Apex Legends Season 3 kicks off today, and that means tons of new features. One of the biggest changes in the battle royale game’s latest season is the fact that the new World’s Edge map has replaced the previous Kings Canyon, which means that the latter will no longer be playable as of today.

In an interview with Stevivor, Respawn Entertainment’s Drew McCoy (Project Lead on Apex Legends) explained the reasons why the developer is removing Kings Canyon in Apex Legends Season 3. He said:

“What we don’t want to happen for example, is what it is like when a new character comes out.

In Season 1 when Octane launched, he was the brand-new thing and you would see a lot of people select Octane as the first player on their team.

Then the other two would disconnect because they also wanted to play as the new character.

It’s a separate problem, but we think the same type of thing is going to happen with multiple maps.

What we don’t want is for someone to get in on October 1st and be like, ‘Oh, it put me on Kings Canyon, I’m going to back out.’

You’re going to end up with a bunch of half dead games.

So at launch it’s going to be World’s Edge only, and then based on feedback from players, and the data we can get, we have a lot of different levers we can pull to see what we can do about reintroducing Kings Canyon.

But there are a lot of moving parts, because we also have events happening throughout the season, and all these other things that are flipping on and off, so it’s one of those things where we have given ourselves many doorways to go through depending on what happens.”

While Kings Canyon is gone for now, at least there’s the hope of its return in the future, after players have had their fill of the new World’s Edge map, of course. In the meantime, head on over here to find out why we think that the arrival of Apex Legends Season 3 could bring in newcomers and sceptics to the game.

Apex Legends Season 3 is now live for all players on the PS4, Xbox One, and PC. For everything you need to know about the game, we have everything grouped up here.