After the recent U-turn on Apex Legends' Season 7 Battle Pass, Respawn developers boldly took to reddit to answer questions from the community. Among them were insights into the future of Apex and Respawn's culture.

Apex started out as a trio, a squad of three players, and later added the option to play as a duo. Since then, there has been an open question as to whether a four-player squad would be added to the game: ...... And the answer is no.

Jason McCord, Apex's design director, writes We needed to make this decision early in the testing process. The trio is the magic number for us. That's when the legendary composition really shines and the X-Men vs. Avengers fantasy begins to shine. In the early tests of the Quad battle, the combat becomes almost impossible to follow. It is chaotic in a negative way."

McCord enumerated problems that, while solvable, meant that Quads were not part of the game's future." Unless the rest of the game is designed around the trio, this (chaos) would not be a complete deterrent for a limited time mode. The lobby, for example, is designed for three people. Loot distribution is also designed for three players per squad. Even the banners throughout the map do not have room for a fourth person. These are all problems that could be solved with enough technical effort, but we are not pursuing quads at this time because we feel that trios are the sweet spot."

Respawn's community engagement is certainly better than its competitors. While it is all too easy to blame the developer for screwing up the launch of Battle Pass, the fact is that they responded quickly, acknowledged their mistakes, and made specific changes in response to player feedback.

Chad Grenier, game director of Apex Legends, joined the Battle Pass discussion and said, "Respawn always has your best interest in mind, so please assume positive intent!" he concluded his explanation of the mistake. In one of the finest examples of discourse on the Internet, this resulted in Terranical01 describing his words as a "big lie." To his credit, Grenier did not feel the urge to refute it. He instead addressed the accusation that Apex does not provide enough content updates and time-limited modes, pointing out that there are "plenty" of LTMs and that the current format is working:

"We also refuse to reduce the number of people on our team, so perhaps content production will be slower than with a 15-hour workday. To keep up with the demand for content, the team has nearly doubled in size since launch.

The near doubling of the team size for "Apex" is perhaps unsurprising given that EA's ambitions for this title are in the billion dollar category. It's also odd that some people think the game isn't well-supported: Apex is free to play in base, there is a new season approximately every three months since its release, there are constant events of all sizes, it launched with eight characters, and now has 15. That seems like a pretty good deal.