Apex Legends Dev Tracker

Tough question, but I'll try to answer sincerely and in good faith since you aren't being rude! We have a strong culture of playtesting at Respawn and have multiple playtests per week where everyone on the team is welcome to join in, play the upcoming content and provide their feedback. We also will occasionally host playtests with pros and content creators to get their feedback on upcoming content. Despite all of that playtesting, nothing can match having content be released into the wild and played by the players to see how a piece of content actually ends up performing. Seer specifically went through multiple gameplay kits and iterations before shipping which was shaped directly by both internal and external feedback. With that being said as I mentioned in another comment we will be adjusting some of his power in an upcoming patch.

Next year.

Cross progression is gnarly as hell in terms of being a problem to solve. It's not only that you have to solve the technical challenge of merging existing accounts, but there are also legal and contractual issues to navigate with purchasing on other platforms. Different regions have different laws. It's a mess. But we're working on it, and we're committed to delivering it.

Playable quests are really hard to do each season without burning out the team. It's an enormous amount of work to make quests every three months. We're definitely not stepping away from lore in our game though--we have some ideas, including some future seasonal work, that will potentially bring even more lore than what the in-game comics offered.

Can't say specifics yet, but we're currently looking at other ways to tell story in the game, as well as continuing to drop lore on social from time to time.

Are you planning to buff wattson in the future?

We are looking into some improvements to Wattson but not sure when those changes will be coming

We didn't really take inspiration from Black Panther, but we are definitely flattered that those comparisons are being made!

There's been a bunch of misinformation out there about "server contracts ending," and it actually isn't true. Just misinformation.

We also had an engineer go in-depth on the tickrate question in this blog. We think there's a bunch of high-impact work we can do to improve server performance, and hopefully you've noticed some improvements with this latest season launch.

In terms of expanding into less well-covered regions, nothing to announce here. Which regions do you think need better coverage?

Yes there is more then just pick rates and win rates that we look at. We do have really detailed stats like Legend vs Legend, encounter win rates and how long certain characters are surviving. All these stats, community feedback and playtesting help us drive our tuning decisions.

Lore will be released throughout the season in the game and on social with a bit more heavy weighting in the latter half...

What kind of stuff are you excited to see?

Oh man, I WISH I had an update to share but we can't say anything definitive at the moment—so can't spoil anything here. Trust us tho, it's in the works and we're excited about it too

Seer has launched strong, which was the hope. He's also brought a lot of new gameplay elements to the game (HP bars, interrupt) which has driven a lot of discussion with players, which is great to see. With that being said is probably a bit too strong at the moment and will receiving some balance updates in an upcoming patch.

It's definitely on my radar. It doesn't repro in dev like it does on live, which has made it a little hard to track down. I'm hoping to get a fix out as soon as I can.

As of right now, we have no plans on changing up Fragment East or West, but I won't rule out anything for the future. We are aware of some of the communities feedback about the POI and are paying attention.

Yeah I asked the dev team about it earlier this week because someone else was asking. This was how the dev responded:

They were using it to change the audio so that occlusion no longer occurs, allowing you to hear people clearly across the map. This is obviously not intended and never was intended - this takes away from the entire audio design of the game - so we disabled it (the fact that they were able to edit it to begin with is the problem).

That being said, I think this answer isn't to dismiss any criticism of the audio, though. Still open to feedback on ways to improve it. Hope that's clear!

I can talk about the prowler, we are watching it and will be looking into a potential nerf coming soon

EDIT: THE AMA HAS CONCLUDED! Thanks everybody!

In today’s AMA we’ve assembled some of the lead devs from the team that brought you the Emergence update—including Seer, the Rampage LMG, the latest World's Edge update, and Ranked Arenas.

Today's AMA officially opens at 11:30am PT and runs until 1:00pm PT.

Got questions? Hit us.

Below is the list of devs participating in today’s AMA, along with their area of focus. Feel free to point specific questions at any of us by tagging us.

u/RSPN_Jello - Game Designer

u/RoboB0b - Senior Game Designer

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LOLOL.
I know thats why I m asking :P
I'll make a thread and let you all give me the pitch forks soon.

Nah

Since you are suggesting changes to the drone, are we talking about the passive, or just adding anti-scan to the character in general? If we are talking about the latter (just adding anti-scan), we are starting a whole new discussion and the considerations and variables we need to discuss

I don't see why there couldn't be a legend that created an anti-scan AOE of some sort as an ability.

You would be correct on that assumption; We still need to consider if that would be degenerate in some way; and that the gameplay involving 'creating a fog of war' isn't just 'smokes' gameplay. But conceptually, there isn't a reason to say a character can't have a specific niche, in fact, I think it's a good thing. Creates a strong character identity.

That said, I feel there is a need for a hard counter to exist against combat intel legends as such. There are very few meta abilities in the game that have zero hard counter. AOE damage dealers, defensive zoning tools, personal mobility abilities, visual obfuscation tools, they all have a counter. Combat intel legends don't have that.

I don't want to jump into that conversation, but that would be an argument to nerfing/constraining scans systematically. I'm...