No problem! Thanks for the question :)

I love ranting about this stuff haha! I am very fortunate to have a job I care about a lot and have players who love the game so I can get paid to do it :D

What are the main issues you find? Is it with specific guns or specific situations more than others? Any info is good! Always willing to take a look at this stuff and make improvements! We try to find a balance between "visible enough to give you the information you need" and "not in the way of what you are trying to see", but it's obviously never perfect! Maybe we could make a specific "high visibility" mode that players could toggle so we could help with those preferences. No promises, but always happy to hear specifics of where you have the issues!

Since it's a competitive multiplayer game, I doubt we'd give dev command access stuff in general, as it would be ripe for abuse and cheats! I'm also not sure if even ships with the game like that? As far as viewmodel FoV, I'm actually not entirely sure! There's a lot of math to adjust for main camera FoV changes and all that, so I don't know how much code work it would be to support vm fov as a player facing setting? I also would say that our artists and animators work really hard to present the game in the way they think looks best for the player, and forcing our viewmodel animations to work with lots of different vm fovs seems perhaps too limiting. I will follow up with folks and see how feasible it is and how people feel though!

Random aside just cause I see the sentiment a lot... It's not really a Source game, the engine started as a fork of Source, but it's pretty significantly different in tons of ways. No shade to you at all, thanks for the question! I just want to m...

No current plans for crosshair customization unfortunately. Apex's crosshairs are actually quite complex and technical. They don't just grow and shrink in size due to hipfire spread! They move based on aim point movement due to animation and such, change color and add elements sometimes due to character abilities (pathfinder grapple), fade in and out based on sprinting and ammo, go transparent on and off with ADS and menus, and all sorts of stuff. Building a system such that we can present options for players, preview the results, and hook all that data deep into our crosshair UI script would be a really massive undertaking, and it would make future changes and new crosshair additions way more difficult. It's just not high on the priority list in terms of bang for the buck sadly.

It would be nice, and maybe we can get some smaller scope stuff in like color adjustments, but no promises for now, sorry!

Unfortunately, probably not. It wouldn't be good for a cosmetic item to give in game power, definitely want to avoid that when possible. It would be pretty sweet flavor though!

I assume you mean the local charge up without a beam and then single fire shot, so I'll respond based on that assumption! I'm not the original designer on the Charge Rifle, so I can't comment with 100% certainty on the decision, but the main answer is counterplay and victim frustration.

One of the major axes of power for an Apex weapon is something I personally call "burstiness" (it's a technical term). While TTK and DPS refer to how quickly a weapon can kill someone, "burstiness" is how much damage is done in one short moment, or how _spikey_ it is. Most snipers have quite poor TTK, i.e. they don't down players as quickly as any of the other guns, because they have very slow fire rates comparatively. But, the tradeoff for this is that they do lots of damage in one shot, which has advantages in certain situations like catching someone by surprise, or engaging in peeking poke battles where players will hide back in cover as soon as they start taking damage (and you can hide ...

We experimented with lots of stuff! Lots of spaces in BR maps and also lots of custom map prototypes. We learned a lot about what works and what doesn't, and unfortunately small maps just didn't really work imo. In my personal experience they felt like they got too same-y really quickly, you lose most of the interesting and meaningful decision making about where to go based on where you think the enemy will go, weapon loadouts, etc. The POIs like the health bins and the cash stations and the care package just felt all too close together too.

I'm no level designer, this was just my personal experience with it, but wanted to note that we have been experimenting a lot with this before launch, and will continue to do so!

As you will find with most creative mediums, the tool itself is really not the important part. I believe most animators in the industry currently use Maya due to ingrained tech, but Blender is free and would be fine too! I am not an animator, but I bet you can find online intro courses on animation on various sites like udemy and such (not sponsored, just the one I personally use lol).

I am going to give the advice I would always give to people who want to get into game design, and hope that it's relevant. The answer is that you just gotta get your hands dirty and do it! Truly, if you want to be an animator, you just have to start animating! You will learn so so so much just by actually creating things start to finish. It helps you identify what pieces you like and gravitate towards, and helps you ask meaningful questions. It's impossible to start from the "I am gonna go and learn everything first then I'll do it", because it just doesn't make sense or stick if you don't ha...

That's the canon explanation in game! There's a mechanism on the grip that allows for usage powered by the weapon itself. There are still problems if you think about it too much, but yea lol

The Animation team at Respawn is truly incredible! I have the distinct joy to work closely with Shawn, our viewmodel animator, and man he's just unbelievable. He does all of the legends, did almost all of the heirlooms (octane knife inspect and bangalore knife being the exception s), and does all of the weapons. He is an absolute powerhouse of productivity that I just cannot fathom, and he still finds time to add all the flourish and polish and charm of rare special animations and all that. I work most closely with him and our engineer Ravi (who is also an incredible powerhouse handling the entirety of weapons code AND AUDIO CODE WHAT ^{EDIT: Not the only person working on audio and fixing audio bugs! Others derfinitely jump in and out to support when needed, he just did the lion's share of the initial feature work} by himself, not to mention his technical skill and strong design sensibility), and it's really humbling to work with such incredible people.

People give...

Doesn't really solve cases like bangalore holding her smoke out, or ziplines, or gibby arm shield, so we still needed to come up with a more general solution. At that point, not really worth fixing that one specific case with a whole new solution I think!

I would say at this point it doesn't really run on Source. In the same way that Source originally started from GoldSrc, or GoldSrc started from Quake, our engine started from Source, but almost all of the major pieces have been completely rewritten! There are always weird little vestiges though haha

You don't even want to know the amount of meetings and work that went into trying to solve the one-handed problem. We legitimately tried and retried stuff on this constantly for like 8 months lol! Our poor animator... Fundamentally, our game assumes one handed behavior is always possible with a gun, and that the gun is always held with the right hand while doing so. This just doesn't work with a bow, and there's no good way around it that isn't bizarre when you stop to think about it. We planted the flag from the start that it was of critical importance that players could still use the weapon fluidly in all of the expected cases (on ziplines, using certain abilities, LITERALLY ANY TIME GIBRALTAR GOES ADS, etc.). I think it was worth having a little jank to make sure the weapon was as fun as possible, and it was still worth shipping the bow with this goofiness! Hopefully this isn't too visually distracting in actual gameplay hahaha!

Yea, this! It's about the visual bug. These patch notes go through lots of people and we missed this on our read over, sorry bout that!

Wanna know the crazy thing? Modern huge game engines are very very rarely built from scratch, always built as modifications of the past things. Our mags are called "clips", because we inherited that when the original folks took source and started doing heavy modifications to it, but it wasn't worth trying to change the name. And Source came from GoldSrc (made for Half-Life), and probably inherited the naming there. And guess where GoldSrc came from? Quake! It is entirely possible, and perhaps even likely, that mags in Apex are referred to in code as clips because that's how it was first written in the 90s!

Legit almost all modern engines have some roots to OG Doom or Quake -- they are entirely different engines at this point, but there are often these weird remnants that get strung along for decades because it's just not worth doing all the work to rename something like that!

It's an eternal and silly problem of software, you have to make early decisions ...

Hey! I edited the comment, but wanted to say that I think my reply being to your comment was unwarranted, sorry about that. I was just reading a ton of the nasty comments surrounding it and just kinda replied to the last one I saw, but yours is definitely the least offensive by a long shot, sorry to get your downvoted by the hive mind! I appreciate your question, sorry for snapping on the phrasing, it just is the sort of thing that beats you down and sometimes the last straw is at the wrong place wrong time, I apologize!

Also, I'm just a designer, but the weapons engineer gave some more context which is better and has more accuracy and details! I think it was on your comment too, but mostly directed at the general nearby comments of "sounds like ur code sucks u idiots lel", not very "your comment" specific. https://twitter.com/ravi_ramas/status/1387971094280237059?s=19

Sorry about that...

Hahaha nooooo I promise!

The real story is that I had been working on this prototype, and we needed to get the name decided to record VO. VO is recorded way ahead of time, and there is no way to emergency add it, because it's all based on voice actor schedules and such. So very early on, we had to come up with a name with the weapon. I am not particularly great at names, so I went to our wonderful and kind writers who I often bother to help me come up with names. We made a short doc, and wrote a bunch of names -- there was an attempt to get my name in in some sort of hidden way, like SEK-197 or whatever ("bow" + "sek" easter egg), but we were thinking probably something like "Hornet" or some tech gun name "Hornet", like we do "M600 Spitfire". Then, the lead writer at the time, made the executive decision to name it after me, albeit pronounced slightly differently. I tried to tell people to maybe also record "Hornet" as a backup in case we don't like it, but he was being v...

I don't usually respond to this kinda comment, and I don't want to be too curt, but the tone you have here doesn't seem to be in very good faith, and maybe it can help be a learning opportunity. You guys seem like you may work in engineering, but definitely not in games. Games are software, but they are also FAR more than pure lines of code. How about assets? What about sound files or animations? There's no trivial "replace all instances" on binary proprietary data compression files. You can try and make tools to do stuff, and I would argue our internal tool for this is really quite incredible for how well it manages most of these assets (the engineer who made it is incredibly smart). But it is a universal truth that renaming the weird mess of asset file code executable VM dependency that comprises game projects is very costly and can cause lots of bugs and be unsafe. Gotta do it with good purpose! I know the tech artist I work closely with was working real late with me for a coupl...

The goal is that they are a lot better off drop! Maybe aren't there exactly, but we'll see and adjust, but the goal is that the P2020 and Moz are getting big buffs

They are mags! Dev names are just silly sometimes :)