• Titanfall/Apex Legends thread v2: gotta go fast
    122 replies, posted
Apex Legends updates less to maintain dev quality of life | Game.. Spot on. Zampella isn't a fucking dictator and understands his team have lives. Apex will likely stay at a fairly stable, but slow release cycle as Respawn are doing other shit too.
I would argue that means Respawn needs to hire more people, obvs zameplla is being a good guy and not overworking his team, but that's having the side effect of making the game dwindle, fast - sooner rather than later, there's not going to be an audience for the game - especially if the high profile streamers are being vocal about leaving.
Never has a dev company been less equipped to handle, and dropped the ball harder for, a huge success. Realistically nobody sensible was asking for weekly updates, and the fact that they mentioned that kind of amuses me. League of Legends, the biggest PC game, updates every other week. Fortnite updates every other week as well iirc, maybe even less frequently. A majority of modern games, even GaaS games, don't even have set update schedules. But it's clear that they want to treat Apex as an actual retail game with hours of unhindered gameplay when it isn't. It's a Games-as-a-service game with a single gamemode. There isn't enough depth to be held, there's no competitive mode to grind, there's no variety outside of the main game. If Respawn can come back around and prove that they're putting their best foot forward and learning from this launch, then I'll happily eat my words. I'd love nothing more than for Apex to be as good and as popular as it was for the first ~3 weeks. But... so many failures to follow up on promises, so little communication, so little potential for consistent content in a game model that needs it to live. If it wasn't free-to-play, it'd be as mismanaged and bad off as TItanfall 2 was.
I expect they are quite a small team, and expanding would probably do them a world of good. But at the same time I'm not sure chasing the idea of weekly content updates would be good for the health of the game, it'd just exacerbate the skinner-box components and turn it in to yet another run of the mill cosmetics farm. At the very least a dedicated team of balance and bug guys would help quite a bit. And maybe a bit less radio silence. Though with Jedi: Fallen Order happening soon I expect everybody in the office is clenching their asses quite a bit right now. People don't really play Fortnite because the gameplay is good, it's fucking garbage after all, but it keeps a player base because flexing on defaults with your real world cash money skins and playing the sponsored content scratches some strange itch.
They outright said that nobody was taken off the Apex Legends team to work on Fallen Order.
I'm not sure it's fair to say TF|2 was mismanaged. The game, while it was supported at least, received balance updates and new content at a fairly decent pace for a retail product that they very well could have just abandoned due to it being DoA (for all intents and purposes) thanks to the absolutely fucked release date they went with. Respawn listened to community feedback, implemented what made sense, and threw us some bones with maps and Monarch. The cosmetic aspect stayed relatively true to their word and only a handful of cosmetics were store items. It didn't have the longest life, but as far as I felt, Respawn were pretty on top of it the entire time and tried to keep it going with competent updates and community interactions.
I mean your point still stands. The people behind Apex are not a giant team, but a decently small one despite Apex being a game of a rather large caliber. Weekly updates especially considering it's game for consoles too doesn't sound pleasant as a dev as far as Id imagine - even if it is just bugfixes, it would be a lot more efficient and comfortable to just make a big bug fix patch rather than several new ones - not to forget the mess of *new* bugs crawling in would be with a bunch of versions.
Patching on consoles probably is a pain, I yield that, but rolling up game breaking bug fixes into seasonal patches is obviously not the right call either. No one here is calling for weekly patches, but having had 5 updates in 3 months is not good either, especially when most of those did nothing except minor balance. We still have day one issues in game. New bugs in a patch is a smaller issue with more frequent updates than fewer, since smaller updates bring fewer bugs and each patch can iterate and fix the previous patches bugs. Overall I don't agree with the outlook on patching scarecly.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B583RO3spEk
https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/109886/b8e79af6-2d70-49f7-b073-f5975a384ad2/image.png Looks like someone's got the efficiency award! 1 Frag 2 Dmg, just how did he pull the frag off is beyond me
Just watch the first couple of seconds. https://youtu.be/8JRrIY2L77A?t=25
My friend has had Kills: 0 Damage dealt: 800+ Multiple times, whereas I've had Kills: 3 Damage dealt: 30 or so Multiple times. It's weird.
Weird how fast this game dwindeled to ash. I understand not working your crew to dust for the sake of content. But lets be honest, they really REALLY need to give us something. They should be able to hire someone for the revenue they earned by now to produce content. We don't even have a profile we can look at, and the only way to even keep track of your stats is to manually check your stat-trackers that you recieved from your lootboxes. People are like: "but content aren't gonna solve anything". Uh, okay. What do you think is gonna make people come back? The bug fixes? People got burnt out the first couple weeks due to its insane popularity. We got one extra character to play as and a weapon Oh let's not forget the joke of a battlepass, it's shit, let's be honest but I don't blame them. But without content people aren't gonna come back for a while, I played a couple hundred hours during release. And playing the same fucking map, with the same guns, with the same skins, without NO progression to work for at all isn't fun after the rose-tinted glasses come off and everything isn't as new and exciting anymore.
From what I understood, the "revenue" they earned, basically evened it all out considering the dev costs AND the brute force marketing of paying streamers to hype up and play the game. Shit sucks right now, and there's barely a compelling reason to play the game right now other than it being occasionally fun and shit. But the sheer amount of game breaking bugs? Wraith infinite portal is STILL not patched.
Bandaids that will help: Solos/duos mode, or bar that no auto-fill mode (I'd rather play 1v3 than have 2 loot goblins who hide at the sight of blood) Give crafting material every 5 battlepass levels instead/alongside of the stupid badge Give Apex packs every 5-10 levels after level 100 Remove or double the per legend bonus cap (it would be ideal to not have had this in the first place and instead just halve the xp needed per BP level) Level/kill/win based match making (doesn't have to be perfect, just try to fix skill disparity a little bit) These are really low effort ways to try to recover some lost player base that don't revolve around actually fixing the games many bugs
While I still somewhat enjoy Apex, i'm just honestly tired of battle royal in general and I look forward to whatever Titanfall related thing is going to be coming out in the fall?
I don't get why the game doesn't just give you a lootbox every level like Overwatch does, are they really that scared it's gonna eat into lootbox sales if people receive them a lil more regularly?
Respawn's update pace is fairly standard for a normal GaaS title. The problem is Epic's scorched-earth strategy of constant updates deliberately designed to poison the well and make other studios look slow by comparison. Rainbow Six Siege only gets notable updates, like, every three months, and we (mostly) don't complain about updates being "slow". Right now Apex has a much more important leg up that I'd say negates the need for Sweeney's Eternal Crunch-Time Weekly Update stratagem: Being the only BR with anything resembling good gameplay whatsoever. I'll take solid gameplay over Fortnite's constant mediocre weekly updates that make Changes for the Sake of Changes any day.
Do other BRs have skill based matchmaking? I honestly don't know. But just that would make the game vastly more fun for me. I swear every engagement is either super easy or I die instantly. Occasionally I get good fights, but usually lose at the end to the godlike squad of aimbots (literally or just really good players)
That's not a scorched earth strategy lmao, league has literally been doing the same update schedule for 5+ years.
And Riot is fucked to work for with the recent revelations. You get to be a good studio who cares about their craft Or you get to crunch your developers non-stop So far I've not seen any in between here.
So this is a thing https://www.ea.com/games/apex-legends/about/characters/mirage/story
lore is lore I guess tbh i'd want more lore purely because this is still technically a titanfall game in some way, hell Bangalore iirc was a grunt for the IMC.
The recent revelations are sexual harassment and general immature actions from the higher-ups, and isn't anything to do with the update schedule. The strike is because the company refuses to do anything about the (not just restricted to female employees) sexual harassment.
Honestly I find it a bit incoincidental in that case that Riot is another Tencent studio.
February 4 - Release February 9 - Minor fixes February 13 - Minor fixes February 19 - Minor fixes March 19 - Battlepass, QoL, weapon/legend balance April 3 - PC Crash fix April 16 - Fortified, weapon balance 6 Patches in 3 months, of which 3 are barely anything do not constitute over working your devs I have worked as a dev in environments where patching is much harder than pushing to Origin and we still aimed for at least monthly updates, with weekly critical fixes when deemed necessary. Given that there are day 0 bugs as well as game breaking bugs as well as server stability issues, I feel like Respawn has really got to do something. They promised a "check in" this week, which I took to mean actually fixing something, but since Tuesday has come and gone I have abandoned that hope They pushed a PS4 update today that seems to have broken playing lifeline. Their stance was well tested, concrete updates. None of the updates so far have felt very well tested nor concrete. Fortified has been broken since day 1, this update broke things, last time there was an update they also broke servers for a few hours, it all points to Respawn being incompetent at what they do
https://www.reddit.com/r/apexlegends/comments/bn6ec6/respawn_check_in_510/ A check in with some actual answers/acknowledgements! Hopefully the next patch will be a good one (as long as it's released next week or the week after)
Finally, feedback.
They're addressing that piggy backing but they need to just give those players who want to play solo a way to do that. I understand that solo and duos were datamined from the start right? It's weird they aren't modes available yet.
Well no update this week, see you all next!
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