardlight,” Monahan continued. “Examples of this would be the E-District’s buses and World’s Edge’s Crawlers. Additionally, there are a few buildings in Skyhook and Fragment on World’s Edge that have seen old openings closed by Hardlight. Our goal is that, while Hardlight should change how you play around buildings, it should not make buildings less safe across the board.”

Hardlight creates new considerations on the battlefield.

Hardlight Meshes won’t be everywhere in the new season, but it sounds like they will be in quite a few places. “We’re not just going to throw it in everywhere,” Monahan said. “I would say, on E-District, most routes [near points of interest], you’re going to see a lot of Hardlight. On Broken Moon, I would say maybe it’s half of the buildings you interact with will have Hardlight, and World’s Edge will be a little bit less than that.”

I was most excited to learn that Hardlight Meshes are creating the possibility to enter a building from the roof or through the floor, but unfortunately, it sounds like these horizontal meshes are far less populous across the various maps than the vertical windows.

“[Horizontal meshes] are limited because they can create awkward situations at times, where if there’s a player above you and they can break that out, and it’s too far away for you to either fight back or, in the case of a Controller Legend–all of whom have the ability to rebuild or reinforce [Hardlight Meshes]–it’s too far away for them to reach,” Monahan said. “So we’ve tried to keep it to areas where those hatches are relatively close to the ground of the room that they would be entering, so it’s a little bit more even [and balanced].”

Reinforcing Hardlight changes its color from blue to purple.

When a Controller Legend interacts with a Hardlight Mesh, they can both rebuild any damage that’s been done to it, and reinforce it (when reinforced, a Hardlight Mesh changes color from blue to purple). While not a direct buff to the Controller Legends–Catalyst, Caustic, Rampart, and Wattson–this certainly feels like an indirect one, given how substantially these four can reinforce these new exploitable points on the map. On its own, a Hardlight Mesh has 200 hit points, but when it’s been reinforced by a Controller Legend, that number goes up to 1,250 hit points. That’s a lot–for comparison, each player has 100 hit points and has a body shield that adds anywhere between 50 and 125, depending on its level. So while breaking a normal mesh requires as many resources as knocking out a single opponent at the start of a match, a reinforced mesh is closer to taking out four or five enemies at the end of a match. It might as well be a wall you cannot get through at that point–the team behind the mesh is going to hear you coming. And reinforcement is easy. All a Controller Legend has to do is go up to the mesh and hold the button prompt that pops up for a few seconds.

While all types of damage work against Hardlight Meshes, certain weapons and Legend abilities do more. Melee attacks, shotguns and snipers, grenades, and Legend abilities that are considered explosive (like Fuse’s Knuckle Cluster) or EMP-like (like Crypto’s Drone EMP) do critical damage against Hardlight Meshes. A lot of these abilities are found in the toolkits for Assault and Recon Legends, making these characters the ideal pick for breaching Hardlight Meshes. In addition, Hardlight Meshes seem to also act as soft counters for Skirmisher Legends–all of whom are among the most popular picks in Apex Legends, given their all-around usefulness. Ash’s Phase Breach and Wraith’s Into the Void can’t pass through them, for example.

Fuse gets an explosive new upgrade that allows him to propel himself skyward with his tactical ability.

In terms of true buffs, Season 28 is making big improvements to Bloodhound, Fuse, and Catalyst. Of the three, Fuse sees the largest adjustment, with changes to his available upgrades that make him more capable of storming an enemy position or clearing enemies out of an entrenched spot. My favorite change is the Knuckle Jumper upgrade. The Apex Legends team looked to games like Team Fortress 2 for inspiration for the upgrade, which acts similarly to a rocket jump. With it equipped, Fuse can shoot his Knuckle Cluster ability down at the ground and use the explosives to propel himself skyward.

Less exciting but still powerful, Fuse’s ultimate ability, The Motherlode, has been reworked to better behave as an artillery strike that hammers at enemies, not a trap to keep foes pinned down. And Fuse’s new Reignited upgrade will let him use it more often, while the Pyro Techniques upgrade drops fire from The Motherlode’s explosives to deal even more damage.

Bloodhound gets a buff that sees them return to when they were at their most terrifying in Season 4.

Bloodhound and Catalyst’s buffs are less dramatic, but still impactful. The major change to Catalyst is the adjustment to her ultimate ability, Dark Veil, which can now be deployed horizontally. In my mind, this raises Catalyst from an okay defender to one of the best, as Dark Veil can now be better used to cut off pathways your squad is protecting. I’ll have to play as her a few times to see for sure, but that’s a great change to the Controller Legend. Bloodhound, meanwhile, is reverting to the terrifying buff they got back in Season 4–better tracking with their passive and tactical abilities, and their ultimate ability, Beast of the Hunt, once again extends with every enemy player knocked. So as long as you keep finding prey, you can keep the hunt going. It’s good to see the best (and most terrifying) version of Bloodhound return to the game.

“And this is just the start with Bloodhound,” senior technical designer Devin Weise said. “We have more we’re planning to share later in the year, and these early changes will help us lay the groundwork while we collect valuable feedback along the way.”

All of this and more is coming to Apex Legends with Season 28, which kicks off February 10 at 10 AM PT / 1 PM ET. The battle royale game is available on Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Switch, and PC, though the Switch version of Apex Legends won’t be available that much longer. All versions of the game support cross-play and cross-progression.

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