Respawn Addresses Apex Legends Ongoing Issues With The Game

With the announcement that Apex Legends Season 2 details will come in June, Respawn Entertainment has provided a much-needed update on the state of its battle royale title. Executive producer at Respawn, Drew McCoy, wrote a lengthy blog post discussing server performance problems, audio and hit registration issues, content update plans, and more.

The post outlines how the California-based studio intends to deal with several issues impacting Apex Legends, including closely monitoring server performance at the beginning of matches, tracking incorrect (and inaccurate) hit detection and registration in-game, and more. “The stability of Apex Legends is very important to us,” McCoy said. “And we’ve been doing a lot of work internally to improve our processes across the board.” Respawn admits there’s a growing strategy to deal with cheaters but hasn’t announced anything yet “to avoid telegraphing our moves.”

Respawn has yet to confirm when Apex Legends will see these changes but will “talk more about the work that’s being done in these areas and provide updates about when we’ll be addressing them in future patches” over the next few weeks. You can read the full details below.

Slow Server Performance at the Beginning of a Match

• So far, we know that it affects some datacenters more than others, it happens on many different server configurations, and it doesn’t seem to hit multiple server instances running on the same machine. In other words, it’s not that a machine is overloaded and everything on it is running too slow – it’s that one instance on the same machine seems to be doing more work than the others, and we’re trying to nail down what work it’s doing and work backwards to understand the root cause. This is extremely high priority for us, and we’ll keep you updated on our progress.

Audio Issues

• Currently testing some potential fixes that will hopefully address many of the performance issues we’ve seen reported.

Cheaters

• We’ve been doing a lot of work behind the scenes. This is something we will always be more secretive about to avoid telegraphing our moves to cheaters, but we’ll be sharing more on the progress made next week.

Hit Registration Issues

• We are adding engine features to help track down and report instances of incorrect hit registration in playtests so we can force the bug and reproduce the issue consistently. While we have made some progress with some fixes locally, more work needs to be done to address the root of the problem.

Season Launches

• The beginning of each season will start big with a new Battle Pass, a new Legend, something new for the meta, and more.

Thoughtful Updates Throughout the Season

• Just as we’ve done since launch, we will continue to address exploits, necessary balance changes, bug fixes, and small features throughout the course of a season. For complete transparency, our goal isn’t, and never has been, to patch or update content on a weekly basis. We believe strongly in the importance of large, meaningful changes to the game that have lasting impact, thus our focus on a seasonal release cadence we laid out at launch. We will continue to follow this cadence in the future.

Improved Communication

• We need to provide more visibility into the future, and what we’re working on. That doesn’t mean we’re going to start telling folks everything they want to know when they want to know it, but you can expect more transparency on future updates and fewer surprise drops.

Transparency is paramount to Respawn, with McCoy stating that it “[needs] to provide more visibility into the future, and what we’re working on.” Apex Legends players can “expect more transparency on future updates and fewer surprise drops.”

McCoy didn’t shy away from the conversation around crunch. In a week when Polygon unveiled Epic Games’ severe work conditions on Fortnite, McCoy said “the studio culture that we’ve worked hard to cultivate, and the health of our team are very important.” He added that Respawn wants to avoid crunch because it can “quickly lead to burnout or worse.” This means any future Titanfall projects are delayed indefinitely to fully support Apex Legend’s longevity. “No resources from the Apex Legends team are being shifted to other titles in development here at the studio,” McCoy confirmed. “Nor are we pulling resources from the team working on Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order.”

from GameSpot – Game News https://www.gamespot.com/articles/respawn-addresses-apex-legends-ongoing-issues-with/1100-6466490/