If you’ve played any Apex Legends since season three, you’re familiar with World’s Edge. And if you’re familiar with World’s Edge, you know all about it’s infamous centralized POI: Fragment East and West, formerly Capitol City before a lava fissure in season four broke the POI into two.
That was the last time either Fragment East or West got a noticeable change, and players have been getting eliminated there ever since. Fragment is the classic hot-drop POI in Apex. A match on World’s Edge will frequently see no fewer than six or seven teams landing there, all anxious to eliminate their enemies and be eliminated just as quickly.
But according to some trustworthy Apex leakers, those hot drops may soon be a thing of the past.
Notable content creator and insider ThordanSmash seems to think that finally, after 11 seasons, Fragment is getting a change to one of its most popular attractions: the streamer building.
The streamer building is the building under construction on the western side of the river of lava that separates Fragment East and West. With four floors, two ziplines that make their way all the way up to the building’s height, and one of the best concentrations of loot, it’s where most people land when making their way to Fragment. That made the building a popular haunt for streamers looking to secure themselves plenty of kills, as well as having fun with the ziplines and the rest of the building’s architecture, which lends itself to several of Apex’s more advanced movement techniques.
The move to change one of Apex’s most popular drop spots might be one to address one of World’s Edge’s biggest problems as a map: too many people die in Fragment early on in the game.
Looking at the other maps that Apex has introduced, none of them have a POI with the same magnetism as Fragment. And how could they? Fragment, and formerly Capitol City, had a ton of loot and was almost dead center on the map. It was clearly the best place to land, and even after the devs quietly nerfed the quality of the loot there a few seasons ago, it still didn’t take away from the POI’s popularity. Where maps like Storm Point, Olympus, Kings Canyon, and Broken Moon all feature a few different POIs that attract the majority of any given lobby, nothing on World’s Edge comes close to the popularity of Fragment.
And that also meant that outside of some of the higher levels of play, World’s Edge frequently felt uninteresting to play for a lot of the player base. Either you hot drop at Fragment and are eliminated, hot drop and survive to play out the rest of a match where only 10 teams or so have the entirety of World’s Edge to themselves, or you land somewhere else and often play games where you don’t see any enemy teams at all for long stretches of time.
While the map is great for its varied landscape and the interesting combat scenarios it throws at players, Fragment has often been cited as a POI that hurts the pacing of World’s Edge. And it seems like Respawn might just be making a change to combat that, if the streamer building’s demise turns out to be true.
Hot dropping certainly isn’t dead with the change, but it does seem to be getting a little bit of a nerf. And with the changes that Respawn is constantly weighing for its maps, like the potential Wattson town takeover on Storm Point that Thordan also mentions, a little nerf might not be a bad thing.
