During Friday’s Apex Legends livestream, Lead Designer Brent McLeod dropped a little nugget of info about the Shadowfall mode coming tomorrow. The same person that created Shadowfall also created the timeshift level in Titanfall 2.
From the livestream:
“It’s actually done by the same guy who did, for all the Titanfall fans, the timeshift level. It’s [Shadowfall] kind of his baby.”
That “guy” is Jake Keating, a Senior Game Designer on Titanfall 2 and Apex Legends.
A fantastic 2018 GDC talk by Respawn’s Christopher Dionne dives into how the team made Titanfall 2’s single-player levels with a technique called “action blocks.” And Keating’s “action block” was the only one that made it directly into the game as a final level.
Keating’s early mock-up of the “Effect and Cause” mission showed the entire team “what a level could be. What the tempo and sense of timing and pacing and how all the different parts of mobility and puzzle-solving and combat – how they could fit together into one space,” according to Dionne.
The entire talk is well worth the watch. Dionne talks specifically about the timeshift level at 18:00 in the video below.
A fantastic Vice article dives even deeper into how the “Effect and Cause” mission came together.
Apex Legends’ Shadowfall trailer
The folks at Respawn just dropped a trailer showing the Shadowfall mode in action. There are a couple of big differences from the way Apex Legends usually plays out. Loot drops instantly from bodies in this mode instead of staying inside a loot box. Also, death isn’t the end. When you die, you join the ‘Shadow Squad.’
Here’s Respawn explaining how it works:
As part of the Shadow Squad, you will lose your ability to use weapons and your legend abilities will be stripped, but in return, you will be given increased movement and jump speed, along with a brutal melee attack. You’ll also have the ability to scale walls and be given unlimited respawns via skydive.
The battle rages until there are only ten living Legends left, who must then join forces and make it to an evac ship while the Shadow Squad attempts to stop them at all costs.
It sounds like a crazy version of the Infection mode we’ve seen in games like Halo.
Shadowfall and the Fight or Fright Collection Event kicks off tomorrow and lasts until November 5.