Respawn Entertainment has said it intends for Apex Legends to be a live-service game, and that means we’ll see changes and events pop up in the future. What exactly those are isn’t quite clear yet-the game’s first season, and the new content Respawn has teased with it, doesn’t come until March-but players are just getting their first taste of long-term Apex Legends today, along with a new update that makes a few fixes.
In a new trailer, Respawn showed off the first new gun it’s adding to Apex Legends since the game’s launch earlier this month. The weapon is the Havoc energy rifle, which looks to be a fully automatic assault rifle that handles in a similar way to current weapons like the R-301 Carbine or the Devotion light machine gun. The Havoc is live in the game now-check it out in action in the trailer below.
The most interesting thing about the Havoc as seen in the trailer is that it’s different from the rest of the guns in Apex Legends. It accepts two kinds of «hop-up» attachments; these are rarer items you can add to certain guns that change the way they perform, but usually guns only support one kind of hop-up. For the Devotion LMG, for instance, you can add the Turbocharger hop-up, which speeds up the charge time when the gun begins to fire. The Prowler submachine gun can take the Select Fire hop-up, which can switch the gun from its default burst-fire mode to a fully automatic mode that makes it even more deadly.
The trailer shows that the Havoc can handle either the Turbocharger hop-up or the Select Fire hop-up, and each has a different effect on the gun. The Turbocharger speeds up the rate at which the gun hits its top speed in fully automatic mode-like the Devotion, the Havoc seems to have a short charge time before it gets up to its full energy bullet-spewing potential. With the Turbocharger, the gun looks pretty effective at short and medium ranges.
The Select Fire hop-up allows you to switch the Havoc to a single-fire mode, which fires one charging shot. In the trailer, Select Fire makes the gun effective at longer ranges and, from the looks of things, can turn the Havoc into a sniper or scout rifle.
That’s a whole lot of versatility in one gun, and more than we’ve seen so far in Apex Legends. The Havoc also suggests that future additions to the Apex armory could offer even more customization depending on the attachments and loot you find in the game once you drop into a match. That could make the potential changes coming with Apex Legends’ first season pretty powerful, but we’ll have to wait until March to find out for sure.
