Say goodbye to Promenade in Season 21’s Apex Legends Broken Moon update

Broken Moon is getting a high contrast makeover this Apex Legends season

Broken Moon's skybox looks way prettier this season / EA

Upheaval is coming to Apex Legends in Season 21, which brings a game-changing legend, impactful meta changes, and the return of Solos. We’ll talk more about those in a separate article. For now, let’s dig into what’s happened on Broken Moon, which has been pelted with cosmic debris, changing the topography and points of interest (POIs) forever. 

The entire map has been hammered by moon rock, with Promenade hit the hardest, leaving a huge crater behind. Initially, the developers at Respawn wanted Promenade to be intimidating and harrowing to drop into and explore. They now feel they went too far, so they’ve scooped it out and replaced it with a new POI – Quarantine Zone. 

Quarantine Zone is focused on fast-paced play, backed up by unique zip rail implementation, self-contained within the POI, to allow movement players to dominate their enemies. The developers say there are no real bottlenecks or power positions, making it a much safer place to rotate through. 

There are now 20 POIs on Broken Moon, which means there’s a much larger loot pool across the map, with mini POI camps filling up much of the previously empty space. 

Along with Promenade, one of the Atmo stations has been completely obliterated. The damage also led to a terraformer malfunction, resulting in less atmosphere, mutated foliage, and altered biomes. 

Visually, the map is much more colorful thanks to the alien plant life springing up all over the map. And the skybox – wow. Gorgeous. 

Areas with weakened structural integrity have since been reinforced or put back together with ferrofluid, where possible. 

When clearing the impact sites, excavation teams also found alien eggs of unknown origin, suggesting this change hints at what’s to come in the future of Broken Moon. There are scientific apparatus dotted around, along with cold storage containers and sterile units, where scientists attempt to understand if the eggs pose a threat to human life. 

As a result of all these changes, the map is much less flat, giving players the chance to use elevation to their advantage or head peek the crest of a hill like you can on King’s Canyon. 

Broken Moon was a fun map at launch thanks to its zip rails, which allowed for fast rotation and less time hunting other teams, but that central area of Promenade has always been a pain point. It acted as a series of nasty chokepoints that were perfect ambush points for gatekeeping teams. It’ll be interesting to see how the match pace changes as a result of the new POI. 

I’m also pretty excited about the zip rails in Quarantine Zone. Throughout the rest of the map, the zip rails act as a network system, allowing fast travel between different POIs. These will be the first contained to a single POI, making them more of a flanking tool. 

Last season’s big changes were a hard act to follow, but Upheaval seems tasty from what I’ve seen so far. The new Legend’s abilities could completely change the game, and all the meta changes make flagging characters much more viable. 

I look forward to diving in when Season 21 of Apex Legends begins on May 6.