As a journalist you love to throw around words – at least often. Be it because you want to tell a lot or think of the next funny pun. Of course, I thought it must be fun to come up with names for the legends from Apex Legends.
And how many times a day do you think about naming like that?
Here you can use the full power of creative word creation and brainstorm together until everyone is satisfied. Well, unfortunately it's not that simple, as Narrative Lead Writer Ashley Reed explains to me in an interview.
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Sometimes things turn out differently than you think and that's a good thing. I actually wanted to talk to the developers at ALGS about the Season 20 changes and how they affected Pro Play.
In this context, I asked whether developing the Legends Updates took longer than a season with a new map or a completely new Legend. The answer: It depends. But this statement turned out to be one of the most exciting and unexpected conversations of the entire event.
Ashley Reed then said: “The work that the narrative team puts into a legend takes a year or several years, but the process at S20 was just 'name these things'.” It only took a week for this work to be completed.
When I expressed my enthusiasm for this task, Reed admitted to me that the team would not like this task and explained to me why. And I can really understand it. It sounds so much easier and more fun than it is in practice.
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“Our secret is that we actually hate naming. It's actually our least favorite job because it's so complicated,” Reed said with a laugh. It was quite easy in season 20 because the narrative team wasn't faced with a completely blank sheet of paper.
“But there are a lot of rules for Legends because we don't want to have too many characters with the same first letter. Sometimes a name fits perfectly, but we already have too many characters with that letter, so we have to change it.”
“Conduit gave us the most trouble because we already had three characters whose names started with C. So we thought we can't use C and racked our brains for 6 months until we said to ourselves “We just want to call them Conduit”.
“The names shouldn't sound too similar when called out. If the players don't have to pronounce them, like with POIs, that helps a lot,” adds Reed. “People don't shout out the names of POIs or upgrades as much, so we have a little more flexibility there.”
Fun facts about naming in Apex Legends
However, for the new legend Alter, naming him was child's play. “Alter was actually pretty simple. Downright shockingly simple. It even scared me a little bit. I think there was a little back and forth before we decided on Alter, but not as much as Conduit, so that was it Big relief.” At Catalyst it was also “shockingly easy” to find a name.
I was also able to pick up a few little fun facts about the naming. Did you know that Ballistic was supposed to be called Caliber? “Caliber had to be changed because of a legal issue because the name was copyrighted and we weren't allowed to use it,” Reed said.
And Forge, who was originally announced as a legend for Season 4 but then didn't appear, was actually supposed to have a different name – Diesel. “But then a movie came out starring Vin Diesel about a bodyguard who keeps getting killed but his memory gets erased so he doesn't remember what Revenant's backstory is. And We thought, 'Nobody's going to believe this is a coincidence, so we had to change his name.”