Team Deathmatch finally came to Apex Legends in Season 16 as part of the game’s four-year anniversary celebration. It’s a nice addition that’s mostly pretty fun, though there is some room for improvement at this time.
One such area of improvement is in the length of TDM rounds, as well as the way the game presents this mode. As of right now, each round of Team Deathmatch in Apex Legends can potentially last up to 30 minutes. But with no timer present onscreen, it’s hard to tell just how long these matches are running. This is more of a nuisance than a major problem, but it’s an obnoxious issue nonetheless.
At first, it was hard to tell how long each round of Team Deathmatch could last. I even saw some posts on social media with confused players stating that a round wouldn’t end until one team reached the required 50-point score.
Thankfully, that’s not the case. But the good and bad of it is that TDM match-ups in Apex Legends can feel like a slog when players disconnect, and especially when teams with fewer players begin hiding. If a team of six is battling a solo player on an opposite team where every other player disconnected, for example, those lone players sometimes stay in the game and just hide, forcing the other team to either hunt them down or give up and disconnect themselves.
With no timer onscreen, it’s difficult to tell how long a TDM match has been going on for. While playing one especially long-drawn-out session, though, I noticed that a message appeared notifying me that there were five minutes left on the clock. My team finally got the last kill to reach 50 points about a minute later, and the clock read just a little over 26 minutes.
I checked Google just to make sure, and it looks like the official length of Team Deathmatch in Apex Legends — if neither team reaches 50 points — is 30 minutes. Again, though, you wouldn’t know just by playing. Hopefully a visible timer is added to the HUD at some point in the near future.
More importantly, though, here’s hoping developer Respawn shortens the length of TDM rounds. As it is, it can feel a bit too drawn out — especially when pesky players decide to hide out in the deepest corners of the maps.
