Where is Winter Express

A developer on Twitter has mentioned that the train brings a lot of "Technical baggage" with it, and that certain interactions between legends and the train might be a tad problematic.

I don't believe this is the main reason to why they haven't released the LTM this year, but I do believe that it could've played a strong role in it.

I'm basing this on my own knowledge on the source engine, which partly applicable to this game as it's using a heavily modified version of the source engine.

Taking Team Fortress 2 for example, the payload is a buggy mess and anything with it is just hard to properly implement.

I'm sure Apex has a lot of improvements regarding something like that, but anything like a train that moves in a specific path with a certain speed can just be really hard to work with.

Especially in a game like this, where there are a lot of ultimate's and tactical abilities that can be placed on the ground, meaning that there is a high chance for bugs to exist within such environment.

Last year the LTM was already quite buggy, players exploiting certain bugs to get in boxes so they can just camp.

There also were other issues with players just straight up dying to the train and probably some other weird interactions.

Of course it's not impossible to fix these kind of bugs, but the issue with LTM's is that they are only available for a specific time period.

There are only so many hours in a day, so even if players were to find bugs whilst the LTM is actively running, they probably wouldn't be able to fix these kind of issues during the time that this LTM is out, meaning that players might be stuck with a buggy mess for the entire time that the LTM is out.

More things will be added to the game as it grows, meaning that it'll become harder to manage such LTM's as it requires more effort to make sure the train is able to deal with these new features properly. So it's entirely possible that they might phase out this LTM completely as it's just too hard to make the train work properly.

On a separate note, there also were some players that disliked the mode coming back each year, as it felt like a lazy move to reintroduce the same thing over and over, slowly becoming more stale. There are so many players that want different things, it's not always possible to keep them all happy.

So far it seems like Winter Express won't be coming this year, whilst unconfirmed, it seems to be quite unlikely for them to make this move at this point in time.