The karambit heirloom has so much wasted potential. They truly have became lazy comparing to thr katar.

Just to give some context on the Karambit vs the Katar from a development standpoint. The Katar was a close to 18mo project that necessitated building a lot of entirely new systems from the ground up. But most of the work in that time was creative work, making all the unique variants. I was the technical lead on that project, and it was arguably one of the most interesting things I've worked on in my four years on Apex. But it was also resource intensive enough - especially in terms of things that don't automatically scale like modeling, vfx, animation, etc - that it wasn't clearly worth it to you the players to do again versus putting those resources elsewhere.

The tech is there to have made the Karambit customizable like the Katar. But the actual humans who do the creative work of making those intricate designs do not scale in the same way as the code. A lot of the tech we built for the Katar is being reused by some of these newer Legend-agnostic heirlooms. But a lot of it is very specific to the Katar. Should the Katar have been a karambit-style knife instead? Should the Karambit have been as customizable as the Katar? I am not sure. And I'm also not the decider of such things. I just build them. Though threads like this certainly are helpful in terms of how we think about those types of decisions for the future. And I do value knowing what our players do and do not enjoy.

I personally love the feel of the animations with the Karambit. The animator who did most of these animations is an incredible players herself with a great feel for Apex's movement. I'm a potato personally, but I still can feel that a lot of the spins and inspects just fit with the way Apex moves.

For everyone who loves the Karambit, thank you. For everyone who wishes it was bigger/better/faster/more, I feel you. With every project we do there's always that sense of things we might have done. That's what I love and also hate about making video games. You can build literally anything. Which also makes it incredibly challenging to decide what to actually build.

I knew a response like was coming, but I nevertheless want to take some time to answer this. As I said, the overwhelming majority of those 18 months was creative work - concept art, 3d models, vfx, animation, sound fx, etc. These are not the folks who work on any of what players rightly pinpoint as core issues. An animator isn't going to work on anti-cheat. A VFX artist isn't going to dive into the nuances of matchmaking. A concept artist isn't going to unravel why footstep audio sometimes doesn't play.

Even among technical folks, there's specialization. Most of my expertise within Apex is on meta-game systems - challenges, cosmetics, stats, progression systems, etc. I would like to believe I'm capable enough to contribute in other areas - and I certainly have, but most of my expertise is in these systems. I've done work across a lot of different parts of the game - I was part of the team that made core changes to Ranked to make it easier for us to flag and revoke RP from cheaters. But it's certainly not what I'm best at. I was the primary technical person on these projects because I'm good at this. And that means that the people who are good at those other things - matchmaking, anti-cheat, audio, gameplay, etc. - can focus on those things.

I'm a big believer in being a generalist. But the hardest problems really do require a specialist. People are not simply interchangeable. I am not at all trying to dismiss that we have issues - many of them longstanding. And we are working to address them. I also don't believe it's our players responsibility to "understand" the complexity or difficulty of addressing these issues. Players want a game that is fun and that works. And they do not want excuses.

The Katar took 18 months because of how hard it was in very specific ways. I am not saying that should matter to you. But to the extent that it's useful to understand that those are not 18 months that could have been spent in fundamentally different ways, great. To the extent that you simply don't care about that, fair enough.

Customizable weapons are definitely on the table. See the Serpent's Sting with the kill counter. Will we do another Katar-esque weapon? I really don't know. We're experimenting a lot right now and seeing what player's actually seem to want. I certainly hope we do another weapon like the Katar where you can mix-and-match - and I definitely built the system expecting we would. But it's really up to players to help guide us there.

Color customization is super interesting. I wouldn't be allowed to say if it's something we're actively exploring, but I doubt it would surprise anyone if I said it's something that we've discussed. I know that's a sh*tty non-answer. But also hope you can understand why I couldn't just say yes/no.