A radical new respawn system is coming to Apex Legends in Season 29. Players will now be able to bring their teammates back into the battle almost immediately through their death box, eliminating the need to search for a nearby Respawn Beacon.
For players who win fights and earn themselves a few moments of respite after a hard-won battle, death box respawns are a new option to bring allies back to the game. Other respawn options aren’t being removed, which means the punishment for going down is even less as Apex Legends nears thirty seasons.
How will Death Box Respawns work?
The addition of respawning a teammate through their death box is a little strange at first, as most players’ first question is something along the lines of “what do I need to do” or “what does it cost”. To answer simply, it cost nothing but time to bring a teammate back.
To respawn your ally, players will need to access the death box wherever it may lay and hold down the respawn button for seven seconds, just like they would at a traditional Respawn Beacon.
All other respawn options will also be available, so players who are forced to flee a fight after their team goes down will still have the option to replicate their banners and call down a respawn beacon.
To prevent making revives and respawns too easy, the cooldown on the death box respawn will increase every time a teammate goes down, making . According to the developers, this change is meant to reward teams who hold ground and win fights, as they stated, “adding Deathbox Respawns gets the whole squad back into the game and the action as fast as possible when you have control of the battleground.”
The Evolution of Respawning
Bringing back your teammates has gotten easier and easier over the years. In the early days of Apex, someone on your team getting finished off during a fight meant returning to their death box to grab their respawn banner – hoping no enemies were camping it – then trekking to the nearest respawn beacon to bring them back sans weapons, backpack, or shields.
Mobile respawn beacons weren’t added to the game until during Loba’s season in July 2020, which meant there were far more limited opportunities to come back in the first few years of the game.
Season 19, which introduced Conduit, changed how respawns worked again, giving players the weapons they died with (stripped of all attachments), their armor level, and a small amount of ammo for each gun. Then later in Season 23, the ability to craft banners was added to the replicator, making it no longer necessary to return to a teammates death box to collect their banner.
Now, respawning a teammate has seemingly never been easier, which might have a few pros and cons. Obviously bringing back your own teammates after a battle is a huge plus, but it also takes away the punishment of going down during a fight either due to a bad push or simply a difference of skill between players.
The stakes that come with a full send – think of your random Octane teammate running up to a squad with nothing but an R-99 and a dream – have become even less, making it far more likely that players with this strategy will play even more recklessly, to the detriment of their team overall.
Given the popularity of Mixtape, the game mode that allows players to respawn after only a few seconds, this addition to respawning makes sense in the main battle royale modes. Players don’t want to watch their teammates play as they wait to be respawned, but they also want to get into high-energy gun fights. Faster respawns and more second chances will give players more game time, and hopefully, a better overall experience.
