Haven't posted in this thread (nor played the game itself) in quite awhile, but wanted to pop in and write out my thoughts on what they've teased for S4 so far.
I'm someone who played Apex from launch and pretty much played it every single day, for usually multiple hours at a time, up until just after Season 3 released.
My friends who played and myself kind of dropped off from the game a few weeks into Season 3. For us, I feel like we mainly fell of from the game due to a couple of factors: overall fatigue, not being super hot on World's Edge and what it did/does to the meta-game and overall encounter/engagement flows, and the tightening of the Skill Based Matchmaking (I feel like some form of SBMM has been in the game since the beginning, but I do think that they really cranked it for S3, and to the game's detriment like most people have moaned about quite a bit).
Not going to lie, them saying that the next weapon being added into the game is another Sniper with some charge-focus, that is most likely another Energy weapon is very disappointing for me. Did there really need to be another Sniper style gun? And not just another Sniper style gun, but one with a focus on charging?
Now there's going to be these: G7, DMR, Triple-Take, Charge Rifle, Sentinel, Havok with Select Fire, Kraber for long distance shootouts. And THREE (four if you factor the Triple Take and Precision Choke) of them will feature charging/winding up defining their play!
Would have much rather saw some other weapon archetype gain a new weapon, any of them really. Or a whole new weapon archetype altogether. Or maybe a new ordnance?
But I'm also biased as I tend to never really snipe as my focus in any FPS/shooting game. Though I do think that Apex's (and Titanfall's) strong suit for combat is mid-to-close range engagements overall, so to see them continually try and nudge the game towards longer distance engagements is not particularly exciting to me personally.
Forge as a character could be cool, we'll obviously have to see what his abilities actually wind up being. But I do find it strange that they are adding in a character that appears to be oriented towards close quarters combat, while also adding another long distance weapon to the sandbox. Seems kind of at odds with one another, philosophically.
It's probably a good thing that they are shortening/tightening the ranked process, and it's good to see Kings Canyon officially coming back in a "standard" way.
The expanded assist window and means to gain assists sounds pretty good, as does making "Master" the division after Diamond, and limiting Apex Predator to the top 500 players on the leaderboard is cool too I think, akin to Halo 5's Onyx and Champion rank breakouts.
I hope the map changes to World's Edge are good, but I still don't feel very favorably towards it as a map for the gameplay of Apex.
Might hop back in with Season 4 after jumping out a month after S3, but we'll see.
