Apex Legends Dev Tracker

I was working at a smallish fit-tech/game company called Zwift. The story of how I came to work at Zwift is quite random, but that's a bit of a tangent. Zwift raised a bunch of money in the time that I was there from VC/Private Equity and just changed a lot culturally, such that I thought I wanted to try working somewhere else.

Because of what I had done prior to working at Zwift, I was connected with the then Art Director on Apex on LinkedIn. And so I reached out to him and was like, "hey, you don't really know me, but you might remember my name. Anyway, I'd like to talk to you about working at Respawn." He was nice enough to respond. I found a couple roles that I thought might be a fit. I interviewed for one role. Got rejected. Applied for another role. The then Game Director Chad Grenier interviewed me and was, essentially, "convince me to hire you." I have a pretty non-traditional background, even for game development. I guess I did okay because I got the job....

Yes, and that was a big part of why we wanted to move to an MMR-based system. But in practice, player sentiment just wasn't there. I think some of it has to do with the natural arc that players had come to expect:

• Ranked is relatively easy at the start
• Ranked then becomes appropriately difficult through the middle as you settle into your skill band
• Ranked then becomes very difficult at the end if you push up into a higher tier that's likely at the upper limit of your skill.

One problem with an MMR-based system is that you lose this. And I think this is what people really didn't like. You could be in Bronze and facing Masters, because that was your skill level. So Ranked was never easy. And for a lot of players, that felt bad.

Now, you can certainly flex a bit on this. Like, you can do a hybrid system where rank is prioritized early and skill is prioritized late, but then you basically wreck the MMR experience...

What I will say is that I certainly don't take Apex's success - or even its existence - for granted. And will reiterate that what matters to players is what matters to me. And while I'd never speak for them, I believe that everyone I work with feels the same way. I know that's a bit of a non-answer. But hopefully also not.

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 ot...

Quick note that the team is aware and investigating. Added to Trello for tracking.

Quick note that the team is aware and investigating. Added to Trello for tracking.

Quick note that the team is aware and investigating. Added to Trello for tracking.

We have a fix coming in the 23.1 release.

The back story on this bug is actually quite funny. I'm one of the primary engineers on weapon cosmetics. During some random testing that required like super slo-mo playback, I noticed that when you do a dry reload, there's still a cartridge in the magazine, which of course there shouldn't be. Turns out this was universally true. There was just one model for the mags, and they all had cartridges in them, so we could use the same mag model for the ejected mag as well as for the new one. But that's just ... wrong. So we started fixing this, so a dry reload has a fully empty mag and a wet reload will have a cartridge in the mag. We're still fixing all the guns and not sure of final ETA. So if you dry reload and still see a cartridge in the ejected mag, that's why. Might also be some animation work on some guns needed as well. But we're getting there. But it is something we're fixing. Anyway, in the process of fixing this and setting u...

We're on it, should be back up shortly.

Should be coming back up shortly.

That's good feedback and I agree that having a singular source is always good. Blogs vs. dev post can depend on a number of factors. As an example, one of the reasons the Linux news was posted on reddit (with social amplification) was because that audience is quite present here. I'm all for blogs personally, especially if there's enough turnaround time for approvals, proper localization, etc. (that's a tad biased though since I write most of them).

Hey, Legends.

Below are some details from our dev team around our ongoing support for DirectX 12 (DX12)! Read on to learn more about us moving off of beta and what you can expect moving forward. Let us know your questions and feedback in the replies!

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