Real Apex Legends fans remember Forge. The only Legend who has ever been killed off in the game’s history, Forge was the ultimate bait-and-switch. Dataminers found his abilities in the game’s files, and players got excited by his giant robotic arm and close combat abilities. He represented a marked change from the Legends who had come before, and was well liked in the teasers that developer Respawn started putting out.
Then everything changed. As we watched the premiere of Forge’s latest interview, we were in for a shock. He was murdered on live TV, by a horrifying robot assassin. Forge would never make it to the Apex Games, and millions of adoring fans, both in-universe and out of it, mourned his passing. Revenant took his place, kicking off a killer storyline with Loba that perseveres to this day as one of Apex’s best pieces of interactive fiction.
Can you be called a Legend if you never made it to the games? Ballistic’s son Nathaniel was picked to enter the games before his dad took his place. While I think that we might see more of Nathaniel around 2025, he’s not a Legend, and sadly neither is Forge. That means no official Legend has ever been killed off in Respawn’s battle royale. But that could be about to change.
The revelation comes from Ashley Reed, Respawn’s narrative lead, in a roundtable interview ahead of Apex Legends Season 18: Resurrection. She explains that Kill Code, the single-player levels that made me want a full Apex Legends campaign mode, is an expanding storyline that will last all year, across Seasons 18 and 19. She describes it as a “serialised narrative arc”, but is careful not to call it a miniseries, something that fans have been clamouring for for years. (Reed admits there is “nothing in the plans yet” on that front.) You have to think that an Apex series in the same vein as Arcane would be phenomenal, but Respawn is biding its time.
Kill Code will incorporate cinematic animations and plenty of in-game content, although exactly what that entails is being kept under wraps for the time being. There is “at least one more” Thief’s Bane-esque mission in 2023 and “additional in-game components”, which will crescendo into a dramatic conclusion at the end of the year. The most interesting tidbit, however, was Reed’s comment on the characters involved in the story.
“Relationships will be tested and shattered,” she says, “and maybe not everyone will make it out alive. I mean it this time.”
This is a huge bombshell for the live-service game, with potentially disastrous repercussions. If a character dies in the lore, does that mean they’re removed from the game? What happens to all the skins and cosmetics players have paid their hard-earned money for if they can no longer use that Legend? There are a few options in my eyes.
The first is complete deletion. The character dies in the Kill Code finale, and we can never play as them again. Their portrait in-game is replaced by a gravestone engraved “ggwp”. If you try to play as them, the scene of their murder replays on your screen and you’re kicked from the lobby. It’s safe to say I don’t think this will happen. While live-service games go offline all the time and players lose their cash-bought cosmetics, removing one Legend and all the money players have poured into them would cause too much outcry. Imagine if you’d used your only set of Heirloom Shards on Crypto, only for him to meet a grisly fate. You can never see that weird sword thing again. I guess it serves you right for spending them on Crypto, but that’s besides the point.
The second option is that the character dies in the lore, but continues to be playable in the game. This could be explained or not, and the lore could continue to split away from the game state in numerous ways. However, these cinematics tease new characters and map changes, so it would need to converge again at some point. If this theory becomes reality, I wonder if Apex will lean into the conspiracy that all Legends in the games are simulacra, bodies created specifically for each match while the real Legends watch on from the sidelines or control the single-use bodies from afar. Respawn has never confirmed how every character plays the deathsport day after day, and the focus on Revenant could lead to a simulacrum-based solution to this problem.
Finally, the Legend could return from the dead. This doesn’t necessarily need to be as cheesy as it sounds, as a few Legends could feasibly be replaced in some manner. The most obvious is Revenant, who I think has a high chance of dying in this story. We already know that Hammond and Duardo Silva are trying to replicate Revenant to have a robot assassin of their own. I wonder if Revenant will kill himself to stop the plan, or Loba will relent and destroy his real brain to free him from the torture of reality. His character would be dead, but the corporate killing machine of Hammond and Silva’s doing could replace him in the games – they have a vested interest in the continued success of the sport, after all.
Could Ballistic’s son Nathaniel take on his dad’s mantle after an untimely demise? It’s a bit similar to Valkyrie’s story for my liking, but a distinct possibility that would hopefully draw Ballistic into the story too. However, the protagonists of Kill Code seem to be Loba, Lifeline, Maggie, Valkyrie, and of course Revenant. Bangalore could be dragged in thanks to Loba, Maggie could bring Fuse to the fray, and Octane likely has a part to play with his and Lifeline’s rollercoaster relationship coming into contact with his father’s role in the operation.
These are all candidates for the chopping block in the next couple of seasons, but realistically it could be any Legend’s time to go. The one worry I have is the smile on Ashley Reed’s face as she dropped this bombshell, which makes me wonder if we’re driving headfirst towards Apex’s version of the Red Wedding before 2023 is out.