Respawn overhauls Apex TDM mode in response to players demanding quality-of-life improvements

Season 16, Revelry, has seen the highest player count of all time for Apex Legends, owing much of its success to a focused commitment to the casual player base, with Team Deathmatch finally making its debut after first appearing in Apex Legends Mobile, confirmed to stay as a permanent game mode, taking the place of Arenas.

But despite the positive reception to the classic game mode, Apex’s version of TDM found many criticisms and bugs that plagued the user experience. Respawn quickly took note, and in a tweet one day after season 16’s release, announced changes to the game mode that would fix all of the prominent issues.

Team Deathmatch pits two teams of six legends against each other in past Arenas maps like Party Crasher, Skull Town, and Habitat 4. Players can switch legends and loadouts mid-game like in Control, as they race to 30 kills in a best-of-three format, with teams switching map sides after each half.

Teams who lost round one would often quit early, however, leading to imbalanced teams and additional players subsequently leaving, until lobbies were completely empty. Not only would the game continue without any enemies to fight, but players would have to manually leave the game itself, wasting more of their time. Players abandoning their team currently receive no penalty for leaving TDM, unlike other LTMs like Control and the standard Battle Royale.

With the day two patch announcement, Respawn addresses all of TDM’s critiques and seeks to improve the game mode further with later updates. Games are now shortened to one round of 50 kills, shortening the overall length of the game and discouraging players from leaving early, further reinforced by the addition of abandon penalties, where players are locked out of joining any mode for a period of time, extended with consecutive offenses.

The fourth-anniversary celebration of Apex brings the Nemesis AR, a new collection event, updated classes, and the new Mixtape playlist, where fan-favorite limited-time game modes like Control and Gun Run will now permanently reside. 

Team Deathmatch will stay for three weeks until March 7, before joining the rotating Mixtape lineup of LTMs. The new changes to TDM can be watched in the Twitch Rivals Drop In, set to take place on Friday, Feb. 17 at 5pm CT on the Twitch Rivals official channel.