Apex Legends Dev Tracker

If something's problematic at the comp level, it's probably only a matter of time before it rears its head in some way down the chain in Ranked. We want to preserve parity between comp and the main game so that spectators don't feel a disconnect: "This could be YOU one day."

Great question. We don’t have a steadfast rule around which abilities get two charges. It’s easy to turn on as a balancing tool, but two charges have big, potentially scary consequences. However, I do think we have a history of being overly cautious when shipping new Legends with tacticals that have potential to be “aggressively imposing” in good players’ hands.

It’s preferable for players to feel like they got outplayed by their opponent, not that they simply died to a tactical. Tacticals that restrict the ability to fight back or inflict damage on a low cooldown are much more viscerally connected to the latter. (“Where’s the skill expression in Knuckle Clustering a rock?” or “I couldn’t move/shoot/use my abilities!”) A lot of Assault abilities creep towards this slippery slope. If we’re doubling the cadence at which you can use those abilities, sure, it’ll add power and open up a bunch of new gameplay opportunities, but at what cost?

Similar to the response from ...

Yes. I think it's short-sighted and naive not to think about how we can affect the meta with system-level changes to breath new life into the ever-growing cast of Legends. We've learned a lot from the Legend Class Rework!

Ash.

During development we were extremely concerned over the power of her tactical. Seems like a joke, right? But for a long time it was very potent and internal feedback on it's power was loud. Even after reeling it back to what we eventually launched with, a well coordinated team could snag an enemy and reign inescapable grenades on them securing a kill more consistently than a Horizon ult combo. With the power to follow-up and chase with her Ult, the offensive team potential, and the map knowledge from her passive - she seemed poised for a strong foothold in the meta for edge play, but there were cumbersome elements to each of her abilities that bogged her down and never let her fully excel or play as reactive as you need to be in the high level. And once Valk arrived with superior macro-rotation and beacon scan, there was no real place for her on the squad. Tac changes have helped, not sure if it's quite there, and the ult is still unreliable though.

Somethin...

How much do you guys like JIRA tickets

In the past we've explored the possibility of weather features like dense fog and falling snow. The biggest challenge is to introduce an element like this that performs well across ALL possible consoles and PC specs and gives a consistent player experience so that there isn't a competitive disadvantage. Adding ambient details in the forms of falling leaves, snow, rain, etc. adds a lot to the believability of a world, but can heavily impact gameplay in a negative way. We see how changing our time of day can sometimes alienate our players...so weather is an element we are even more cautious about.

Naming things is one of the least favorite things to do in all of game dev.:)

Glad you're enjoying the new Storm Point! When the map launched, it was clearly more preferred by Ranked and Pros vs the more casual audience. When we did the first update and introduced the Downed Beast and IMC Armories it felt more like a nudge than a shift. The first update came 2 seasons after the map launched, so it felt too soon to really get enough feedback and analysis given our dev time from launch to that first update. With the second update, we gave ourselves more time and made a concerted effort to make major changes in an effort to hit our goal of balancing Ranked vs Pub enjoyment. Our biggest takeway is that we need to give ourselves time to dissect feedback, thoroughly test and prove out our design goals and make impactful changes

Thanks for the feedback! In an ideal world, our map updates knock it out of the park, hit all our design goals and are well received and balanced. IF we find there are further things to be done, then we can start to plan a future update. As of right now, there are no plans to do another update on Storm Point. If that day comes, we'll start to think about what those changes can be and what the story is that we can tell. Some other maps DO have story arcs we'd like to do through multiple updates, but unless there's a design need, we don't want to do change for the sake of change.

None that I'm aware of. What would you call them?

I touched a bit on this in my prior answer to a similar question here https://www.reddit.com/r/apexlegends/comments/180tcus/comment/kad02qy/?utm\_source=reddit&utm\_medium=web2x&context=3

Balancing visibility across large maps is not an easy task. We focus on the main POIs and golden routes first, but there are some secondary or tertiary areas that sometimes don't get the same amount of attention due to time and scope. You can expect tweaks here and there, but we won't do another big swing of a lighting or skybox change unless it's a potential future map update...

I'll tackle the first question. Introducing new lighting into a map that's familiar is always going to open up opinions. We certainly take feedback re: visibility seriously, but we also want to create variety across our maps. If all maps had the same midday, blue skies they would all start to blend together and feel the same.

That's a very deep question...and certainly a tough one to answer thoroughly. I'll try and break it down as simply as possible.

1. LD (Level Design) does a paper design and proposal.

2. LD blocks out and we start to playtest.

3. Art Direction puts together a style guide and Narrative gets looped in for gut checks.

4. LD is iterating while Art starts doing Look Dev on biomes and assets.

5. LD starts handing off areas to art that are "locked" (iteration still happens but on a refined scale.)

6. Skybox and lighting starts development.

7. Art is in full production and LD is refining, adding cover and other gameplay elements.

8. FX and Audio start getting visibility and doing their passes.

9. PLAYTESTING AND REVIEWS HAPPEN THROUGHOUT.

10. Optimizations, bug fixing, polish from all departments

11. SHIP!

That is OVERLY simplified ...

That's a good suggestion! Something worth bringing up to the team!

Excellent questions! The Games take place on Syndicate Worlds, so Págos and Nexus would not be considered unless they were to somehow join the Syndicate. That's not to say the Syndicate would never expand (as we saw in Season 8 with Salvo joining.)

As for question #2, new maps are prototyped with a gameplay goal in mind. Level design focuses on the experience with some very light exploration around biomes or themes. As it starts to take shape, the narrative backstory starts to form, visuals and mood boards get put together and those help inform further development of POIs and possibly new gameplay ideas. Design always comes first! We add context and flavor later.

Suotamo has been dealing with blackouts ever since the storm hit and took out the infrastructure. The Energy Banks are running low and it's affecting quite a few districts throughout the city - in particular E-District which is the part of the city that Crypto was originally from. This in turn has caused turmoil in the streets as citizens have begun fighting over what remaining power there is. Wattson's "Project Electro" plans (as seen in her POI) is in reference to E-District and trying to help her friend's neighborhood. I certainly hope we'll see some sort of resolution to the energy crisis in the near future.