Season 21: Upheaval Postmortem

Apex Legends, at it's best, worked so well because it was an adventure across several dimensions. For many seasons, the Respawn teams did a remarkable job of balancing excellent gameplay mirrored with rich character and story elements, at a genuinely exciting and engaging pace. The end result was fresh, challenging, and rewarding.

The state of today's game is very far from just a few seasons ago. I hoped that Respawn's increasingly slower development pace was simply growing pains from transitioning to a new dev team. It seems more likely now that EA is forcibly maximizing the profit motive, straining both the creative wellspring at Respawn and the goodwill of the playerbase.

Initially, we players poured tons of money into AL despite the rough edges, because the game was approachable, aspirational, competitive, and lore-rich. The current decline of Apex is hugely disappointing, and a clear indication that Respawn needs to re-prioritize good game design and storytelling, not selling cosmetics.

New Legend: Alter

Great personality, interesting character. Feels shoehorned into the story-line. Her abilities are intriguing, but they're far from intuitive and much too situational. Usability is a deal breaker. Her tactical has a high setup cost, and her ultimate is fiddly to activate and too easy to cancel. She presents a lot of outplay potential in specific circumstances, but suffers during the interstitial gameplay moments where the terrain is not to her advantage.

Legend Perks and Meta Update

The legend re-balance feels well-done, but doesn't shift the meta enough to matter. The perk redistribution and tweaks are appreciated, but the Fuse ring-scan buff effectively shortchanges the entire controller class.

Evac towers still largely negate the purpose of the skirmisher class (especially Valk), and diminish controller utility by easing commitments to midgame engagements. If skirmishers exist to enable team mobility, why circumvent these rich gameplay opportunities with a universal item?

Weapon meta is definitely stale. The havok is still OP, and the other ARs feel too weak compared to the short-range weapons. Midrange engagements are increasingly unreliable, and faster resets make long-range attacks irrelevant or annoying.

Map Update

The new Broken Moon zones are refreshing, and offer interesting angles. However, many of the new connections and transitions are visually confusing, hard to read, and force teams into killboxes during rotation. In combination with oversimplified, repetitive, unremarkable geo, the new POIs are harder to learn and risky to explore.

Overall, since the update is limited to a single map, the day-to-day impact is/was small, but certainly more concentrated after the split.

Map Rotation

Not terribly enjoyable. Pairing the two oldest maps with the newest is painful. KC and World's Edge are tedious and cramped in ranked. Having Olympus after the split is/was more fun.

Server Problems

Servers are the worst they've been in quite a few seasons. Near-constant lag, ping spikes, and packet loss. Ranked is a crapshoot, with at least one in three games a loss due to bad servers. On busy nights, opponents might have 2-3 seconds of extra reaction time from asymmetrical server lag.

No amount of new features or content can/will make up for sudden 100+ ping and 60/0 packet loss, the inability to see or invite online friends, getting shot while behind cover, or broken lobbies preventing legend selection or entry into a match.

The devs argument that better/faster servers won't help is complete BS. Assuming one frame of latency at a 20hz tick-rate (effectively 10hz accuracy), and 50ms ping for two players, that's a minimum .4 sec first-shot advantage (and I've measured a 1-2 sec opponent look-ahead from the kill cam). In a game with ~1.2 sec ttk, that's anywhere from a free knock (1v1) to a squad wipe (focus fire).

Faster tick rates and upgraded servers mean better error correction, more consistent shot registration and aim handling from session to session, less movement jitter, and vastly better latency (I get 13ms ping from my ISP, the local GDCs rarely top 34ms).

If/when the kill cams show opponents *missing most of their shots* and still getting a knock, the current server status clearly does not support the nature of the game.

No Sound

The one thing we can count on getting worse each season. Every game there's a no-sound bug. I regularly have opponents *bouncing* off me without making a sound. Sick and tired of getting shot from behind. The only reliable indicator that an opponent is anywhere near are the bullets hitting you.

Universal Heirloom

The Katar is such a blatant cash-grab that my friends are embarrassed to equip it. It bears no relationship to the story-line, the in-game universe, or lore. They're irrelevant, and therefore uninteresting and un-collectible. I'm definitely on team "bring-back-real-heirlooms".

Misc

Auto-queue is a usability nightmare. It feels tacked-on and confusing, and eliminates important post-match feedback. Even after weeks, someone usually forgets and returns to lobby.

Sorely miss clubs. Retiring them immediately shrank our playgroup from 10+ to 3. It would have made sense to cross-promote new club features with custom game lobbies (club vs club leaderboards, championships, etc). Now, there simply isn't a universally accessible way for our cross-platform playgroup to coordinate or grow.

Summary

AL, at it's core, is a game (not a fashion show). Games work by continuously presenting players with incremental "meta shifts": evolving challenges implemented through playable elements like maps, weapons, rule-set changes, and characters. For new elements to be effective, they must be "meta-altering" in ways that materially impact gameplay at a practical and strategic level. If gameplay elements are meta-neutral, there is no practical reason (outside novelty) for players to engage with them, and they may as well not exist (see *tautology*).

Along with the rate of new playable content continually slowing, Apex has been leaning *hard* in a meta-neutral, overbalanced, storyless, risk avoidant direction. It's boring. The perk system is technically excellent, but it's effectively homogenized the meta at a time when Apex is long overdue for new maps and weapons.

We miss the town-takeovers, the legend heirlooms, and lore drops (heck, even the dev diaries).

Coupled with the constant sales push, the worsening cheating situation, and degrading server performance, our confidence in the game is at an all-time low.

- neb