HORIZON Abilities

Quoting a dev

"I'd say it's very unlikely we'd ever put wall running and double jumping on a full Legend. We had a lot more leeway with Shadows because they don't have guns and it's not important to chase them down (because they respawn when you kill them anyway).

Apologies if you've heard/read me talk about this before, but here's my real quick explainer why there's no excessively fast/vertical movement tech in Apex:

When you're chasing an enemy and lose line of sight on them, you have a mental calculation to make: given the time since you've last seen them, where could they possibly be? There's a blob-shaped possibility space that grows with time. So when you round the same corner 2 seconds later, you know there isn't a long list of places they could have gone to; you can quickly check one or two and get a good idea where they must have gone. This allows you to understand the front lines of combat and where danger is likely to come from (outside of third parties).

In TF2, that possibility-space-blob grows crazy fast, and what's worse: it doesn't really stick to the ground. The enemy went around a corner? Two seconds later, they could be on a rooftop behind you. This makes combat all about in the moment reactions: how quickly can you react to an enemy popping up from a direction you didn't anticipate? How accurately can you track crazy fast movement? This by itself isn't a bad skill check; but it's all in your "reptile brain": your basic hand-eye coordination, your reaction time, your precision. Your higher brain functions are barely engaged. This makes for an extremely exciting but also extremely exhausting and samey experience.

On the other hand, Apex combats play out over longer times and have meaningful ups and downs in their pacing; for instance: there's the initial shock and excitement of running into an enemy and exchanging fire; there's a chase; there are their allies returning fire, you falling back to heal, your teammates arriving; then maybe you're slowly clearing a house, anticipating where they might be hiding, trying to remember if they had a Caustic, and then finally you re-engage and the combat comes to a close. Importantly, your higher brain functions has to make sense of what could have happened, you have to make plans for the next 10-12 seconds, not just the next second, and you have time to make meaningful choices (do I heal or do I push? Do I use my abilities to get close or hold them to get out of trouble? Where are my teammates and can I afford to wait for them?)

Games are much more replayable when you can tell yourself an interesting story about the game you just played, and when these stories are different from play session to play session. Anecdotally, people absolutely loved the constant sugar high of Titanfall multiplayer, but then also very quickly burned out on it. Sure, some players stuck with it for a very long time, but on average it's the kind of game you play and absolutely love for a few weeks and then you're kind of done. Long before I got to Respawn, some designers who are way smarter than me (and from whom I learned all this) made some choices about movement in Apex and it seems they were on to something: people are still playing Apex."

TLDR: Wallrunning and double jumping are sugar rush mechanics that are good in small doses, in LTMs, and in asymmetric combat situations. It's very unlikely they'll come to Apex proper.

-DanielZKlein, Designer Respawn

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