[2021] Respawn here. We just shipped Season 8 - Mayhem. Ask us anything!

What were some of the tried and canceled ultimates for the characters?

One of Fuse's first ultimates we tried was just straight up a giant bomb. You'd shoot it like a mortar, similar to what his current ult looks like, but when it came down, after a short warning, it would just f*cking kill you. That was fun! Not for the other people tho. So we didn't ship it.

Certain bigger changes didn't make the cut in time. I think we make up with some spiciness in the midseason update and the start of Season 9.

Why so shy with loba tactical? Ever since launch everone was on the same page about her tactical, yet you always buffed her ult. I am so tired of her failed teleportations (especially in kings canyon) so I'd love to see some buffs (and bug fixes!) on that front. Maybe at least a band aid fix like a cooldown reduction until you guys can rework her tactical? Thanks for everything guys, love the game!

Hi! There's two separate issues, only one of which I can really speak to. So issue 1 is her tactical still has a bunch of areas where it fails. That's a bug! Whenever we find those, we try to fix 'em for you as soon as possible. That's all I can say for that one.

The other issue I *can* speak to. Why are we so conservative balancing her tactical? There's good reasons! Combat readability, that is to say having a good idea where the enemy could have gone to in this case, is super important for making Apex feel as good as it does. Teleports are scary in this context; if you ever fail to see/hear the throw, you might suddenly have a Loba behind you you didn't expect, and that feels awful. So both the amount of telegraphing (a very visible silver arc in the air + very audible sounds) and the amount of downtime around usage (before/after the throw) help with this.

One thing we *ARE* trying is just making it feel better while not adding too much power. We're currently playtesting a version that doesn't slow you down at all while the bracelet is in the air and that doesn't slow you down when you arrive at your target location. Bit scary, but been testing well so far, so while there isn't an ETA we hope to ship something for Loba's tactical soonish.

I wouldn't ever say something is not possible, but it's certainly more challenging to add cross-progression to a game that's been out for 2 years. A lot of people have accounts on various platforms and trying to figure out the best way to pick or merge the account data is a challenge with many pros and cons. We're certainly looking into cross-progression and it's something that I think would be great for the game, but it's still a ways off most likely.

In the few days since it's released, I've seen everything ranging from: "This thing's OP!" to "Eh, it's whatever I'd rather use longbow/Scout/TT." Considering people are still learning how to use it, it's way too early to tell where it stacks up against other weapons. But, we're definitely happy with the power level it released at and seeing people familiarize themselves with it is awesome.

We had the first prototype of Fuse in the game in June or July of 2019. His kit was more geared to bomb defusal at the time. His tac was to suck up live grenades in the area, defuse them, and put them in your inventory. Personally I'm glad we ended up gong the way we did instead :) The larger Season 8 project was started in late 2019.

We'll be fixing this. As much as I like Fuse's utility as a door buster, the effect on the Rampart walls is much too strong. Details to come with a later patch.

120 FPS is one of our goals and as we continue to look at NG features and balance between what we think is best for the overall player experience for NG, we're keeping this in mind. Can't promise anything but with the core mechanics "feel" of Apex being such an important piece of the player experience this one is high on the priority list.

There's no one thing that inspires a character, but a big part was my Uncle Bazza; a tall tale telling, BBQ loving, charismatic, and quite enigmatic man. He doesn't have Fuse's trademark eye patch, but he does have Fuse's trademark mustache.

Revenant's a tough one to tackle; while his performance does put him into a spot where he needs a buff, it's not clear which part of him we could buff without adding a meaningful amount of frustration to the game. His tactical and ult both are frustrating to fight; his tactical silences you, which is frustrating when you're mashing a key trying to save yourself with an ability; and his ultimate makes you fight enemies twice, setting up a baseline unfair fight.

Truth be told I'd really like to buff Revenant in a way that gives him the power he needs without making him a lot more frustrating to fight. That would imply stuff like hitboxes or his passive. We see the suggestion to give him infinite climb height a lot but it turns out this isn't quite as simple as tweaking a number; we'll need some time to figure out how to best make that happen. I'm also doubtful that it would actually meaningfully buff him, but it definitely would feel better!

Sorry I don't have more to share right now, but he is on our radar.

I'm sorry, but it's illegal to put the third game in a series on Steam.

We tried a lot of different outputs with his tactical. Any visual or slowing effects we had made the ability feel much worse for people on the receiving end. It became a press Q to win situation. More complicated effects made it feel less Fuse-like because he's a pretty simple guy. Pure damage and introducing a bit of chaos with multiple explosions ended up feeling the best.

We are always looking at ways to expand the the play spaces of our Legends beyond Battle Royale. All I'll say is that we have a lot of really cool prototypes in the works. :)

It's a pretty tricky question, but the answer is yes, we wanna fix whatever issues people are running into.

Connectivity issues can come from a lot of different places. Sometimes we run into issues with servers, and we try to address them as we see them. One thing that helps us out is when players lets us know specifically which issues they're running into. A lot of times when we start seeing a lot of similar reports, that helps us solve it faster. We've got people working on the servers all the time, actually, and they ship a bunch of small tweaks that don't necessarily get blasted out with huge press releases.

So, my request: Keep us honest. Let us know in as great of detail as possible what you're running into and we'll always do our best to solve it (especially if it seems like something widespread and not on the user side or like a temporary ISP thing).

The plan is absolutely to have Legends release stronger than for instance Rampart or Loba did. It's really hard to predict how strong a Legend will be before we release them on live; there's so many of you playing so many games, you dwarf the sum total of our playtesting in like the first hour that a Legend is released. Fortunately we are a live game and can always react, but in future we'll be trying to err on the side of releasing ever so slightly too strong rather than useless. There's always a certain amount of time before a Legend reaches their full potential as you all learn them, so I'd rather risk the new Legend being too strong for a week or so than them being useless for half of the season.

Writing Fuse meant LIVING Fuse: My diet was simple, a playlist of Acca Dacca, the Oils, a little Crowded House, and watching "The Castle" on infinite loop.

As with any map update, there are always knock-ons to existing content. The Nessie's are no different! The Leviathans moved to the north end of the map for a closer look, perhaps a Nessie or two has done the same!

I like this idea. I'll also say that we really wanna do more original video content. Basically, the devs wanna connect with players more, and sharing behind-the-scenes stuff is one the best ways to do that, imo. Look out for some of that type of stuff in the next few weeks and months.

Good question. I think ever since the change to gas allowed teammates to play in gas with relatively no repercussions, there was a lot of unrealized potential that was quickly tapped into within the past couple months. Caustic is undeniably strong, and has the highest win rate in matches that last longer than 20 minutes. Caustic plays a unique role as a defensive legend that can act offensively in certain scenarios, and we have to make sure we tweak him in a way that removes frustration without hurting how it feels to play as Caustic.

Long story short, we hear the community feedback, as a player I feel it's valid, the data backs up that he's strong, and he'll be getting some attention in the near future. In regards to Apex becoming "Ability Legends," as new characters are introduced, it's important they take up a unique design space. This opens the door to potentially devastating synergies between legend abilities. I've seen (and experienced myself) the clips of chaotic ability driven end games, and that's something we're actively working on resolving.

Re-pasting from below, because this definitely is important:

It's a pretty tricky question, but the answer is yes, we wanna fix whatever issues people are running into.

Connectivity issues can come from a lot of different places. Sometimes we run into issues with servers, and we try to address them as we see them. One thing that helps us out is when players lets us know specifically which issues they're running into. A lot of times when we start seeing a lot of similar reports, that helps us solve it faster. We've got people working on the servers all the time, actually, and they ship a bunch of small tweaks that don't necessarily get blasted out with huge press releases.

So, my request: Keep us honest. Let us know in as great of detail as possible what you're running into and we'll always do our best to solve it (especially if it seems like something widespread and not on the user side or like a temporary ISP thing).

You're not wrong. Lifeline's ult is often underwhelming, to say the least. On the flip side, her passive is the root of a lot of player frustration. Seems like a prime candidate to receive some ability power shuffling...

Path is in a healthy spot right now in terms of pick and win rate! I do think he could stand to be a little more powerful, and he's definitely fallen out of the ALGS meta, which isn't a bad thing in and of itself seeing how long he was a must pick. I think we can probably take low profile off him soon and then we'll see what else we can give him to make him better in competitive again. Any ideas?

Horizon used to have Newt create a large low-grav AOE affectionately called the 'bouncy castle'. It didn't have much use in gameplay, but MAN it was fun! We also had the reverse as a test which was the 'ultra gravity dome' which was called 'the no fun castle' for removing the ability to sprint or climb. While effective it was TOO effective. I miss the bouncy castle haha.

We're always looking at the data for weapons and the Mastiff is no different! It's proving to be a very effective tool within the weapon arsenal. We don't have any rules when it comes to how we address each weapon as far as buff others or nerf the culprit, we have to evaluate what the right changes are for the overall health of the game. When it comes to tuning popular weapons its important to not compromise the identity of what makes those weapons so fun and popular, this is one of the reasons why it can take a seemingly long time to get these adjustments in- its because we're tuning, playtesting, and searching for the most cohesive change that we have confidence in.

*edited because I answered the wrong question here!

A lot of effort goes into developing new maps and map updates, currently, there are no plans to make multiple updates in a single season.

We are aware of this issue and looking at it as we speak.

What is the progress of designin a character?

Currently the way most characters in Apex are designed is someone comes up with a cool gameplay idea, we put in a very early prototype to try it out, iterate heavily on it until it feels promising, then we start talking to writers and artists about who this character could be, what they could look like and so on, and once we're all excited about making the character, we have a meeting where we let everyone know this character is now actively being worked on. From there on out it's just lots and lots of dev and playtesting and iteration.

Steve answered this one below! Comment link: https://www.reddit.com/r/apexlegends/comments/ldfgmq/respawn_here_we_just_shipped_season_8_mayhem_ask/gm5mby0/

It's so early! This is like asking someone who fell out of a 50th floor window how it's going as they fall past the 48th floor... going well so far!

No but seriously, we only have the smallest amount of data so far. Generally we try not to look at data until the new character's been out for at least a week or so.

THAT SAID... he seems to have released weaker than Horizon, but in a very healthy spot. His overall trios winrate on day 1 was 4.65%; we generally see new characters rise by about 0.5% winrate in their first two weeks after release, so if that holds true for Fuse (big if), he'll end up around 5.1%, which is basically a bullseye in terms of balance.

His pickrate was astronomically high on day one as well; a good 10% higher than Horizon's. Not sure what that means except that apparently gamers love explosions?!

We don't have a network engineer here in the AMA so I'm not going to get out of my depth and post a response about server tick rates just so Respawn can say we responded.

I'll do this though: I'll look into working with our network team to put together some in-depth comms around our plans for servers in the future. Will try to put that together sometime before the next season.

We want to work on a better onboarding experience in general, and this is a pretty cool idea. I am a big fight game nerd, so will definitely pass this along. :)

Octane was in a pretty good place before this buff, and I think he's received plenty of love lately. I'd argue his jump pad offers a lot of team utility now considering you can essentially traverse more ground than a Wraith portal, heal while doing so, and are hard to track with how fast you fly. If there was doubt before, I think it's clear now that he's solidified himself as the speed demon of the Outlands.

We actually consider what the loot looks like with a ton of different combinations entering and exiting the care package. This season we decided to keep the care package contents the same to allow for the meta to settle in with the addition of the 30-30, a weapon that has a somewhat similar charging mechanic- but this isn't a hard rule or anything. We know the peacekeeper is a fan favourite and is one of the first weapons we consider coming out of the care packages each season so keep an eye out in the future!

I think it's just a UI bug. We've got a fix in the works.

So Lifeline's supposed to be a supportive character; someone who helps her team. Putting fast heals on her was understandable from a fantasy perspecitve--she's a medic! She is super quick at using syringes!--but it made no sense at all for her gameplay fantasy: it only made her heal herself quicker, which is a very selfish type of power.

I agree with you that her passive is a big point of frustration in the playerbase and we're definitely looking at it. We've got some super early experimental changes we're playtesting right now, but it's too early to talk about yet.

Just as each Legend’s road into the Games is unique, so to is their creation process. With Fuse, an early version of the kit existed first. Character IS action – you are what you do – so the question was “If Fuse has these abilities, what kind of person is that?” The answer: A bad ass mercenary, biker, cowboy with a heart of gold.

Have you been in the Firing Range all this time?

Legend Class passives were something we experimented with a while ago. We had a decent one for recon, and passives for support/offensive/defensive we didn't really like. We ended up shipping the recon passive because we agreed it was good not to; the support passive was "can use blue bins", so we shipped that one for Lifeline (and there's a conversation if we should give it to Loba as well); for offensive legends, we had "can stack 2 grenades" (this was around the time we were making the changes to 1 grenade per slot), but we didn't think that's healthy for more than maybe one Legend in the game to have (hence it ending up on Fuse); for defensive characters we never had a good answer; we tried a very experimental "you can barricade doors so that they can only be meleed open plus it takes one more melee to do so", which was neat but a little too niche.

The answer here is we'll be very happy to ship more class passives if we find some that feel good for the game. Nothing new to share on this front right now.

Our ecommerce lead isn't here but I feel like I can take a crack at this.

The big reason it feels inconsistent from season to season is that we're always experimenting and trying to make stuff that performs really well. Sales stuff is really heavily informed by data of what performed well in the past, but we don't want to get stale, so sometimes we take shots in the dark to try to surprise and (hopefully maybe even delight??) players.

Wraith came into the game with the smallest hitbox, hard to hit animations, and a kit stacked full of combat and team utility. It's no surprise she's been the poster child of Apex. I fell in love with her early and 10,000 kills later she's still my all-time favorite. We do look at stuff like win rate and encounter win rate across skill buckets, and there is a correlation between good players and Wraith. Balancing abilities should be looked at first and foremost, but Apex is a gun game and the variables that effect metrics the most are hitboxes and low profile/fortified. So after modifying abilities and animations and not seeing her come down at all as an outlier, we had to look elsewhere. We don't shoot for 50% encounter win rates across the board, and we know that players with different skill and gameplay styles will be drawn to different types of legends, but outliers on both the high and low end should be brought in.

I get it. I really do think we should do an in-depth answer at some point because a flippant dismissal in an AMA just wouldn't be appropriate.

It's a totally fair question. When it comes to the competitive nature of Apex we are first a foremost a 3 legend squad game. The bulk of balancing is and will always be done with this game mode in mind. To have a true and competitive duos mode that is missing a third of a squad that the game is designed and balanced around can lead to an ultimately unstable experience at various levels of play and making those concessions knowing one mode suffers isn't something we're willing to do.

A major goal with every map update is to change up the way that players flow through it. One of the ways we do this is by looking at different sets of data. 3rd parties tend to be a commonly called out problem, and the data definitely reflects this. The Farm was one such area where a lot of 3rd partying was happening, so we decided to make a major change here and remove the building structures from the map, replacing it with a decimated version. This removal forces you to make different decisions and experience the map in a different way. We've decided to remove the replicator in the mid-season update, but the charge tower will remain so that there is still a reason to take the risk and rotate through here.

This is awesome! You are officially ready to write for Fuse :)

The team is without a doubt the top priority. I can tell you as fact that over the last year we've made decisions to push or completely remove full features from a season multilpe times for the long term health of the team.

Making Apex is our passion and it's really easy for us to push ourselves farther than we should because we love the game and we want to make the coolest stuff we can but sometimes that can go too far and we have to be constantly reigning ourselves in and getting better at staying within healthy limits.

The pandemic has had an impact as well since it's become so much easier to just plug back in to work from home at all hours, just finishing one more thing, then another and another. We've gone as far as having mandatory studio shutdowns to ensure we're all taking the breaks we need together but it's really a daily effort to keep our season to season plans balanced between our passion for the game and a healthy work load. It's a daily challenge to ensure we all remember to take time to spend away from the monitors and ironically enough that usually means spending time in front of another monitor playing Apex instead of making it.

Wall-jumping comes to mind. Definitely 100% a feature.

Yah it's a cheeky non-answer tbh but it's all we can say for now!

Yep, the features roadmap for clubs is actually pretty long and meaty right now. Lots more to come, it'll take us time to get it to where it really deserves to be, but there's a team working on it.

Good question! Apex is a game about being the best squad in the arena, and sometimes that doesn't mean thirsting every tall glass of Fuse you see. It means making tactical decisions, using creative positioning, and pouncing when the time is right to ultimately win the game. Rewarding extensive kill farming instead of playing for the win becomes a little disingenuous to what a game of Apex is all about. You're competing to be the Champion, not the kill leader and we feel strongly that your rank should reflect that.

Are you ever going to buff Rampart? She just seems so below par to the rest of the legends, she needs big buffs.

Agree! She definitely needs more! That said, based on about 2 days worth of data, the buffs in season 8 were pretty damn effective, which surprised me! We've got some plans for her in the long run, but we'll need to see how the current buffs settle first.

Adding on to this: our philosophy for when we embrace a bug as a feature (the polite term is emergent gameplay) is that as long as it doesn't necessarily makes the game a lot worse and if people are enjoying it, we try to keep it in. Wall-bounce is a classic example of this: it emerged from how our movement mechanics work and while it's important at the highest level, you really don't have to be able to perform a wall-bounce at most lower levels of the game. It's a cool moment and occasionally the difference between life and death, but it's really hard to do and even when you can reliably pull it off it's hard to know when you should try to be fancy and when it would be better to just run away / slide.

Contrast this with early Apex bunny hopping while healing where you were able to move at full speed while healing. That one was a hard to do input that was absolutely necessary to be competitive and made the game very frustrating if you couldn't do it but were up against someone who could. That one we removed from the game.

Another good example is the super jump on Octane's jumppad. It was super hard to discover and really difficult to do reliably, especially if you had any amount of latency at all. But it was a huge advantage. What's even worse, people who didn't play Octane didn't reliably get the chance to experiment with and learn the super jump. That's why we removed the super jump--by making it the default! Instead of requiring you to hit a jump nearly frame-perfect, we just said you always get it, putting everyone on the same level. We also added the much more learnable slide-jump that takes you farther: you can SEE other players visibly slide into a jump pad and learn it that way.

So while we don't have any plans to change wall-bounces at the moment, I could see us going either way if we ever did want to change them: either make them easier to do for the general population or remove them entirely if they turn out to become a mandatory thing to learn if you want to be competitive. But right now: wall-bounce away.

I’m happy to say every silly little line we wrote for Fuse passed regulations – but that’s because we write with those regulations in mind. And honestly, it’s fun to work inside limitations --- you’re forced to be more creative. Are there more colourful ways for Fuse to say “I didn't come here to shag spiders”? Sure! But “shag spiders” makes me laugh waaaay more.

Hope you don't mind me copy-pastaing this; I talked about Rev in a different answer:

Revenant's a tough one to tackle; while his performance does put him into a spot where he needs a buff, it's not clear which part of him we could buff without adding a meaningful amount of frustration to the game. His tactical and ult both are frustrating to fight; his tactical silences you, which is frustrating when you're mashing a key trying to save yourself with an ability; and his ultimate makes you fight enemies twice, setting up a baseline unfair fight.

Truth be told I'd really like to buff Revenant in a way that gives him the power he needs without making him a lot more frustrating to fight. That would imply stuff like hitboxes or his passive. We see the suggestion to give him infinite climb height a lot but it turns out this isn't quite as simple as tweaking a number; we'll need some time to figure out how to best make that happen. I'm also doubtful that it would actually meaningfully buff him, but it definitely would feel better!

Sorry I don't have more to share right now, but he is on our radar.

Horizon is strong. And now her lift cooldown is now more in line with other relocation abilities (Wraith phase, Path grapple). Her grav lift offers sooo much utility, and her black hole coupled with ordnance/other abilities can be inescapable at times. We're playing around with tweaks to her abilities to remove power without gutting what it feels like to play as her. Her passive and ultimate have really nice synergy with her tac, and we don't want to lose that.

I agree that it can be difficult to predict where Horizon will be at any point during an engagement. Right now her lift gives her full control about how long she can stay up the sky before dropping down. We're working on a resolution for that, so that it doesn't feel as bad or unpredictable on the receiving end. I agree that the strafe speed in the lift is extremely strong. We're looking at that as well.

I will humbly accept the role of sweatiest player in this AMA. I was Pred back in Season 3 before Masters was a thing. Some of you may have come across Redkulaid in PS4 Pred lobbies, he's an environment artist for us and he goes hard in ranked every season.

I'll bring him to the next AMA. Bet on it.

I should start by restating how we use data: we look at data points like win rate, pick rate, encounter win rate, win rate sliced by ranked bucket, win rate sliced by MMR and so on as a *starting point only*. We use all this only to begin the conversation: is this part of the game healthy? Is it frustrating? Is it powerful? (these aren't always connected! There are lots of things that are frustrating but not powerful etc). We then use both our design instincts and focused feedback and playtesting to confirm our assumptions before we make any changes.

So all that said, we try to be extremely careful in overinterpreting an individual data point like performance by skill. We look at broad trends: if a character is never picked in low skill but dominates the ALGS, then that's a data point we can use to direct our work. We also do a lot of under the hood things to normalize for skill; for instance, a question that comes up a lot is "is this character only performing so well because only good players pick them?" and the answer is almost universally no; both because trends are never that clear and because we control for that in our data.

We've tried so many different mechanics and abilities over the years, it's hard to pick just one but the most fun mechanics are generally the ones that are also the least fun/punishing for your opponents. That's a pretty common thing we run into as we iterate and try new things.

One that comes to mind recently was one version of Horizon's tactical, lovingly referred to as the "boop". Instead of a Gravity Lift players could throw out the same device and detonate a violent spherical physics impulse. You could stick it to any surface and use it to eject yourself, opponents or any other physics objects in any direction relative to it's orientation to the boop. It offered a ton of fun experimentation but needless to say ejecting opponents and allies off of Olympus or drops like airbase was just way too easy. It was hilarious for you but infuriating for everyone else. There's so many more along those lines.

We absolutely have! In fact it was shared with the whole team in our morning team meeting today! I haven't had a chance to go through all the letters yet but I'll be sitting down over the weekend to read through it all (and probably start following a ton of new artists)! From myself and and on behalf of all of us at Respawn thank you to everyone involved, its one of the most heartwarming and touching fan creations I have ever seen.

We started by looking at areas that we, as players, felt underused. A common opinion within our maps team was that the North part of the map could use some attention. We knew some of the rotations to Slums Lake were difficult so we thought about easing that up. We knew a flood was something we wanted to use to "wipe" the slums out and rebuild it, but the catylyst came about as we realized our timing of Season 8 lined up with our 2 year anniversary. A decomissioned gunship that was flying around and saluting the games was one of our early ideas. Eventually it fell in place with Fuse and Salvo joining the Syndicate. We originally intended to drop the ship in front of Bunker in that unnamed, desert town. We actually playtested that for a bit, before we came to the realization that we had an opportunity to solve some of the community's disappointment with the map being smaller after Skull Town was blown up. From there, we knew the mountain range in the North would be ripe for expansion. We hope everyone's having fun in those new spots! As for future modes, we're always looking at ways to expand beyond BR. Never rule anything out.

Exploration mode was brought in to help people adjust to our brand new map, Olympus as well as get a feel for our all new vehicle. Could we try it with our smaller map updates? Future new maps? Certainly if the appetite is there!

Wattson's in a very special place when it comes to pick rates and win rates. She is one of our most powerful characters across the board, stronger in high skill than in low skill, but she's practically not picked AT ALL in low skill (even though when she is, she dominates) and while her pick rate climbs slowly across skill ranks, she has an absolutely enormous pick spike at the highest end. We can't just add power that's useful for her at all skill levels because it might push her over the top at the very highest level of play. Even at low skill, if we did something simple like increase the rate at which her ultimate recharges shields, it would be inappropriate power at all skill levels; she'd dominate even more at low skill.

I really want to give Wattson power that makes her more fun to play; I would love to make this power more useful at low skill than at high skill, but even if we managed to pull that off we'd probably still need to compensate and take power out of her somehow in low skill.

I think most would agree, that a brighter, midday skybox, is both visually pleasing and better for gameplay visibility. That's not to say other skies wouldn't work, but you always want to balance the look of a sky with the chance of visual fatigue over an extended period of time. Honestly, it was a pleasant surprise to hear how many were happy that KC's sky reverted back to a bluer tone. We simply wanted to show as much of a visual change over the last update as we could. Hence, the change in water color as well. That decision was tied to the story we were trying to tell. Originally, the water looked much more polluted, but, again...visual fatigue and player mood can be influenced by color so we shifted to a more pleasing color while still insinuating the fuel leak. It seems to be a hit with the fans. Going forward, we will still try and create interesting and dramatic skyboxes, with lighting and visibilty front and center for gameplay.

Copy-pasting from elsewhere:

Legend Class passives were something we experimented with a while ago. We had a decent one for recon, and passives for support/offensive/defensive we didn't really like. We ended up shipping the recon passive because we agreed it was good not to; the support passive was "can use blue bins", so we shipped that one for Lifeline (and there's a conversation if we should give it to Loba as well); for offensive legends, we had "can stack 2 grenades" (this was around the time we were making the changes to 1 grenade per slot), but we didn't think that's healthy for more than maybe one Legend in the game to have (hence it ending up on Fuse); for defensive characters we never had a good answer; we tried a very experimental "you can barricade doors so that they can only be meleed open plus it takes one more melee to do so", which was neat but a little too niche.

The answer here is we'll be very happy to ship more class passives if we find some that feel good for the game. Nothing new to share on this front right now.

Gameplay first is the motto we live by. The decisions we make to change areas of the map are about how we want to change the gameplay experience. From there, we look for a wrapper. Sometimes the map team drives this and tells a story that's exclusive to the map and other times a character is introduced that feels like a natural way to tie into the map changes. It's been pretty fluid and organic and our writers are amazing at finding threads that they can tie together.

You and me both! There's a fine balance between bringing out new content and experiences in a consistent manner and still finding time to go back and address perceived weaknesses. I'd like to think we tend to make more people happy than we do not. As for Olympus, it's a very fresh map...you haven't seen the last of its evolution.

All of the above. They did become subtle death traps, but with the introduction of the explosive holds, we brought a more immediate and wider spread looting opportunity. At that point, they may have felt too redundant.

A very early version of the ship was tied to Horizon when we were considering her for Season 8. We had rough ideas around escape pods falling from the ship (which eventually became explosive holds). When Horizon moved to Season 7, the ship was still very much in play with Season 8. We knew we were coming out with the 2 year anniversary and thought having a gunship firing off its guns in celebration could blow up parts of the map we wanted to change. Fuse was then brought in, Mad Maggie and Salvo and the whole Syndicate unification came together after that and it all just organically fell into place.

Happy to hear you are loving the changes to Kings Canyon! The major goal for the update was to increase the overall size of the map, which is why we blew up the northern mountain range. Slum Lakes was always something that we wanted to update, as the data pointed to low drop rates in the area. It has always been a difficult place to rotate out of, so we really wanted to change that to get more Players dropping in that area.

You got this! Wishing you a successful recovery! f*ck Cancer. We'll be here when you're ready for action

Patience is a virtue.

Once again, happy to hear all the love for the changes to Kings Canyon! While I cannot speak to upcoming map updates, what I can say is anything is possible. We are always listening to the community and leaning into player data to decide what to do and what not to do. Thank you for your feedback and suggestion! With regards to the super spicy Mirage Voyage end circle, this was not an intentional ring change but it's awesome to hear that someone actually enjoyed the mayhem of it!

Did you guys take Ideas from Titanfall 2 for the legends? For example are Fuse's abilities inspired by Northstar's Cluster Missle and Scorches Fire Wall?

Yup, the Northstar cluster missile was a direct inspiration for Fuse's tactical.

That would give Rev and his team even more agency around the totem and thus make it more frustrating, I think.

Infinite climb definitely sounds like fun that won't increase power much. Some abusable spots in maps would have to be fixed / out of boundsed but we should do that anyway.

Not a big fan of messing with sounds as an output from abilities. It really sucks when your sound is unreliable, as we know all too well.

Yeah! There's a lot to figure out about the actual play experience of this (what buttons do I press? What kind of quick fence do I get?) but you're spot-on: moving setup-only abilities a tiny bit closer to reactive works wonders. That's the theory on which we made the current Rampart changes.

These are all cool but a little hard to explain/justify. I do like increased zip line speed for Path's team, but we'd really have to figure out how to tell you that this is an "allied" zipline.

Could totally see barricading come back as an ability on a character; the big question is what does that ability do for you when you're nowhere near buildings, out in the open.

Yup! Pathfinder spyglass is definitely an idea we've been playing around with. Would fit his recon identity and would return a real passive to him. That one's near the top of things I'd try. Do remember that there's a limited number of hours in the day and there's no guarantee we'll find the time to dedicate to Pathy (other than stripping low profile) any time soon.

We definitely want to help hearing impaired players, but this is a pretty tough subject in a highly competitive game. What if whatever visual indication of footsteps we put in became so noticeable and reliable that all players felt compelled to turn it on? The brute force solution here is to make it a toggle: either you get sounds or you get visual indications, but that runs into the "which one is optimal for competitive play" problem even more--what if we're not incentivizing our top players to play without sound because the visual indicators are so much better?

We absolutely wanna help, but we'll have to find the right way to do it.

We do wanna be very careful not to position abilities as primary damage dealers. Revenant's tac is pretty reliably hittable, so probably not a great candidate for more damage.

I hear you, and what you're saying agrees with my design instincts 100%; I didn't expect these changes to do very much... but it looks like they did? We have very little data, but Rampart moved up quite a LOT. Might be the Spitfire buff, might be gold mags, might be a combination of all of the above.

How about a second grapple mid-grapple? ;P

(I wanna be very careful about adding even more mobility to him)

One hundred percent, yes. That's the thing that makes this job so hard: make meaningful changes without breaking the meta in a bad way.

We don't even need to increase your CD I think. Like I said, we've started playtesting something.

It's very early but it seems like the nerf has worked. For now she dropped from 2nd to 4th place in trios winrate.

Very different type of game; for one, you have more than one life.

That's what makes buffing him so hard; it's clear he needs buffs, but it's also equally clear that tac and ult shouldn't be straight up buffed