Apex Legends 1.87: A Tiny Patch Before Defiance, Revisited in 2026

As I look back from 2026, the January 27, 2022, Apex Legends update 1.87 feels like a tiny blip. But at the time, I remember it mattered. Respawn Entertainment deployed the patch across all supported platforms, and it brought only minor tweaks. No new legend, no new map, no flashy event. Just a quiet fix. Still, with Season 12: Defiance only a week away, every small change felt like a clue.

What was actually in update 1.87? That was the question I kept asking. Respawn had not released official patch notes at the time. The update had just gone live, and full details were expected shortly. According to Apex Legends data miner KralRindo, the patch likely included a fix for treasure pack rewards. For anyone who does not remember, many players had been collecting all of the season treasure packs. They completed the grind. They expected the set cosmetic rewards. But the rewards never arrived. That bug was frustrating, and a fix was overdue.

I can still picture the Reddit threads and Discord chats. Players were posting screenshots of their completed treasure pack collections. They were asking why the game had not granted the cosmetics. It was not a game-breaking bug. It did not crash servers or ruin ranked matches. But it damaged trust. When you spend weeks collecting something, you want the reward. A silent patch was better than nothing, but it also showed how quiet Respawn could be about small fixes.

The bigger story, of course, was Season 12. The first trailer for Defiance also dropped that same day. It officially confirmed Mad Maggie as the next legend. She was set to join the Apex games on February 8. That news lit up the community. A new legend always does. But Defiance promised more than just Maggie. It was set to include a limited-time mode and plenty more. I remember watching the trailer multiple times, looking for hints about the new season.

Here is a quick snapshot of what we knew then:

That table tells the story of a transitional moment. Update 1.87 was not meant to be memorable. It was a maintenance patch. It cleaned up a reward bug and maybe improved some behind-the-scenes systems. But it arrived at the doorstep of a major season. In many ways, it was the calm before the storm.

Looking back from 2026, I think that tiny update is a useful reminder. Live-service games are not only defined by huge content drops. They are also defined by the small fixes that keep the player base happy. The treasure pack bug was not glamorous. But fixing it mattered to the people who had earned those rewards. Apex Legends has changed a lot since 2022. The meta has shifted. New legends have arrived. Maps have been reworked. But the lesson remains: players remember when their time is respected.

Would update 1.87 have been exciting on its own? No. It was a minor patch with few tweaks. But it was part of a larger week. The Mad Maggie reveal gave us something to talk about. The Defiance trailer gave us something to anticipate. And the treasure pack fix, if that is what it was, gave affected players a reason to log back in. Sometimes that is enough.

In 2026, I still keep an eye on patch notes. I still look for quiet fixes. And I still remember update 1.87, not because it was big, but because it showed how Apex Legends moved between seasons. Small patch. Big anticipation. That was January 27, 2022. And for a moment, that was everything.