Apex Legends is finally giving players what they’ve been requesting for years with 1v1 battles coming to the game soon as part of a mid-season refresh. Fighting against friends in the Apex Legends Firing Range Duel Pit is helpful to a certain extent, but you can now properly test your gunfighting skills against randoms with the brand new limited-time Arenas: Duels mode, arriving June 24th for season 25.1.
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For the first time since Apex‘s release in 2019, players will be able to hop into a 5-minute match in a server of 30 players. Instead of picking your weapons, however, loadouts and Legends are randomized per Duel. Apex players can imagine this as Solo mode meets R5Reloaded if they’re familiar with the latter. Largely focused on gun skills, abilities will also be disable at the start of the game mode. You won’t be able to heal either, so aim and movement take top priority. It is ego aim training, and only one player can come out as victor.
R5Reloaded is a modded version of season 3 Apex, but isn’t a part of the game itself, nor is it promoted by developer, Respawn Entertainment. It was instead, created by the community as the ultimate Apex aim trainer. R5 is exclusive to PC users, meaning console players have no way to train their aim outside of the Firing Range or by spending hours diving into pubs and ranked matches. Apex Legends seems to be taking a leaf out of R5’s book with the implementation of Duels, acting as an extension of the 3v3 Arenas that was added back into this battle royale for Season 25, Prodigy.
Kills will be tracked, and all 30 players per server are placed on a leaderboard based on their K/D. Although R5 typically uses Wraith because of her tiny hitbox, Arena: Duels fully randomizes the experience by switching up Legends and weapons in the Apex pool. Here you can practice movement, strafe pattern, and recoil control. The setting will remain fair, as both players partaking in a Duel have the same loadout and Legend. So, you will have to adapt to whatever Apex puts in front of you if you want to outgun your opponent. Legend abilities will be turned on towards the end of 25.1, bringing more unpredictability to Duels.
This is the first time we’ve had an accurate way to measure our gun skill in Apex; as the Firing Range is limited to predictable dummies, stationary targets, and the occasional 1v1 in the Duel Pit (against a friend, at that).
There are no excuses if you lose. Just dust yourself off, move on, and strive to improve. Console players will now get the R5 experience from the source, where Arenas: Duels should provide a close-range and intense 1v1 setting every match. A 30-player lobby means each Duel will be unpredictable. There is that question however, on whether matchmaking will feature a more casual playerbase (as seen in Mixtape), or if Duels will become as popular as ranked. The top Arenas players play very differently to ranked players. Will Duels create a different playstyle that is transferrable in another setting? The answer will likely depend on how much of the playerbase want Arenas: Duels to become a permanent mode in Apex.
Apex Legends players can try out Arenas: Duels from June 24th to July 15th as part of Season 25.
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