Players have been asking for cross-progression in Apex Legends for a few years now. With 2023 about halfway over and Apex Legends Season 17 about to begin, we asked Apex Legends senior design director Evan Nikolich if the team had a release window in mind.
“No, I’m not going to put a date on it,” Nikolich told GameSpot. “It’s getting done. We have a Slack thread here, which updates every day. And yeah, I agree [with the players]–it’s frustrating. People want to be able to move. Even I’m one of those people. I’m primarily focused on PC, but I would love to be able to play on my PlayStation 5. So not there yet, but I’m hoping to talk soon about actually doing it. And when we can do it, we’ll let people know immediately. Because I want to stop talking about it.”
I don’t blame Nikolich for being tired of people talking about cross-progression. The feature is perhaps the most oft-requested feature for Respawn’s battle royale game, and conversations about it have been lingering around for years, largely sparked by a comment from–at the time–Respawn director of communication Ryan Rigney in August 2021. During a Reddit AMA, he told players that cross-progression was coming in 2022. Obviously, that didn’t happen.
In October 2022, Nikolich told the press during the Apex Legends Season 15 preview event that there were “no real updates” on cross-progression. We didn’t hear anything else until February 2023, when game director Steven Ferreira said cross-progression is still “definitely coming.”
At this point, it sounds as if Respawn is going to hold off on promising any more release dates for cross-progression until the team has a specific one in mind. I think it’s safe to say that we won’t be getting it during Season 17. We will see the implementation of a weapon mastery feature in Apex Legends, however, as well as changes to World’s Edge and a new playable legend named Ballistic.
