Apex Legends’ Arenas Mode Returns For Limited Time In Bow-Focused Season 25
2025-05-01T15:00:00Z
Apex Legends Season 25 kicks off May 6. Titled Prodigy, the season brings back the battle royale’s beloved round-based 3v3 mode, Arenas, for a limited time, and gives a lot to archer-lovers–the Bocek Compound Bow has returned to ground loot with some explosi…
Apex Legends Season 25 kicks off May 6. Titled Prodigy, the season brings back the battle royale’s beloved round-based 3v3 mode, Arenas, for a limited time, and gives a lot to archer-lovers–the Bocek Compound Bow has returned to ground loot with some explosive changes and the new playable legend, Sparrow, is a trick-arrow recon specialist. The season launches on the heels of big layoffs for Electronic Arts’ studios, including about 100 people at Apex Legends developer Respawn, and the reported dissolution of several unannounced projects, like an extraction shooter set in the Titanfall/Apex Legends universe.
Arenas is the big focus of Season 25, as the mode has not been seen in the game since the conclusion of Season 15 in February 2023. May is quickly proving to be the month when fan-favorite modes in Apex Legends make a surprising comeback–last year, Solos briefly returned to the game after developer Respawn had already said “we’re not bringing it back.” It seems like any long-lost mode can make a potential return, if only for a limited time.
Similarly to when Solos briefly returned, Arenas is coming back with several changes that are aimed at addressing shortcomings with the once-permanent mode. Lead modes designer Clément Bachellerie told me that the team “simplified the win condition to the first team winning three rounds to have faster matches.” Previously, to win an Arenas match, your team not only had to win three rounds but also have two more total wins than the other squad. So if both teams had two wins each, the winner of the next round would then have to win again to win.
Arenas is a 3v3 mode in which the victor is determined by whichever squad earns three wins first.
This would cause some Arenas matches to go on for… a while, with Round 9 always graciously acting as a take-all tiebreaker so both teams could finally go their separate ways. Under this new ruleset, matches will never go beyond Round 5. “The fact that matches were dragging and could become frustrating, [led] sometimes to players even dropping out early,” Bachellerie said. “We simplified the win condition to the first three rounds won to help with the pacing.”
“Later in the season, we’re going to update the game mode with a few [more quality-of-life] changes that we hope will address some of the pain points the experience originally had,” Bachellerie added. “Some of the store choices were a bit cumbersome, notably around healing items. We now give them by default, focusing the purchasing space on more interesting items, like weapons and abilities. [Also], Arenas meta could become a bit stale, with everyone choosing the same few guns. For this, we’ll introduce a ban and a discount system. The former prevents you from choosing the same weapon every round; the latter tempts you to buy/try a weapon that is outside of your comfort zone. The mix of the two, we hope, will help with the overall game mode meta health. Lastly, some of the secondary objectives, like Care Packages, weren’t very enticing [in the original mode]. We did a pass on [those] rewards to take it up a notch.”
When I asked how long Arenas will stay in Apex Legends this time around, Bachellerie said it will be for a few weeks, transforming into something new when Season 25’s first major patch drops. “The [traditional] 3v3 game mode is meant to support 25.0 until 25.1, so a bit more than a month. In 25.1, a new game mode variant called Arenas: Duels [which will be 1v1] will take the place of Arenas in the [Limited Time Mode] slot. These game modes may come back in the future as well, a lot will depend on how the season plays out for those modes’ actual popularity.”
Pathfinder gets a few nice buffs in Season 25, which are intended to let him grapple faster and more often.
Those who prefer to only play the mainstay battle royale mode of Apex Legends will have new stuff to look forward to as well. Season 25 feels like a love letter to those who have been clamoring for the return of the Bocek Compound Bow–the weapon has returned to the ground loot pool and the new playable legend is an archer with a soft spot for the weapon.
To fix the ammo problem that originally saw the Bocek removed from ground loot and stuffed into Care Packages (the bow was the only weapon to use the “arrow” ammo type, so very little of it spawned in comparison to every other ammo type), the weapon will behave like a Care Package firearm without actually being one–it will come pre-equipped with a number of arrows, removing the initial need to look for ammo. It’s just grab and go! Replenishing your ammo works much as before–collecting loose arrows from the world that failed to make their target–with one fun exception: An enemy that has been damaged by arrows will transform into a deathbox riddled with arrows upon their death. This lets you run by the deathbox and grab the arrows passively, removing any need to actually spend time looting to replenish ammo for the Bocek.
When I asked the team if it was possible for a player to pull arrows that have been shot into them out of their own body, replenishing ammo by tanking damage, design director Evan Nikolich said, “Unfortunately not at launch but that’s a fun idea we’ll look into!” So if that gets patched into Apex Legends in a future update: You’re welcome!
You can now equip frag grenades to the Bocek Compound Bow to make explosive arrows.
In a fun and explosive change for the Bocek, Season 25 adds the option to attach any frag grenades in your inventory to an arrow, transforming it into a bomb arrow. So far, these bomb arrows have been a great way to match Fuse’s distance in launching frag grenades, with the added benefit of the piercing nature of the arrow meaning the frag grenade sticks to the target, like an arc star grenade. It’s going to be a lot of fun to use this to scare enemy teams and make them scatter as they abandon the one teammate with a bomb suddenly stuck to their neck.
“There’s a noticeable difference from the delay and way frag grenades detonate [in comparison to the bomb arrows, and] we’ve done a lot of work on the presentation so it should be abundantly clear when you or an ally has been stuck so that players can try and make the best decisions they can,” Canavese said.
No one likes the Bocek more than Season 25’s new legend, Sparrow, who has unique pick-up animations and voice lines with the bow, akin to Mad Maggie with the Mastiff shotgun and Vantage with the Sentinel sniper rifle. A recon legend, Sparrow is primarily geared toward mapping spaces and locating enemies, like Bloodhound, Seer, Crypto, Valkyrie, and Vantage. Sparrow leans closest to the last of those comparisons, in that his abilities make him an ideal marksman and long-range combatant.
Sparrow’s Tracker Dart can watch your squad’s back to notify you of invading parties.
Sparrow’s passive ability is Double Jump, which lets him do exactly what it sounds like. The only time this ability doesn’t work is when Sparrow goes off a Launch Pad, which already gives a character a double-jump. “[Sparrow’s double-jump] does have a unique sound so you should be able to pick it out versus the other ones,” Sparrow legend designer John Ellenton told me when I noted that Sparrow is the third legend to have an ability that lets a player double-jump (Octane’s Launch Pad and Vantage’s Echo Relocation), which could create audio confusion in the midst of a match if a team is trying to figure out who is moving in on them.
Sparrow’s tactical ability, Tracker Dart, is why he’s a recon legend. Once Sparrow launches it into a surface, it emits a constant scan–any enemy that wanders into that space is marked, allowing Sparrow and his allies to track their position for as long as they remain in the dart’s sight lines. These darts can be destroyed by the other team, encouraging Sparrow to place them in hard to discover spots. Additionally, Sparrow can fire a Tracker Dart into a Survey Beacon, allowing him to bypass the lengthy hacking process to instantly access the beacon’s information and discover the location of all nearby squads. “His tactical can really give your team some great awareness of the battlefield,” Ellenton said. “Placing it in chokes or behind your team to cover your backs makes it a great anti third party tool. So many times in playtests, we were about to jump on a team when a trap [would go] off–this allowed us to change strategies and not get caught out in a bad push. It’s also great to throw out at teams you know are there; this will give you more direct moment-to-moment tracking if you can catch them with it.”
Finally, Sparrow’s ultimate ability is Stinger Bolt. Using a high-tech bow affixed to his gauntlet, Sparrow fires a bolt that, upon landing, emits a pulse that targets and electrifies any enemies in the vicinity, both weakening them and slowing their movements. This makes it far easier to catch and kill enemies trying to escape an ambush. Both Sparrow’s Tracker Dart and Stinger Bolt are small, making them far easier to fit through barred windows and partially opened doors than most legend abilities–together, the two abilities can give a team the layout of a room and weaken any potential threats without even having to go inside. “They are actually both great tools [for] flushing enemies out of a room,” Ellenton confirmed.
Sparrow’s Stinger Bolt is a great way to weaken enemy teams before jumping in.
So far, we don’t know much about Sparrow’s story, other than having strong Ezio Auditore energy–he’s an Italian with a sarcastic and good-natured personality who descends from a family that belongs to an order of assassins with avian motifs, including beaked hoods. It’s unclear how, or if, Sparrow’s inclusion in the game will push Apex Legends’ narrative forward, which has stagnated and hasn’t seen much momentum in over a year. “The narrative goals for Sparrow would be to explore a legend whose entire world and identity was rigidly defined by them [for] their entire lives by their family, but is now living on his own terms and learning what it is he wants, all while under the microscope of the public eye,” narrative director Amanda Doiron told me. “His good nature allows him to navigate this better than many people, but it’s not without its struggles, especially because he does still love his family and desires their acceptance even if they have never quite accepted him as he is.”
To that end, Sparrow will have some connections with other legends in the Apex Games. “While he has no previous history with the legends before joining the Games, I think a number of them could relate to how much the Games allow him to express himself fully and also surround himself with a found family,” Doiron said. “Fuse, Seer, and Octane are just a few that come immediately to mind.” Admittedly, I was surprised Vantage wasn’t one of those that Sparrow has camaraderie with, given their similar set-ups: Both are very young marksmen-focused legends with a criminal parent, signature weapon, and a cute pet (Vantage has a bat named Echo and Sparrow has a cat named Artemis). “We don’t currently have [any] special dialogue between them, but that’s not to say we won’t in the future,” Doiron said, as she noted to add lines between them in the future. Once again, if this change happens in a future update: You’re welcome.
Apex Legends is available for Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, PS5, PS4, Switch, and PC. The battle royale is free-to-play and supports both cross-play and cross-progression.
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