Apex Legends: The Road Ahead

With Apex Legends’ Anniversary in full-swing, it feels like an excellent opportunity to give you all a lay of the land for what the dev team is cooking up for the year ahead. We want to tell you all about the team’s design philosophy, the goals we’re setting for ourselves and, most excitingly, what content you have to look forward to.

As you read on, please know: we are going to aim to be as thorough as possible, but we will be treating our roadmap like a living plan and we’ll have more surprises to share throughout the year. As an important disclaimer, game development timelines may shift throughout the year. When looking at “The Road Ahead” infographic, note that “Locked” content carries the most concrete timeline, “In Progress” denotes that the features are being actively worked on, and “Planned” content is in preproduction, with work to start soon. If we make changes to the projected timeline, we’ll do our best to communicate what’s changed and why.

Let’s dive right in with a bit of an overview about how we want to push Apex Legends in 2026. First and most important, we are pushing forward with our Community-Focused development process. This isn’t new for our team as we continue to ensure that we’re taking player feedback into consideration with every decision. This means using community sentiment, data driven processes, and years of Apex game design experience to balance our decision making processes.

Another key component this year is a continued commitment to transparent and forthcoming communications. We’ll maintain and strive to strengthen an open dialogue with the broader community, proactively sharing what’s changing and why, so you’re always in the loop and part of what we’re making. For the latest in updates and dev insights, check out the newly formed ApexLiveComms X and Threads accounts. 

Our goal for 2026 is simple: continue to evolve Apex Legends, the best, most competitive Battle Royale out there. Competition for all that’s fast, fair, and always evolving with you.

We are continuing our focus on competition and ensuring it has depth for mastery and, at the same time, remain inviting for everyone to join in. It doesn’t matter if you’re a day-one grinder or just getting started… If you want to be the best, Apex Legends is going to be the place to prove it.

With that in mind, we’re excited to share our content roadmap to give you a look at what’s coming in 2026 and beyond. We'll keep updating this all year long.

ALWAYS ON UPDATES

Throughout 2026 and beyond, our team will be focused on implementing quality of life improvements, Legend balance changes, and tweaks to our audio systems to improve the overall, day-to-day player experience. This means, you’ll consistently feel the impact of our team’s quick work in frequent tweaks, adjustments, and updates.

We will also continue our commitment to competitive integrity, dedicated to maintaining and raising the bar on our anti-cheat, matchmaking and server performance.

LEGENDS

Legends are the lifeblood of Apex Legends (it’s right there in the game’s title) so we are introducing TWO new Legends - a Skirmisher Legend in Season 29 and another in Season 32. Both new Legends are designed to shake up how you approach building your squad by providing new ways to take on fights together. 

We will also continue to evolve our existing roster with Legend Reworks planned for Seasons 30 and 31. Currently planned in Season 32, along with the new Legend, we will be updating team comp by overhauling the Legend Class system.

WILDCARD

Wildcard was a groundbreaking addition to Apex Legends in 2025, creating an often-chaotic, heartpumping experience, and allowing for frequent experimentation (looking at you, hoverboards). In 2026 we are committing to events in Wildcard every season, with Season 30 and beyond boasting two Wildcard events each, one per split. Keep an eye on the near horizon as we’ll be featuring a pair of special events (we can’t say more now, but holy heck are we pumped for these!)

MAPS

In the first half of the year, we will be working on POI updates, balancing cover placement, and rotational flow focused on improving how they feel to play at all levels of competition. Later in the year, you can expect a competitive update for World’s Edge and a major map update that is sure to shake things up, and bring a little dose of nostalgia to our seasoned players.

LOOT

In Season 28 we shifted the loot pool to make finding desirable items in-match easier by removing Backpacks and Knockdown Shields and tying them into your base kit. Currently slated to land in Season 30, we are overhauling the in-match looting experience. We’re taking aim at making power progression more impactful and streamlined in every single match you play. Furthermore, we will be introducing a new way to wield an existing fan favourite weapon in Season 31!

GAME INTEGRITY

We are shooting for best-in-class online integrity, continuing to crack down on cheaters and improve how we keep bad actors out of the Apex Games. We know we have our work cut out for us, but we’re dedicated to the task. 

RAPID RESPONSE TIMES

Rapid responses and game changes from the dev team will be a key part of our playbook as we continue to pay close attention to your moment-to-moment experiences, feedback, and data. Quality of Life updates will continue to roll in during every season. From bug fixes to meta adjustments, you won’t need to wait for the next major update for what matters the most. 

While looking ahead to all that’s projected for 2026 and beyond, we wanted to take a moment to thank you and look at the most exciting things you helped us shape in 2025. 

In 2025, we:

• added all-new content and meta changes all year long

• released our newest Legend, Sparrow

• launched Wildcard

• revamped Olympus and E-District maps

• made major changes across our weapons and Legends rosters

• migrated the game to new servers for more stability and responsive online play

• meaningfully added to our Audio systems, allowing for better threat detection and fairer games with less audio clutter

Also in 2025, we took some big swings at tuning matchmaking and fighting cheaters. We know fighting cheating is a never-ending battle and even a small number of bad actors can impact match quality. These improvements are signals we’re heading in the right direction to keep more cheaters out of the game overall, and that we’re catching more of them earlier than before. We know there's more to do in this area in 2026, so expect ongoing updates. 

Let’s take a quick look at some highlights that capture the hard work of the Anti-Cheat team:

• ~50,000 cheat preventions per day

  • Our team strengthened EAC client-integrity checks to detect manipulated clients before cheaters enter matches

  • As a result, players made fewer reports and encountered fewer cheaters as we stopped them earlier in the funnel

• >86,600,000 RP removed from cheaters in 2025

  • Resulting in honest players climbing higher on the leaderboards

• Shipped gameplay driven cheat detection models

  • Models are used to identify anomalous gameplay patterns without relying on client signatures

  • Bot and Teaming detection fully automated and moved into production pipelines

  • Aimbot detection models still in validation/testing stage

The following are year-over-year comparisons from 2024 to 2025.

• Ranked match infection rate on PC is down ~33% 

• Our new Teaming detection model resulted in a 300% increase in bans for Teaming

• Bot bans are down 38%, implying there are fewer active bot accounts in the Apex games

• Reports Per User (RPU) is down for Teaming and Botting, 62% and 58% respectively, meaning players are encountering these issues less than a year ago (Data is aggregated across PC and Console)

• Overall RPU's are down 22% (Also, aggregated across PC and Console)

2025 was an incredibly exciting time for Apex Legends and we are delighted to carry that momentum into 2026. Thank you to everyone who has been along for the ride; whether you joined us in 2025, or you’ve been with us from the beginning (or somewhere in between), you are the reason we continue to strive to make Apex Legends the best, most competitive Battle Royale out there. We are thrilled for you all to experience what we have been working on and we’ll see you on the Dropship!