World’s Edge: A map of ice and fire comes to Apex Legends

Season 3 of Apex Legends is here and along with a whole new Battle Pass and mysterious new champion in Crypto, players have been transported to an entirely new planet and arena to test their skills in.

The new arena follows season three’s theme of catastrophic industrial accidents by being located on some sort of abandoned mining colony. Along with the various new biomes around the map including lava fields, hot springs — complete with geysers that function just like the balloon towers still scattered across the map, abandoned cities with multi-floor towers, rolling fields of purple flowers, and in the north-east quadrant of the map is The Epicenter — the main focal point of which is a giant drilling-machine trapped in an explosion of jagged ice whose cause is currently unknown but has blanketed the surrounding urban sprawl in a blanket of snow.

Did the team mention that there’s also a train?

Respawn has already confirmed that World’s Edge is a bigger map than King’s Canyon, and while sprint sliding, balloon-towers, and the occasional geyser may be a fun way to zip around between neighboring locations, if you really want to travel in style the only way to travel is the 4:15 from Skyhook to Lava City.

The train, much like the supply ship floating around King’s Canyon, is usually a great spot for rare loot if you can get there first, but like the dropship, you also have to make it out of there in one piece. Unlike the supply ship, however, the new train only stops at the predetermined train stations along the route or, if you can make it to the control car, there is an emergency stop button for some unscheduled looting.

Outside of the new areas to explore, including a mysterious vault locked behind a giant gold door and a countdown to sometime next week, the very layout and size of the map will undoubtedly affect the games meta and in some obvious instances, it already has.

World’s Edge, with its long unobstructed sightlines and multistory urban buildings with plenty of space for sniper’s nest’s, is very clearly an arena that favors long-range combat.

Champion-wise, one of the biggest benefactors of the new map and accompanying meta is Bangalore. Alongside her much-awaited damage buff to Rolling Thunder from 20 points to 40, Bangalores passive makes her especially difficult to pin down during sniper battles and her smokescreen allows her team to safely reposition and complete finishers on downed enemies which now refill a player’s shields even if they aren’t equipped with gold body-armor.