Apex Legends players still want an LTM that transports them back to launch day

As Apex Legends rolls along in its fourth year of live service operations after its release on Feb. 4, 2019, a large chunk of its player base remains nostalgic for the early days dominated by an over-tuned Wingman and a Peacekeeper shotgun capable of long range poke damage. However, it isn’t just reminiscing—players want to relive that era through a legacy Apex LTM.

A Reddit post by u/Emotional_Spray4341 gained traction on April 6, 2023 gathering the community’s thoughts on such an LTM, sharing the screenshot of a poll asking the same question by Respawn developer and Apex security team member Conor “Hideouts” Ford. Despite the fact that the Twitter post is almost a year old, it concluded with 31,000 votes and over 90 percent of people in favor of an LTM hosted on the old King’s Canyon with the original stats and abilities given to both the Legends and the weapons sandbox.

As a year passes by with no further news or information on whether this proposed mode could ever become reality in Apex, players are making it clear through their support for the post that they are very much still in favor of seeing it happen one day.

However, some in the comments are more hesitant to believe that such a mode would be as much of a critical success as it sounds on paper. “I want this, but potentially hot take: it won’t be as good as people remember,” one commenter pointed out. “A big part of what made it fun was that everyone sucked at the game, nobody knew what guns to use, and kill grinders weren’t common to come across.”

The consistently rising skill floor in Apex has been a topic of discussion for a few years now, and recent changes to the skill-based matchmaking and ranked play acknowledged that the growing ability of the playerbase forced Respawn into a suite of changes all on its own. Putting those talented players back into a version of Apex with a Wingman, R-99 and Peacekeeper that were drastically overpowered compared to their modern day counterparts could be a recipe for disaster.

“I’d support it coming back, but I would campaign against it ever becoming permanent/semi-permanent,” a reply by u/AmazingSpacePelican offered. “People have rose-tinted glasses for this stuff, so they don’t realise the insane amount of QoL features Respawn has implemented over time, or how apocalyptically bad the balancing was originally.”

Those quality-of-life improvements were mentioned throughout the thread in various forms, with u/Baptized_Bison jokingly asking “is code leaf included?” and u/bigmacjames pleading for the LTM to not become a reality for fear of Wraith and Pathfinder’s previously broken hitboxes making a return, making life extremely difficult for those fighting against the two most-picked characters in the game right now.

With the original poll being over a year old and the overwhelming support for such an LTM mixed in with just as much trepidation, it’s hard to imagine that the cries for a trip down memory lane like this will ever make it to Apex unless Respawn has been keeping it close to their chest. Despite the novelty of a time capsule mode like this, it likely wouldn’t take long for it to overstay its welcome in the face of the far healthier state the game currently finds itself in.