[2020] Everything is broken, or ya'll just like to complain?

Another interesting element in all of this is regional differences exacerbated by the pandemic with the lack of LANs, at least from a competitive standpoint. With strictly online tourneys, we see unique metas develop in different regions. In the latest ALGS, Caustic had a 30% pick rate in EU and less than 5% in NA. Bloodhound has been on the up and up with a nearly 60% pick rate in NA but right around 30% in EU. APAC leaned heavily on Rev during the summer circuit with nearly a 90% pick rate but more recently has resembled NA and EU team comps. This mirrors the feedback we get from pros in different regions when they claim fill in the blank legend is overtuned.

This isn’t a bad thing, it’s just interesting that the lack of LANs has had this great of an effect on what the hot balancing topics are for pro communities around the world. I’m curious to see if team comp variation flattens out when LANs return.

We should hire this guy.

Oh wait we did :D

Haha :D I did a long ass post once upon a time why we'll never introduce wall running to Apex. Go dig through my history and find it if you're curious!

And to be clear, I'm not saying wallrunning is bad; I'm saying wallrunning is a bad fit for Apex Legends. Eventually we'll make other games in the future (nothing being worked on at the moment I'm afraid) and I wouldn't be surprised if a game that's less PvP focused could bring the amazing movement model of TF2 back. Like if there ever is a TF3, for instance. It's just not a good fit for Apex, a game where good positioning matters, where getting the drop on an enemy matters, where differences in loadout matter. If you bust open the skill ceiling and set it to "outer space" (which is what wall running effectively does) then all of these things will become irrelevant compared to "is my opponent a lot better than me at the movement model? If so, I'm screwed no matter what else." That just doesn't fit into the kind of game Apex is.

We've got something planned for her but I doubt it'll be enough. What we probably need to do is to put health into her walls as they're building, but that is a very scary change. Those of us who were around for early Rampart playtesting remember how incredibly unhealthy it was for the game to be able to throw down a wall midfight, have instant cover to heal/reload behind, and possibly also make your enemy waste like a full Mastiff shot on a wall. There's ways of avoiding that while also making the walls stronger but we're moving carefully.

(My current preferred pitch would be either give the wall health as it's building, but let that health tick up gradually, so you can still destroy it if you focus it, or else give the wall health as it's building but allow bullets to pass through while it's building--in that version the wall would still come up as long as it doesn't take full damage, but it wouldn't protect you until it's built. Version 2 would require a lot of visual support)

So we played around with this and looked at it from all angles, and letting bullets through while the wall was building just looked like a bug. We'd need to redo the visuals of the wall building to make that okay in any way shape or form. So we're currently thinking of trying something a lot more spicy and dangerous: 45 health on the wall while it's building, no ramp up, no bullet penetration other than snipers (sniper bullets also go through players, so that seemed fine).

I'm really worried about overbuffing her, but at this point she needs something real.

Yeah absolutely! I've given my thoughts on this before so apologies if this is all old news to anyone.

So Overwatch and Apex look very similar but they're fundamentally different genres within FPS: one is a class based shooter, the other is a gunplay-first shooter with character abilities. The quickest way to differentiate is to ask yourself how often do you die to abilities. In Apex the answer should be very rarely; in Overwatch it should be rather common. The other way to differentiate is to ask yourself if characters have their own weapons they start with and that are balanced and designed around their kit, or if they can pick up and use any weapon.

Add to that the fact that Overwatch isn't a single life game where it's a lot more acceptable to die to a random Junkrat ult you didn't see coming because you're just going to respawn in a few seconds anyway.

So in class-based shooters, character abilities should absolutely dictate the outcome of the action. How well you know when to use them, how well you play around enemy abilities, how well you coordinate abilities with your team. With few exceptions, this should be more important than how accurate you are at shooting your gun.

In a game like Apex, gunskill still trumps everything else. Knowing how to use your abilities is important and there should be long learning curves on characters, but abilities alone should never decide the battle for you; you always have to follow up with some amount of gunskill. So Horizon's ult doesn't hold people perfectly still, Caustic's gas damage ramps slowly, Bangalore's ult has a comfortable 6s prime time etc.

That said, it's all on a spectrum. Clearly being able to use your abilities well in Apex will win you games; if you pick just the right time to full team 3rd party while using Revenant's ult after softening them up with Crypto's EMP and if you're dropping a Wraith tunnel at the same time so your second run at them can happen way sooner, you're almost guaranteed to win unless they're like ten times as good as you at shooting their guns. (This precise combo was actually so successful we nerfed it to where it has more downtime baked in; we tried not nerfing it out of the game, but nerf it to the level where it's not a guaranteed win).

So there is a world where Rampart can have some shield on her wall on placement, I think. There are delays around putting away your weapon, pulling out the wall, placing it, raising your weapon again: that means you can't just do it for free in a close range gunfight. So we'll try something and see how it goes!

Gonna try giving it some health while it builds first. Worried about getting the amp too quickly. It's not off the table in case the health while building doesn't do enough.

A lot of the ways in which I sound smart are just me benefiting from the knowledge this team has amassed over the years! I'm still new to designing for FPS games, so I absorbed as much of their combined learnings as I could when I started here. I don't have first hand experience of the negative impacts of wall running on the long term enjoyment of a shooter, so I can't really speak with confidence here. You may be right, there may be a tuned down version of it that works, or you may be wrong and any amount of added mobility over what we have now may imperil the secret sauce that makes Apex so good: your ability to understand and play smartly around complicated combat situations.

See the really scary part of this, to me, is that this is somewhat resistant to playtesting. It's the kind of unexpected negative side effect that manifests only over many many hours of millions of people playing with it and seeing what they can do with it. I, too, am excited by the potential of wallrunning; hell I loved the Titanfalls before I ever came to Respawn and had a great time in them, but the way the negative effects of wall running and other hyper mobility were described to me track perfectly with my own personal experience: it's incredibly fun and exciting in the moment, but eventually it just becomes exhausting and without realizing why you stop playing the game. When I started working on Apex I dove back into TF2 and played a decent amount over a few weeks and then suddenly forgot it was even there as an option, even as I was playing other shooters. So there definitely is something to this sugar rush effect that we should be extremely careful about. For the time being, I will definitely follow the design instincts and insights of designers who were there and making the decisions around the time of the Titanfalls.