Apex Legends' Cipher Trailer Turns Crypto Into an Aggressive Intel Hunter
Respawn's new Apex Legends: Cipher trailer reveals a battery-powered Crypto, a dual-wielded Wingman and alarm-triggering Stronghold vaults in Season 31.
Respawn Entertainment has posted its official gameplay trailer for Apex Legends: Cipher, the battle royale's Season 31 update, and the trailer leans hard into its new tagline: information is now the deadliest weapon on the map. The trailer, uploaded to the official Apex Legends YouTube channel, doubles as a highlight reel for the season's two headline additions, a rebuilt Crypto and a dual-wielded Wingman, while squeezing in a glimpse of the new vaults squads will be fighting over once Cipher goes live.
A Firmware Upgrade for Crypto
The trailer's framing device is a "firmware upgrade" Crypto receives from his sister Mila, and it reworks him from a passive drone-camper into an aggressive intel hunter. His Surveillance Drone now runs on batteries instead of a cooldown timer, so he can recall it, redeploy it and keep gathering information without the long waits Season 30 players are used to. A new Sentry Mode lets the drone automatically tag enemies the moment it spots them, and his EMP Ultimate can now be fired off with a single button press instead of a channeled cast. Together, the changes push Crypto toward a scouting role that rewards constantly feeding information back to a squad rather than tucking the drone away in a safe corner.
Akimbo Wingman Doubles the Firepower
The trailer's biggest applause line is the Akimbo Wingman, which lets a Legend dual-wield Respawn's signature hand cannon for what the developer is calling double the damage output. It is a callback to the kind of swaggering, high-skill weapon play Apex built its identity on, and the footage shows it dropping squads in close-range duels where a single Wingman would have left time for a third shot. Expect the loadout to become an instant staple in ranked lobbies the moment Cipher's servers go live, for better or worse for anyone caught without cover.
Strongholds Raise the Risk
Where Care Packages once marked the safest bet on a map, Cipher introduces Strongholds as their higher-stakes evolution. The trailer shows a squad popping one open only to watch the whole map light up: opening a Stronghold takes time and triggers an alarm that reveals the raiding team's exact location to everyone else in the match. The payoff is worth the risk, with crate weapons, corrupted attachments and EVO on offer, and the vaults spawn with their own cover and Hardlight barriers so a squad can actually hold the ground they just gave away. It is a deliberate push toward contested, visible fights instead of quiet looting in a corner of the map.
Ranked Gets a Legend Ban Vote
Cipher's changes extend into Ranked play, where Diamond-tier lobbies and above now open every match with a Legend ban vote. Every player in the lobby casts one vote, and whichever Legend receives the most has the highest chance of being banned from that match entirely. It is Respawn's first real attempt at letting the Apex Legends playerbase police its own metagame rather than waiting on a balance patch, and it should make high-rank queues noticeably less predictable from one game to the next.
Revenant and Lifeline Also Get Reworked
Two of the roster's older Legends round out the patch. Revenant comes out of Cipher with a shorter Ultimate cooldown and a quicker Tactical, plus upgrade options that can extend his Ultimate's duration on a knock, silence nearby enemies after a Shadow Pounce, or refresh the Pounce automatically while tracking a marked target. Lifeline's kit leans further into sustain, with a reduced D.O.C. cooldown, the ability to self-heal while gliding, a shorter Ultimate cooldown, a shield while reviving a teammate and smoother flight mobility. Neither change is as flashy as Crypto's overhaul, but both nudge two long-standing picks back toward relevance.
Apex Legends: Cipher went live on November 3 across PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, Nintendo Switch 2 and PC, where it's available through the EA App, Epic Games Store and Steam. The trailer's framing suggests Respawn intends Cipher to be remembered less for a single new Legend and more for how it reshuffles the information squads can gather and the fights they're forced into over it, from a battery-powered drone to a vault that screams its location the second it is cracked open.
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Mira leads previews at Gamers6. She has spent fifteen years playing co-op shooters badly and writing about them well, and she still keeps a spreadsheet of every weapon reload animation worth the frame count.
