Apex Legends Season 3 Starts in a Couple Weeks, Here's What's Changing With It

Meltdown, Apex Legends' third season of content, will kick off on October 1 with a proper introduction for Crypto, the battle royale's new playable Legend. It'll also introduce some serious tweaks to ranked play, which should make scoring more granular throughout the mode's tiers and fire up the competition amongst the game's highest-ranked Apex Predators.

Crypto, quite possibly Apex Legends' worst-kept secret, is the star of the latest lore-focused "Stories from the Outlands" video. It's a flashback that takes place place long before Crypto makes his way to Kings Canyon—in it, he's framed for the disappearance of his "forever family" companion Mila after the duo stumble upon a prediction algorithm that could rig the Apex Games.

The organization framing Crypto is the Syndicate, about which not much is known... beyond the important fact that they run the Apex Games. While the origin stories for previous Legends have largely drawn on or added to Titanfall lore, it now looks like Respawn is going to explore a lot more of Apex's particular corner of the studio's shared fictional universe.

A lengthy post on the official Apex Legends blog presents a breakdown of how the battle royale's first ranked series shook out and details the significant changes coming to Series 2. The overarching aspects of Apex's scoring won't be changed: it'll still be divided into six tiers going up from Bronze to Apex Predator, and there still won't be demotion within tiers. Here's how the ranked tiers in Series 1 break down as of September 10:

• 5.1% Bronze
• 40.0% Silver
• 35.7% Gold
• 16.8% Platinum
• 2.1% Diamond
• 0.2% Apex Predator

The post characterizes this distribution as "pretty solid," but close to everything else around the no-demotion tier structure is being tweaked or essentially overhauled. All the Ranked Point (RP) totals doled out in games and used to determine ranks are being multiplied by ten to let Respawn increase the granularity of its system; essentially, 1 RP is becoming 10 RP so that intervals of 5, 15, 25, and so on can be awarded to players. The amount of RP it costs to enter a match have also been multiplied up and adjusted slightly.

Players will also be earning more RP thanks to changes to the way kills and assists are counted. Assists on completed kills will now be added to players' kill count portions of their ranked scores, but only if the kill is earned by a teammate. The combined kill and assist tracking will still max out at 5 kills per match, but RP it rewards will be increased by a multiplier based on the place your team finishes in.

Respawn says Loss Forgiveness for Series 1 worked as intended and won't be changed, but the developer is introducing penalties for people who intentionally leave ranked matches early. For now these won't penalize and subtract RP, but they will impose time-outs on players starting at five minutes and increasing with repeat offenses up to a week.

On top of all this, the fraction of a percent of players who reach the Apex Predator rank will be able to see their worldwide standings within the game's pools of PS4, Xbox One, and PC players. While the cosmetic bonuses being rewarded for first series' ranked players were a way to motivate all players, these new ladders should give Apex's most skilled players another reason not to wipe the arena floor with regular players' faces (like mine) in unranked play.

For more on Apex Legends, keep an eye on USgamer's guide section for all its latest updates.