With its new season update trailer, Apex Legends would like you to know it has invented windows

Apex Legends season 28 launches on February 10th, and appears to add competitive glazing to the now 7-year-old battle royale. The game’s “newest tactical mechanic”, so says the announcement post, is Hardlight Mesh, a glowy, bullet-resistant window that teams can either throw up to defend a hidey hole or, with enough lead, rockets, and/or angry kicks, break down to form a new ingress point. Holes in walls? That’s old hat. ApeLegs is disrupting holes in walls. There’ll probably be a TechCrunch article on it.

Here’s a little teaser trailer, which opens with a tribute to Respawn Entertainment co-founder Vince Zampella, who died last December in a high-speed car collision along with his passenger. Said tribute is then immediately followed by someone hurtling through a window. O…okay.

Accidently Partridgian video edit aside, we can see that Hardlight Mesh panels do actually play a lightly Rainbow Six Siege-y – or dare I say it, Highguard-y – role in dynamic point defence. Though I’m always unnerved by attempts to make Apex gunfights more locked-down and static; all its best action tends to be more scrappy, dynamic, and three-dimensional, with lots of panicked scrambling up walls and near-constant bumslides. That said, these panels are also the source of an agurably needed buff to the oft-overlooked Controller Legends class – yer Wattsons and yer Catalysts – who, alone, gain the ability to repair and reinforce these fresh new takes on glass sheets. Next-gen windows, they is.

It also sounds like they can be countered by certain Legend abilities, including those of Fuse, who’s getting a rework in S28. His ultimate, instead of drawing a ring of fire, will instead pepper the target area with cluster bombs – and judging by the trailer, the initial projectile can lodge inside shields and dump its payload onto the opposite side, nullifying Hardlight’s defensive advantage.

That’s fine, if a bit similar to the tactical ability of rival Legdge (and lore buddy) Mad Maggie, which does basically the same thing but worse. More worrying are the promised Bloodhound buffs, detailed to us in a separate email from EA: they’re getting an “improved Tactical Scan and massive reduced Ultimate cooldown”, as well as the power to extent their ult’s duration by knocking enemies while it’s active. More legal wallhacks, then. Cool. COOL. What’s even the point of having Windows 2 to cower behind when a rampaging plague doctor can x-ray-vision you from six thousand miles away?

Respawn may or may not answer that question on February 6th, when a more in-depth Designer’s Note blog on the season update goes live. That’s ahead of the full patch notes on the 9th, and the update’s release on the 10th.