Everything You Need to Know about Apex Legends Battle Pass (and Patch Notes!)

It feels like it’s been a long wait, but the Apex Legends Season 1 Battle Pass is finally here. Apex Legends kicked off its first season of play today with the release of Season 1: The Wild Frontier Battle Pass. There’s a ton to dig into, including a new character, new items to earn and show off, and a ton of performance fixes. Let’s dive right in! Season 1 will run for 91 days, starting today.

Size: The Season 1 patch is 3.03Gb.

Battle Pass Explained

Season One Battle Pass

The Battle Pass for The Wild Frontier comes in two versions, and both cost Apex Credits to unlock. The cheaper version, simply titled “Battle Pass,” allows you to level up and earn rewards for each level you unlock. It costs 950 Apex Coins, or about $10.

The second version of the pass, called the “Battle Pass Bundle,” is, in essence, the regular Battle pass, except for the fact that it is instantly level 25. The means that when you buy the Battle Pass Bundle, you unlock all of the rewards from level 1 to level 25, “earning” you that sweet loot. The Battle Pass bundle costs 2,800 Apex Coins, or about $27.00.

Now, there’s also a “free” version of the Battle Pass. By simply playing during Season 1, all players can earn a Wild Frontier Legendary Skin, five Apex packs, and 18 themed Stat Trackers even without paying for the pass.

Legend Bonus

This is a neat little feature that almost no one is talking about. Respawn has included bonus XP for the Battle Pass that is tied to each Legend. By playing with different Legends, you can increase your Battle Pass XP gains by 25,000 bonus XP (tied directly to survival time) for each Legend. That's over 225,000 XP extra XP per week just by playing different characters!

Next up, Season 1: The Wild Frontier introduces a new character to Apex Legends: Octane.

New Character: Octane

Have you ever wished you could have Bangalore’s passive whenever you wanted it? Well, with Octane, you can. Octane seems to be a high risk, high reward character. He can close the distance quickly with his tactical ability, Stim, which increases his movement speed by 30% for six seconds. The tradeoff is that, while active, Stim drains health from Octane. Stim has a two-second cooldown.

His passive, Swift Mend, helps players recover from Stim’s health drain by allowing Octane to recover 1 health every two seconds as long as he is not taking damage. Additionally, while under the effects of Stim, Octane is less slowed by abilities that would normally slow him, like both Gibraltar's and Bangalore's Ultimate abilities.

Finally, Octane’s ultimate is a deployable launch pad. Octane and his squad can step on this pad to be launched in their current movement direction. It’s bound to set up some crazy hot drops into fights, especially if Octane pops his Stim before he goes in! Launch Pad has a 90-second cooldown.

Octane costs 12,000 Legends tokens or 750 Apex Coins to unlock.

Unlocks and Rewards

The Battle Pass has 100 levels, and each time you level up your pass you receive a reward. These rewards range from character skins, weapon skins, Apex Coins, borders, character intros, Apex Packs, and pretty much a Season 1 version of anything you can unlock in the game. If you fully level your Battle Pass, you’ll get 1,000 Apex Coins over the course of the 100 levels, meaning that the pass basically pays for itself if you purchase the basic version.

You can check out the full list of available unlocks on the Apex Legends site! It's got a handy layout, too.

Patch Notes

Even will all of the Season 1 and Octane hype, this is still a fully fledged patch for Apex Legends. Respawn has jam-packed this one with a ton of different fixes and features, so we’ll just overview the big changes. You can read the full patch notes here.

Hitboxes

Hitboxes for Caustic, Gibraltar, and Pathfinder have been adjusted to “better align with their shapes.” While we don’t know how this will affect play until we’ve had a chance to fool around with these characters, at least Pathfinder will be playable again!

Character Changes

Caustic:

• Reduced cooldown of Traps 25 -> 30 seconds.
• Increased radius and proximity radius by about 10%.
• Removed a one-second delay on the smoke dealing damage to players.
• Reduced cooldown of Gas Grenade 2:30 -> 2:00 seconds.

Pathfinder:

• Grapple
  • Increased distance 850 -> 900.
• Insider Knowledge
  • Increased the number of beacons in the world 10-> 12.

Bangalore:

• Double Time
  • Reduced move speed bonus to 40% -> 30%.

Gibraltar:

• Defensive Bombardment
  • Fixed a bug where your teammates wouldn't be affected by Shell Shock. This was meant to be the same as Bangalore's ultimate.

Player Reporting

According to the patch notes, Respawn has banned almost 500,000 players for cheating in Apex Legends, and that number is sure to grow not that they have added a report button. That’s right, you can finally report players for cheating from inside the game, thanks to a nifty new report button. You can report players from the spectate screen after you’ve died, or you can even report your own teammates from the Squad screen.

Respawn also mentioned the rash of speed hackers that have been cropping up in King’s Canyon, and they’re working on a fix that should be deployed in the next server update.

Respawn also mentioned that there are even more anti-cheat features that they are working on, but they want to stay tight-lipped on it for now.

Keep it locked on to ESTNN for all of the latest up-to-date news on Apex Legends!

Images VIA: EA and Respawn Entertainment