Opinion: Apex Legends is Slowly Killing Treasure Pack Content

What originally started as an exciting and new way to tell stories in Apex Legends, the Treasure Packs are now little more than a participation reward for just logging in.

Author:
Robbie Landis
Publish date:
May 25, 2023 2:16 PM EDT

Apex Legends Treasure Chest Stories are a Ghost of the Past

Introduced in Apex Legends Season 5, Season Quests and Treasure Packs rewarded players with a storyline centered around single-player or co-op missions.
The storyline missions never returned, but the stories evolved into comic panels that followed a single thread for the entire season.
The Treasure Chest rewards still remain, but the storylines went from comic panels, to text-only and in Season 17 are nothing more than four recycled trailer screenshots.

Every online game struggles with content cycles and finding new ways to keep players engaged. However, few developers get it right the first time and then slowly drop the ball over the course of several seasons. With Apex Legends, the Season Quests introduced in Season 5: Fortune’s Favor have slowly dwindled down to nothing more than daily log-in rewards.

What are Treasure Packs

When Loba was released in Season 5 of Apex Legends, she came with a brand new content system called Season Quests. Whenever a player opened a supply bin, there was a good chance a treasure chest would pop out. Treasure chests are mythic rarity items you can pick up once per day.

They were tied to a season-long reward tracker that would get you one reward each day you picked up a treasure chest. These rewards consisted of reskinned weapon charms, battle pass experience, crafting materials, apex packs and most notably, story events and missions.

A lot has changed about the treasure packs since then, but the one constant that remains is that each day you log in and play, grabbing a treasure pack gets you something. If you manage to log enough and collect all of them (usually between 30-45) during the season, you get an Epic Weapon skin reward at the end of it.

Stories and Solo Missions

What made this system so much fun at the start is that Apex Legends used it to tell the story between Loba and Revenant. Loba joined the Apex Games to find the source of Revenant’s eternal simulacrum life. Through these stories, you got to play out events where you had to fight off evil spawns of Revenant’s trying to protect what she sought.

It was a nice break from the grind of ranked or trios and a fascinating way to tell the story of Apex Legends without some external comic book page, trailer or in-game voice lines. But, adding in all new missions and events was likely a strain on Respawn Resources.

Stories Turned to Comics

Sadly for the players, the events from the Season Quest didn’t last long at all. In Season 6 the text-based story that was included with Loba’s event was replaced by comic panels. Getting the upgrade from text-only to comic was a nice change of quality, but it also led to less story overall.

The text-only stories gave a lot more context because you were getting more insight into the characters with more back and forth. The comics on the other hand, had to jump around in the story and only give about a page’s worth of context and story each time you unlocked it.

Season 6's Treasure Pack Comic Reward in Apex Legends.
Screenshot Apex Legends\Respawn Entertainment.

This continued for four seasons (Season 6 through 10) before they shifted back to text-only stories in Season 11. But it wasn’t the last downgrade in quality or quantity that the players would see with these Season Quests.

Season 11, the introduction of Ash, had seven chapters in the text-only story. It fluctuated between seven or eight for the next few seasons, but in Season 15 there were only four of them. In Season 16, there were only three and there was no clear focus. Each story was about a different Legend that didn’t really go anywhere.

Worthless Treasure Packs

In Season 17, with the addition of Ballistic, the Season Quests are a pale reflection of what they once were. The Treasure Packs and their rewards still remain, now nothing more than a glorified participation log-in tracker.

The stories? Four screenshots from the Ballistic release trailer with a brief summary of what brought him to the games. No more text-only story that can be unlocked over the course of the season.

It's a real pity too, because Apex Legends is one of the few online competitive games with a rich cast of characters, an interesting world and a great sense of storytelling using all of it. That is when they’re not constantly slashing down the quality.