Chad Grenier, Respawn Entertainment’s Game Director working on Apex Legends, has confirmed that private matches will be coming for all players – regardless of platform – soon.
Given Apex Legends’ incredible popularity, it’s somewhat surprising that the battle royale doesn’t have a ubiquitous private match feature. Now over two years old, many players have requested Respawn implement the feature, which would allow anyone to hop into a closed lobby with custom rules and players.
Currently, the closest Apex has to a private match mode is its tournament mode, which allows players to organize private lobbies if given permission and an admin code by Respawn.
Speaking to the BrownGirlGamerCode community, Chad Grenier outlined Respawn’s intentions to add the feature in the near future, although he was not able to provide any dates for the addition.
“As of a couple of weeks ago,” he said, “We made that support [for tournament mode] crossplay as well, so it can be used on console and on PC, or even a mixed lobby using crossplay…
“We have a separate effort that we’re doing to make it go public. I don’t have a timeline, but we’re trying to make that go as quickly as possible, where we offer the private match feature available for anybody who plays Apex.”
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“Again, it’s not as simple as just turning that feature on and making it public,” he continued. “There’s some work in the back end we have to do to make it to scale – to that many people. But we’re doing that work. It’s hard to give dates, but we’re hoping that some time soon we’ll have private matches across all platforms and you can play different games or you can organize your own events without having to ask us for a code and have an official event happening. So yeah, stay tuned.”
The news will be welcomed by many Apex fans, who have been eager for the feature to be added for some time. It will mean players can dictate their own private lobbies, customizing rules and players to suit their needs. As Grenier stated, it will make tournaments far easier to organize as they will no longer require an admin code from Respawn.
Although no dates were given, we wouldn’t expect it to release with Season 9, which is set to drop on May 3. It sounds like it’s still deep in the development stage.