Apex Legends Collection Event brings Ring Fury playlist, Caustic Town Takeover

Coinciding with the launch of Apex Legends on Switch, next week the battle royale is getting another Collection Event with a bunch of new cosmetics, a playlist called Ring Fury, and a Caustic Town Takeover. Yeah, I'm not totally sure I want to check out Caustic's idea of home renovations either.

Starting on 9th March and running until the 23rd, the Chaos Theory Collection Event brings a number of free earnable cosmetics, which largely seem to have an orangey-brown theme. You can earn 1000 points per day, with challenges that refresh daily and additional "stretch challenges" that give out unique badges if completed during the event.

Alongside the free stuff, there's also a bunch of premium skins that you'll have to purchase either with Apex Coins or Crafting Metals - or alternatively, through buying Event Apex Packs. If you really want to buy all 24 of these packs (something that in previous events has totalled over £100), you can unlock the new Bangalore heirloom - but this item will also become available through regular heirloom crafting (via Apex Packs) once the event is over.

The Ring Fury playlist, meanwhile, is a new mode for Apex that follows regular battle royale rules - but with each round one or two ring flares will appear within the arena, basically creating a bunch more slowly-expanding rings that you'll need to avoid. As ring flares deal equal damage to the existing overall ring, these will get pretty lethal towards the end of a match. Thankfully, a new item called a heat shield can be thrown down to prevent damage from ring flares - and each player gets given one at the start of a round, with more scattered around the map. The shields also increase the use of healing items by 50 per cent and revives by 25 per cent, but they degrade over time - making them only a temporary shelter.

At least you won't have to choose between a heat shield and shield batteries, however, as a new survival slot is being added to players' inventories - and it sounds like a mobile respawn beacon can also be placed in this slot. Nifty.

This playlist is also a little different to usual in that it's an escalation takeover, meaning that every few days during the event, the prevalence, timing and size of ring flares will be cranked up, making it steadily more chaotic. Ties in nicely with the theme, I guess.

As for Caustic's Town Takeover, it looks... like what you would expect. Water Treatment has been transformed into a gassy and smelly laboratory, full of toxic waste and bad vibes. Caustic appears to have set up an experiment where players can drain toxic liquid from the facility to gain access to items locked in cages, but tarrying will get you caught in this trap - so take your gold Mozambique and go.

In other news - and there's a lot of it in this blog post - Apex Legends is getting a "no fill" option if you fancy your chances as a solo player (good luck with that). To make sure this isn't disruptive to the lobby, there's a cap of six solo players per match, and the feature isn't available in ranked.

The patch notes, meanwhile, detail that while Caustic is getting a Town Takeover, he's also getting a nerf - so this is a real mixed bag for him. The dev team determined that his gas abilities were too oppressive and had been slowing down engagements, so his Nox Gas damage has been significantly reduced, while the cooldown for his Nox Gas Grenade has been increased from 2.5 minutes to 3.5 minutes.

And there's finally some good news for Pathfinder mains: the robot is no longer classed as a low profile character. Legends with low profile have damage increased by five per cent to compensate for their smaller hitboxes, but as Pathfinder is quite a large lad, the devs have decided it's "hard to justify" categorising him as low profile.

A number of other legends have seen nerfs: Horizon has her ultimate cooldown increased, while Gibraltar no longer has 15 per cent faster heal item usage while in his dome. One of the less popular legends, Rampart, has also had penalties against her cover and mounted gun removed - meaning they should both be able to withstand explosive damage a little better. You can find the long list of balance and quality of life changes over here. Maybe make yourself a cup of coffee while doing so.