Different games within the same genre do different things and generally shouldn’t be shamed for borrowing and expanding upon each others’ ideas. At the same time, it’s tough not to look at a narrow genre like battle royale and imagine all its games in a constant fight for supremacy. Especially when the makers of Fortnite are now talking about bringing respawns to the game – just like the sudden hit Apex Legends.
In a Reddit AMA held earlier today, as noted by PC Gamer, an Epic rep says that the studio has been “considering” respawning, and has “been exploring it. Want to make sure we give it the time it needs and fully understand its impact on the game as a whole. Look for further updates during Season 8.”
In Apex Legends, you can collect banners from fallen comrades and take them to beacons where your dead teammate can be revived. Fortnite would likely have to do something similar – it’d be tough to balance a battle royale against traditional respawn timers, in any case.
But while respawns are a fundamental part of Apex Legends, they’d be new to Fortnite – and the game’s had trouble with balance-upending new additions in the past, like the Infinity Blade. It could be a very nice fit for some sort of LTM, at the very least.
We’ll apparently find out more sometime after the season 8 release date.
Related: The war between the best battle royale games continues
Apex Legends player count is getting up there faster than Fortnite did, but the Fortnite player numbers remain an astronomical goal to chase. We can continue to hope that a broad array of battle royale options will push every game in the genre to keep getting better.