Apex Legends has been out for 4 years and its player base doesn’t seem to be slowing down. Last week Apex Legends surpassed its concurrent player count on PC from its previous high of 510,000 players to now hitting 610,000 players.This seems to be from the new patch released to celebrate the 4 year anniversary with some very big changes.

The new update's biggest change is the introduction of classes, similar to other hero shooters like Overwatch where each hero is given its own class that comes with its own perks.

• Assault: More ammo per stack, can access red bins. (Bangalore, Ash, Fuse, Mad Maggie, and Revenant)
• Skirmisher: Can reveal care packages. (Wraith, Valkyrie, Octane, Horizon, Mirage, and Pathfinder)
• Recon: Can deploy a survey beacon to show enemy locations. (Bloodhound, Crypto, Seer, and Vantage)
• Controller: Access to Ring Consoles that show the Ring's location. (Caustic, Wattson, Rampart, and Catalyst)

Support: Crafts banners and can access blue bins. (Lifeline, Loba, Gibraltar, and Newcastle)
The new update also introduces Team Deathmatch mode as a permanent addition with some changes to try and make the games play faster by reducing the rounds to 2 and 30 kills.After the first 3 weeks, this will be moved from its own mode and added into the Mixtape playlist that consist of a handful of other mode types.

With the new update lots of fixes and balancing changes have been made with addition to a new weapon. To celebrate 4 years they are also giving away two heroes for free. The first week being Crypto with week 2 being replaced with Ash.

Patch Notes