Saturday marks my four year Anniversary at Respawn and on Apex. I get up every day excited to work on this game. And, over time, that excitement has only grown. One special thing about working on a game with a proprietary engine is that you can do literally anything. The more you understand about what your tech does and how it works (or could work), the more interesting things you can build. Every year, this game just gets more fun and more interesting to work on.
But the best part of working on this game is the players. For two reasons. It's a lifetime opportunity to work on a game of this scale. There just are not that many games with a player base this size. And that causes a lot of really maddening and fascinating problems. I've lost track of the number of cases of, "well, this should never happen, but I think there's a chance it could, so I'll defend against it and add some logging to see if it actually does happen." Spoiler: the thing happened.
The other reason is that players just care a lot about this game. And that's also just super rare and super special. The Legends, the lore, all of it. The Respawn office in LA is covered with fan art. And it's amazing. Every time I see it, it just blows me away. People love Apex's characters. And I try to be mindful of my role as a steward of those characters that mean so much.
In the time that I've been here, I've gotten to work on a ton of interesting stuff. Some of which players liked. Others stuff, not so much:
- My first big project, in Season 8, was the categorization of badges. Something inspired by this very sub!
- Either/Or (Multi-Game Mode) Challenges in (I think) Season 14 (maybe...)
- The move of Ranked to an MMR-based system in Season 17
- Ranked Trials in Season 19
- Deathbox Customization in Season 19
- Undoing the Ranked MMR system in Season 20 because y'all didn't like it very much
- The Customization System for the Katar in S21
- Art-only Trackers in S22
Those are the big things I remember anyway. I've introduced a bunch of bugs. Fixed a bunch of bugs. And just, in general, had an awesome time. I know the game is not perfect. But I also know that the things that matter to the players also matter to me. And I believe that to be true of everyone I work with.
I hope that Apex continues to thrive for at least another four years. And I hope I get to be a part of it.
As a quick PS, I won't respond to specific questions about bugs or features just because it becomes overwhelming to try to do so. To the extent that folks have questions I can answer or want to have a discussion about working on the game, I'll try to do so.
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