Why is Arenas being removed from Apex Legends in season 16?

The next season of Apex Legends, aptly titled Revelry as the game celebrates its fourth anniversary, is bringing widespread changes to its foundations. When it launches on Feb. 14, it brings with it major updates to legend classes, weapons, and the new player experience.

However, not all the updates are additions. Arenas, a second permanent mode introduced to Apex in season nine, is going to be removed when season 16 arrives. Its removal from the directory opens up a free spot beside the core battle royale experience that will be taken up by a new playlist called Mixtape.

Arenas has struggled to find an audience since its inception, but it still took Respawn a year and a half to decide that its lack of engagement was reason enough to sunset it all together. Why they chose now to replace it with a more laid-back mode is something that the team provided some details on in a press event last week.

Why Respawn removed Arenas from Apex Legends in season 16

Respawn believe that Arenas has not been a successful place for players to practice in preparation for battle royale matches, nor does it offer a low-stakes environment for them to try out new weapons or legends.

“It’s not hitting our goal for being a good place of practice,” design director Evan Nikolich explained. “We have the BR as this high stakes, competitive place, and Arenas overlaps a bit too much with that space. We want to bring something that allows players a little more relaxed play.”

“Arenas was supposed to be our ‘smaller slice of BR’ mode,” game mode designer Marty Wong added afterward, breaking down the move toward a rotational arcade playlist. “What ended up being was that it was kind of a sweatier mode that felt high stakes. A lot of players would go into it feeling like they couldn’t make mistakes or couldn’t really experiment and they had to play really hard.”

“We’re hoping that TDM comes in and provides a place for players to die fast and feel comfortable making mistakes,” he continued. “We’re hoping that it gives Apex a lot more accessibility for newer players, so that they can bring their friends in as well as experiment and hopefully bring those skills back into sweaty ranked games.”

When Arenas is sunset on Feb. 14, the game mode directory will first transition to a limited-time TDM playlist for three weeks at the start of the season. Once the limited-time mode comes to an end, the new permanent Mixtape playlist—which features Control, Gun Run and TDM itself—will sit beside battle royale.