Apex Legends Dev Tracker

Yeeeeaaah when people ask me about the new weapon I'm like... wait... which one of the ones we've been playtesting for a year? Oh right it's the bow! Wow that's old ;P Character wise we're figuring out seasons 13 and 14 atm... just to give you an idea. But specifically the balance changes that people often try to read out of these trailers? We can't know until we live in the meta. Like ask me what meta changes I wanna make next season and the earliest I could possibly know is two weeks into the season.

Well what if you don't know who's shooting at you? You only heard bullets whizzing by? Wouldn't that be a bogey? ;P (I think we use the terms pretty haphazardly)

Oh she'll be strong. Terrified right now she might be too strong, but I've called my shots and now all we can do is wait.

Also these trailers are created with so much lead time we generally don't even know what the gameplay changes will be when we script the trailer.

Hope you like bandits and also bogeys

Yup!

Well until the 4th

Damn I have the same Banner!

Not a bad thought, and we looked into that! Hard to explain, but it would be more trouble that it's worth to repurpose the existing system to work in that way. It wouldn't really save any dev time to try to make mags work in a way that doesn't require "reloading", or could "reload while firing", etc. etc. Mags have a bunch of logic that assumes some consistent functionality around reloading and other stuff, and it would be risky to try to adjust what a "magazine" means. In general, it helps stability to make sure systems do a specific thing and do that thing in a safe and consistent way when possible! The more you start trying to have systems do all sorts of different variations of things while being "the same system", the more you tend to get weird bugs and issues.

All in all, the LSTAR doesn't really have a magazine for any of the ways we define "magazine" in script and code. It's cleaner and safer (and probably faster) if we just try to make a system for what the LSTAR...

https://imgur.com/a/fS3nkJb

Thanks all for the comments, sorry I can't go through and respond to each. I don't mean it in a rude way, but suffice to say that if you have thought about it in the time it took to read this comment, I guarantee we have also thought about it as an option haha! I can't really go through and explain each technical piece and why this and why not that for each option, but I promise it's not as easy as "but why not just do this obvious thing" -- if an obvious answer was tenable we would have done it already, that's all ;)!

We're working on it, but we want to do it the right way. There are probably gross hacky ways to fake it and maybe make it work, but that likely leads to bugs and hidden issues that might not crop up until the future. Ideally, we get some sort of stable decent solution that is robust and ready to go for any future weapons we want to do that might also not have magazines 👀

Hope everyone enjoys the new season!

We are trying to work with a similar concept! It's just pretty complicated and risky from a code/script standpoint, so it wasn't ready for this season unfortunately.

That's prettyyyy convoluted, I would imagine very few players would understand what was happening. You'd also have bizarre secret optimizations like "if you have less than 20 energy ammo you should drop it first" that don't feel good and are hidden to most players. Like I said, once you start having to do really complicated conditionals, it's generally a sign you are on the wrong path. It's not enough to have a behavior that works, players also need to be able to understand it (and when players are trying to focus on the game, things need to be AS OBVIOUS AS POSSIBLE! haha). As someone who made an incoming new hopup that's arguably too confusing, I'm very worried about that learnability stuff, and I'm sure you will all make me eat my words here!

If you feather the trigger you can fire the LSTAR infinitely

It doesn't seem worth it to completely destroy the thing that makes this gun unique just to fix this bug in my opinion Also, that would take a ton of work! New animations, new sounds, new model work, new rigs, how to make it work on the legendaries, etc.

No problem! I enjoy trying to give some insight on why things are sometimes more complicated and tricky than they seem. The saying "the devil is in the details" is very very true in game dev (and most creative / problem solving endeavors tbh). Games are hard! But, these sorts of sticky problems are interesting and cool to think about, and I enjoy talking about them!

There are big sticky hard questions in design that are project wide difficulties, like "how can you make a game mode like battle royale that heavily uses randomness and variance to drive continued engagement while also wanting that game to be competitive, which requires the perception that the more skilled players will be the most successful". These are the real juicy ones that are very difficult and take a long time to work on, and often you never "solve" them, you just do what you can to find a compromise that works for your target audience. People love to talk about these ones because they are exciting and ...

As noted above, then as a someone carrying a Devotion shouldn't I just pick up and drop every LSTAR I come across? Then I gotta re-pick up the weapon I dropped, and re-add attachments, which is clunky and annoying. But if I don't I'm literally just not picking up ammo that I need, so I feel like I need to do it. The game is actively encouraging me to do something that sucks. Then, since everyone is running around picking up and dropping LSTARs for the free ammo brick, there are gonna be tons of LSTARs I find that don't have ammo anyway, and we are in the same problem, it's just unreliable and inconsistent now!

Care package weapons are a different type of ammo system entirely. Apex weapons use "ammo pools", which is a value we can set on the player and is used so that ammo is a loot item in apex that goes in your inventory. For most weapons, the "ammo pool" for the ammo type (say, energy ammo), is the reserve ammo, but it doesn't count any ammo in the mag. If you have a Volt with 15 rounds in mag and 4 rounds reserve, you have 4 energy ammo in your inventory. If you reload and the volt has 19 rounds in mag, you have 0 in reserve and no energy ammo in inventory. If you drop the volt, it still holds that 19 rounds in mag, so another player picks it up and it has 19 rounds (simplification of some tech stuff here). When you first pick up a weapon, we give it a full mag, so you get some ammo. The issue is that the LSTAR has a magazine size of 0. This specifically makes it act like the "infinite ammo" / "no reload" type of weapon, but then it doesn't have any ammo that "live in the mag...

We are trying to find a good solution for this! It's tougher than it seems. As noted by others, the LSTAR uses ammo in a different way. Most guns have ammo on pickup because the ammo in the magazine doesn't count towards ammo in your inventory, so they can spawn with a full mag and not have it affect your inventory at all. The LSTAR's ammo count is just the amount of ammo you have in your inventory, so if you pick it up with no ammo in inventory, then it's 0 which stinks. Hopefully it's not a problem every time much because guns have their ammo spawn next to them, but it definitely is too common that you get one with 0 ammo and can't use it, which sucks.

There are a few solutions that seem possible but have some pretty big problems that make them untenable. The most obvious one is "what if you got free ammo in your inventory when you picked up an LSTAR?", but then people could get infinite ammo! This leads into "what if the LSTAR only gave the ammo when it was pi...

On our internal test servers I run the club "SMOOTH BRAIN MOM" (would have been moms, but char limit ;P) with a tag of [SBMM]. I feel that's pretty top tier too.

Smooth brain moms and sugar daddies unite!

Happy Bday!!! congrats on the lvl up!