On July 7, BLAST Titans announced the two-weekend format for their upcoming BLAST Titans Apex Legends tournament, including an Arenas bracket and Olympus as a secondary Battle Royale map. Both will be firsts for major Apex Legends competition.
Olympus is the game’s newest Battle Royale map, added in November of 2020 with the Season 7 update. While some events have run matches on Olympus, the ALGS circuit and other major tournaments have thus far only used Kings Canyon and, more recently, World’s Edge. Olympus will feature as a secondary map in the Battle Royale bracket; used for about one-third of games, excluding elimination games and the bracket finals.
“We want to see what that meta looks like, see what competitive play looks like,” Leo Matlock, BLAST VP of Commercial, said. “Give [the players] something new to try and discover their views on it, and see what the viewers think about it, see what the fans think about it.”
World’s Edge and Olympus will rotate throughout the 40 team, €20,000 bracket. This will open with group stages on Friday, July 23. The top ten teams from each of the two groups will move onto the upper bracket, while the bottom ten will face elimination in the lower bracket. The last 20 teams standing will battle it out in the Match Point finals on Sunday, July 25.
BLAST Titans Arenas format
The 20 teams that reach the Battle Royale finals will be seeded into a single-elimination Arenas bracket. This begins on Saturday, July 31. Teams will face off in best-of-three matches until top-eight the following day, which will be best-of-five. Titans will be the first tier-one event to feature Arenas on its virtual main stage.
“We wanted to try and push the boundary a little bit more in a couple of ways, and then we thought ‘Why don’t we create a connector series where we see how these teams get on in Arenas?'” Matlock said. “Arenas is going to be an incredible opportunity…to show the players off more, what they can do, show the fans what their skills are a little bit more, and also challenge the players to use their mechanics and their specialties as individuals in new ways….People, I think, might see the kind of skills and mechanics that a player or a team will do to win an Arenas match that they would never otherwise see in Battle Royale.”
The Arenas competition will carry an additional €20,000 prize pool for qualifying teams. All the action from BLAST Titans will stream exclusively on BLAST’s Twitch channel.
