Apex Legends Is Going to Get Much-Needed Improvements to its Training Mode

Since it launched earlier this year, Apex Legends has gotten three new characters, a new map, some new weapons, and dozens of item changes and additions. Sometime during Apex's third season of content, Respawn Entertainment will roll out an improved version of Apex's training mode to let players really experiment with the battle royale's various characters and items-y'know, without 19 other squads trying to murder you.

Respawn developers showed off the improved mode a few minutes into the first Apex Devstream last week. The mode will be renamed to "Firing Range" instead of "Training Grounds," though the small map you load into appears to be largely the same. You'll be able to bring an entire squad into Firing Range, swap characters on the fly to experiment with different abilities, and equip any valid combination of Apex's items, weapons, and hop-ups from the collections of loot placed around the map.

Currently, Apex's training mode only lets users play alone as Lifeline, walks them through the basics of Apex's mechanics, and lets players use unadorned weapons on a target range. Now that Firing Range will include hop-ups and additional humanoid dummy targets, players will be able to hone in their feel for certain combinations of loot.

That's a great quality-of-life improvement considering that many of the swings in Apex's meta so far have revolved around certain items and hop-ups. So far, the only way to adjust to these changes has been to hope you find the hop-up in a real match and get a shot at using it. At the start of Season 2, for example, it was surprising to see players stick with the Alternator SMG. By the season's end the gun was so dominant when equipped with the Disruptor Rounds that Respawn retired the hop-up from the game—while introducing two new ones—at the start of Season 3.

Respawn has only said that Firing Range will be added sometime during Season 3. The third week of the season is just about to begin on October 15, alongside the limited time Halloween-themed Fight or Fright collection event.

Thanks, Rock Paper Shotgun.