Trivia / Apex Legends

• Acting for Two: JB Blanc reprise his role as Blisk and also voices Caustic.
• Actor-Inspired Element: According to this interview, multiple transgender people were consulted in order to make Catalyst the best representation that Respawn could offer. Naturally, this included Catalyst's voice actor, Meli Grant.
• The Cameo: The official twitter account of the game posted a set of short videos in the lead-up to Season 6, teasing the arrival of the new Legend, Rampart. The videos were all messages left by Rampart's customers on her voice mail - one of them being Bangalore and another being Frances, the woman who attacks Rampart in "The Endorsement". The other three are played by Niecy Nash, Jordan Fisher, and Danny Trejo.
• Colbert Bump: The insane popularity of the game during its February 2019 launch week actively contributed to Titanfall 2 seeing a surge of interest and a re-examination after its initial 2016 release ran into the twin buzz-saws of Battlefield 1 and Call Of Duty Infinite Warfare and became an Acclaimed Flop.
• Content Leak: Leaks for upcoming weapons and Legends appear sporadically. One of the more infamous ones is Newcastle's leak, having the same abilities in the leak as he would have by release, and the well-polished state he was in — complete with a model and Emotes — pointing strongly towards a Season 13 release.
• Defictionalization: Mirage’s Pork Chops were addressed in an episode by YouTube channel Binging with Babish. The amount of cloves used in the initial recipe made the pork chops gross, and even the developers’s new attempt at the recipe made Babish realize he could do better. Using the base idea of the pork chop recipe, Babish created his own version which he went on to declare as one of the tastiest pork chops he had ever eaten.
• Development Gag: The Triple Take is a reference to the fact that the Double Take sniper rifle from Titanfall 2 actually fires a third invisible bullet.
• Diagnosis of God: Former writer Tom Casiello confirmed that Wattson is autistic.
• Dueling Games:
  • As to be expected, it became a competitor to Fortnite's Battle Royale mode as both are free-to-play, and among the more polished Battle Royale Games available.
  • Also with Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 's Blackout gamemode, as both emphasize fast-paced realistic combat with more polish than other Battle Royale games. More recently, Call of Duty: Warzone has replaced Blackout as a direct competitor, mainly due to being free-to-play and borrowing many mechanics from Apex Legends. Incidentally, Respawn Entertainment was formed by members of Infinity Ward, the studio responsible for Call of Duty.
• Enforced Method Acting: One of the banner card animations for Catalyst involves her leaning against a ferrofluid pillar, which breaks mid-lean to her surprise. That's her mocap actor's genuine reaction: animator Moy Parra asked her to lean against a crash pad to capture the motions, then pulled it away without warning.
• Fandom Nod: Octane's backstory of losing his legs as a result of Explosion Propulsion is derived from a Titanfall 2 player making the Gauntlet^note a speedrunning obstacle course found in the Single-Player tutorial run in twelve seconds via Grenade Jumping.
• Follow the Leader:
  • An archetypal example, as it emulates both Battle Royale games, such as Fortnite and Player Unknowns Battlegrounds, and Hero Shooters, like Overwatch and Paladins. Ironically, that Apex Legends follows in the footsteps of two "hot trending" genres makes it more unique compared to standard examples of either.
  • In turn, many battle royale games like PUBG Mobile, Fortnite, Call of Duty: Mobile and Call of Duty: Warzone implemented respawn mechanics and ping systems of their own after Apex's example, with the latter being taken for even non-battle royale FPS games such as Overwatch 2 and Rainbow Six Siege.
• Meaningful Release Date: Ash's gameplay trailer was released on October 28th 2021, the fifth anniversary of Titanfall 2.
• Meme Acknowledgement:
  • The devs are aware that the Mozambique is a bad gun. This is evident in their 50 million players celebratory video, which includes the statistic "1(?) Mozambique kill". Furthermore, the Legendary Hunt patch added a unique animation that sees players hurling it to the ground in disgust when swapping it out for a different weapon.
  • The Legacy Launch Trailer shows off Valkyrie quoting a memetic line said by her father Viper in Titanfall 2:
    Valkyrie: I'm in the pipe, five by five.
• Official Fan-Submitted Content:
  • The Apex Legends official Twitter account features canon tie-in comics created by fans. In-game seasonal comics are often complemented by a Twitter story release showing what other characters are up to.
  • Multiple seasons have featured community-made items, primarily in Twitch item drops earned by watching certain streamers for long enough.
  • In the game itself, the prologue to The Legacy Antigen was done by a fan, and loading screens unlocked by watching Apex streamers are fanmade as well.
  • The 3rd Anniversary event features a variety of loading screen art and sprays designed by fans from the game's community. Notably, community artists hunnypuzzle, lilakeyLK, Cryophase, and akka_0510 made items derived from ideas by Let's Players iiTzTimmy, Lululuvely, The Gaming Merchant, and ShibuyaHal respectively.
• Prop Recycling: The game reuses a lot of assets from Titanfall 2, most of which make sense by being a Spin-Off set in the same universe.
  • Most of the weapons' basic designs and functionalty are recycled from Titanfall 2:
    • Nearly all of the Pilot weapons have returned in Apex or have obvious successors (like the R-201 becoming the R-301). The only weapons that are yet to be usable as of Season 14 are the Grenadier weapons (the EPG has made a cameo appearance in the "Attention to Detail" Wingman reactive skin preview), and the Smart Pistol (which cameos in Stories from the Outlands: Gridiron).
    • The Arc Star is a fancy Arc Grenade. They don't quite reuse the Firestar/Gravity Star's visuals, though.
    • Thermite Grenades use the Scorch Titan's Thermite Wall ability. This is more obvious in earlier versions of the grenade, which created a hazy orange wall visual that looked more or less identical to the Thermite Wall effect.
  • Many Legends' abilities are derived from Tactical Abilities or similar, down to the visual effects:
    • Scanning abilities like Bloodhound's Eye of the Allfather and Seer's Focus of Attention use similar highlighting abilities to Pulse Blade.
    • Caustic's Nox Gas Traps, and the gas cloud they create, are visually very similar to the Scorch Titan's Incendiary Traps. Also, his ultimate ability bears a striking resemblance to the Electric Smoke Grenade.
    • Mirage's Psyche Out is Holo Pilot with some extra animations where your hologram fakes environmental interactions. In-lore, it's directly related to the same technology. He also use Cloak when incapacitated or using his ultimate.
    • Wraith's Into the Void is mostly the same as Phase Shift (including black-and-white negative vision), except she's still partially visible while using it. It's implied they're connected somehow in-story, as Wraith Escaped from the Lab run by ARES Division, whose experiments created the version of the ability used in 2's campaign.
    • Pathfinder's Grappling Hook is pretty much the same as Grapple, albeit a bit less hyper-mobile.
    • Stim returns used by Octane, including the same sound effect and robot legs.
    • Gibraltar's Dome of Protection strongly resembles the Dome Shield kit used by Titans when they drop. The Gun Shield attached to his model that blocks bullets before breaking is also similar to the Legion Titan's Gun Shield.
    • The sparkling firecracker Recursive Ammo of Fuse's Cluster Grenade are very reminiscent of the Northstar Titan's Cluster Missile. His Grenadier passive that lets him view the trajectory Grenades take after bouncing is also a universal ability in the previous game.
    • The device Lifeline uses to call in her Care Packages strongly resembles the detonator that Satchel Charges used.
    • Ash's ability to view enemy deaths on the map and radar is effectively just the Kill Report kit.
  • The Halloween gamemodes that feature Wall Running work mostly identically to Titanfall 2's wallrunning.
  • The Control gamemode has player-sized rod-like objects to represent points of interest. These are just the objective items used as the flags in Titanfall 2's Capture the Flag gamemode.
  • Even a few animations have been reused, including the run off of a dropship at the beginning of most Titanfall 2 maps.
  • Pathfinder himself is a MRVN robot, many of which are featured in both Titanfall games.
• Queer Character, Queer Actor:
  • Bloodhound is non-binary and is voiced by Allegra Clark who is openly bisexual.
  • Valkyrie is lesbian and is voiced by Erika Ishii, who is openly pansexual and genderfluid.
  • Catalyst is trans, just like her actress, Meli Grant.
  • Bangalore has been confirmed to be into women (her exact sexuality is unconfirmed), and is voiced by Erica Luttrell, who is married to a woman.
• Refitted for Sequel: Bloodhound's design is based on a maquette for the original Titanfall, used to decide the art direction for that game but never having seen actual use until Apex.
• Trans Character, Cis Actor: Despite being non-binary and using they/them pronouns, Bloodhound is voiced by cis woman Allegra Clark (albeit pitched down to sound more androgynous).
• Tribute to Fido: Horizon's Season 14 skin "Anya's Armor" is a tribute to Horizon's voice actor's cat, Anya, who passed away at the age of 20.
• Viral Marketing: Instead of using a traditional marketing push that publisher Electronic Arts would've started months before launch, Respawn chose to announce and release the game at the same time, relying on word-of-mouth to spark intrest and sending the game to major streamers to further that end.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Respawn experimented with having Titans in the early stages of development, but they saw that their presence in a battle royale game was "a huge unbalancing force," and the final game ultimately does not have them. In a similar vein, it also has voicelines for various unused anti-Titan and Grenadier weapons.
  • Early in the game's life, datamining seemed to suggest some kind of PVE event or mode would eventually come to the game that would pit players against AI-controlled Titans, with some new items and mechanics to complement this. The idea never reached the public eye, but may have evolved into the single-party PVE quest missions in Season 5, and possibly the general integration of some AI-controlled wildlife on the maps like Prowlers and Flyers.
  • It was revealed in 2023 that the genesis of Apex Legends was in some multiplayer tuning done on an early internal build of Titanfall 3. Among other things, the multiplayer design team was experimenting with a Battle Royale mode, but found that the this mode was more engaging and interesting to them than the other stuff they were doing. They decided that the improvements of Titanfall 3 over Titanfall 2 were too incremental, so they abandoned the Titanfall 3 project to narrow their focus onto just the Battle Royal mode, which became Apex Legends.
  • Dummied Out voice lines from the Announcer hint at some kind of Challenger / Wildcard mechanic, which likely would have had some kind of interplay with the Champion. However, due to the vagueness of the voice lines, the precise details of how it would have worked remain a mystery.
• Word of God:
  • Revenant's design draws from multiple different cultural inspirations on what's considered deadly.
  • Crypto's Hype Beast skin, which boldly writes his name upon his jacket, represents an innermost desire to be known as himself.
• Word of Gay: Many characters are openly LGBTQ in the game, but some of them are that primarily as the writers have said:
  • Octane is Ambiguously Gay as detailed on his character tab, but tweets from Tom Castiello much more strongly imply he is gay. Seer is bisexual, but it's not really discussed much in-game outside of the Ambiguously Gay relationship history he has with Octane.
  • For most of the game's lifetime, Bloodhound had Ambiguous Gender by a strict text reading because very little about them personally is known; this became clarified in Season 8, where a loading screen lore text — a poem written from their perspective — refers to themselves as "they", fully confirming they identify as non-binary.
• Word of Saint Paul: A recurring point of fan speculation is how the Legends would fare in combat against the previous installments' Pilots. Respawn animator Moy Parra, who has animated for both Apex Legends and Titanfall 2, holds the opinion that Pilots would win a straight fight on average thanks to their much more formal combat training.

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