Creating the perfect Apex Legends map is a tricky task simply because you have to cater to casual players and ALGS pros alike. Broken Moon was very polarizing in this regard when it first launched, but a big season 21 map update is trying to strike a more pleasing balance.
That season 21 teaser where Olympus crashed into Broken Moon, creating a giant explosion in the skybox before games? That’s a literal, canon event in the Apex lore, and it has massive implications for the map. First of all, the explosion in the stasis net left the map completely unprotected, resulting in the Broken Moon area being completely sheared off from Cleo. It’s now floating freely between the gravity fields of Cleo and the planet Boreas. The debris and explosions also left tangible changes on the map—for all intents and purposes, Promenade got nuked, and it ain’t coming back.
Promenade has long been a sticking point with Broken Moon. The large POI effectively served as a massive bottleneck and wall in the middle of the map. And with the zip rails contained along its entire length, the place became a nightmare to try to rotate through.
“When we first designed [Promenade], we wanted it to be a harrowing place to drop into and traverse through,” lead level designer Steve Young said in a pre-season 21 press conference. “But after seeing the feedback over time, we realized that we may have made it a little too harrowing in that regard.”
Young went on to explain one of the biggest goals of the new Broken Moon was to make the central POI something interesting—a point players wanted to explore and engage in, instead of dreading and avoiding the third parties that could occur in the old Promenade. With that, Respawn is introducing the new POI Quarantine Zone in Promenade’s place, a massive central POI that at first glance looks much more open than the old Promenade, and should also be a more loot-rich environment for a hot drop. And there should be plenty of loot there as Young also mentioned that the map has overall received a loot upgrade with the new POIs and some of the “connective tissue” mini-POIs that have been added.
But the explosion of the stasis net has changed much more than just Promenade: One of the Atmo Stations also got destroyed, and the map’s terraforming system got knocked out of whack, resulting in all new foliage and biomes around the map even in the places that will still look familiar. The skybox is receiving a big change, and Young even mentioned Breaker’s Wharf was reattached to the map in a completely different place than before. It’s difficult to envision any facet in which Broken Moon hasn’t changed.
Another important element that’s changed? The zip rails, and where they lead.
“There are actually zero zip rails right now, as far as I’m aware of, that take you directly into the middle of the map anymore,” Young said when asked about Broken Moon’s unique transportation system. Young did point out some of the new POIs and structures like Quarantine Zone received new zip rails but the goal for these rails was to be more “self-contained” and open up mini-rotation and fight options for players, not decide on a macro map rotation for them.
And those zip rail changes lead to an obvious question: Was some of this map update geared toward trying to get Broken Moon into an ALGS map rotation?
“What I can say is we definitely took steps to make it more competitively viable,” Young said when asked about the possibility of ALGS, noting the new Broken Moon’s flow was “much more deliberate and readable.” But the ultimate question of whether we see the map in ALGS play will come down to the pros and how they react to the map, as it often has. While Respawn hit a home run with the introduction of Storm Point to ALGS play, we’re now going on almost two years of Storm Point and World’s Edge being the only two ALGS maps. Players and viewers alike are hungry for new places to play.
Broken Moon will get an entirely new lease on life when Apex season 21 drops on May 7. We’ll likely get a better sense of the ALGS conversation when Respawn lets everyone loose on the map and the top pros and streamers have a chance to explore it for themselves.
