The Inflation of Movement Abilities
Since the introduction of Ash's "Blink", Apex seems to have entered a cycle of massive buffs followed by minor incremental nerfs, leading to an overall acceleration of character speed. Undoubtedly, ...
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Exactly.
Even Fuse, whose strengths were originally area denial and suppression, is now flying around using his explosions. Seeing this trend has made me feel a deep sense of crisis."
So: Obviously I keep coming across Axle in matches because every squad has one now. There is no escaping her. And I've had some time to observe her, observe how other players react to her, and to try and sort out my own coping mechanisms.
The conclusion I'm coming to is that the real problem isn't that she's fast. It's that she makes her entire squad fast. And sometimes people on other squads as well. It's exactly like playing Wildcard and coming upon an entire squad of Octanes. That's what drove me out of Wildcard. I encountered that nonsense exactly once and I never went back. Now I'm playing bots, where no live players other than myself should even be, and all I have to do now to spot the live enemies is look for the pink dots or the pink streaks. There is no more circumspection in this game. There is no more jockeying for position. There is no more thinking about how to handle the next engagement. It just happens and it happens as soon as an Axle sees you. One individual player, such as myself, might be able to react quickly enough to reset the terms of engagement, but my squadmates can't react that quickly, and so far at least, they never seem to want the reset. They want to engage and die. Axle is another nail in the coffin for mid-range play, and another nail in the coffin for any opponent with less than perfect accuracy. I don't know if they realized in design that this would be the outcome, but that's all this game is now: hyperactive close-range engagement. Get a fistful of Ritalin or go home.
And one more thing: It means something that we're all here talking about her tactical. And ONLY about her tactical. I've only seen her ultimate in use once so far and it seems pretty useless from what I saw. So another part of the problem is that her true superpower isn't an ultimate with a long cooldown. It's a tactical that can be endlessly reused. Every 18 seconds, and that gets shorter if she finds a cooldown hop up. And she will. Everyone does. Because it makes everything faster and all Respawn seems to care about anymore is whether or not they can use hyperactivity as the lure to pull children out of the finally failing Fortnite. Good luck with that, Respawn.
Well stated. Dealing with one individual moving at light speed is one thing; successfully engaging three is impossible.
Axle’s tactical can have up to three placed at once, but when you factor in the sheer number of other Axles from different squads, the battlefield becomes pure chaos. It’s like a meteor shower of players sliding and soaring everywhere; you get downed before you can even register what’s happening.
Even if someone were using cheats, they’d blend right in. It’s a dream come true for boosting services and cheaters.
"It’s a dream come true for boosting services and cheaters."
One step forward, ten steps back.
Recon my friend, this goes back to my 5 Types Theory.
This character is a direct result of the Churn finally starting to decimate the Type 2s and working it's way into Type 1s. I can't recall the last time I saw YouTube feed me an Apex Video, or stream. Haven't seen it on Twitch frontpage in a while. All the streamers that show in my Discovery Tab on Bluesky are all talking Nintendo single player games.They can't stop the churn, because it comes for ALL online games. Guild Wars 2 is starting to look sad, and they just pushed a new expansion with new classes recently. They have been going for 12 years, but the churn is starting to hit it as well, and they have a robust PvE experience.
Apex has nothing like that. The Titanfall players that were hoping for Titanfall 3 are all gone, because EA admitted that it will never happen. No reason to stay. Nothing about the game is consistent, the character "Lore" is a joke, and the "plot" even thinner than rice paper.
I haven't played since the Gundam event (I love Gundam which is why I fell for it, I regret that choice). After it, I uninstalled. Before that, I hadn't played since just before Sparrow was introduced.
Nothing I see about this season sounds appealing. This Type 5 is gone.It pains me to say it, but you're missing nothing except the on-going series of **bleep** slaps that Respawn loves so dearly to deal out to their players.
And, in the interest of being the guy who lights a candle instead of cursing the darkness, I'll lay out a quick snapshot of the direction this game should be taking:
- End secondaries.
- Get a grip on the cheaters.
- Stop mistakenly believing that the novelty players crave is in new legends, new weapons, or re-worked abilities. It's in expanding the portfolio of game types. Right now every single mode in this game is some form of player vs. player. Does anyone even care whether it's two- or three-man teams? Ranked or unranked? Elimination or deathmatch? It's time for a social hub. It's time for genuine PvE. It's time for a map editor. It's time for story and lore. It's time for custom games anyone can start or join without being able to get 29 other players together on their own. It's time for the store to allow people to sell back and trade. It's time to get players interested in the community and not just in some flashy new gimmick they think might make them invincible for a season. It's time for long-term thinking and balance, and an end to short-term desperation.
While we have some differences in perspective, I felt your proposals were highly concrete and well-thought-out, remaining consistent with your underlying arguments.
I also agree that it is a mistake to seek novelty or freshness solely through new weapons and legends.
In my view, "the core" of Apex lies in its character control techniques like sliding jumps and tap-strafing (not something caused by character skills), the PvP/Battle Royale format, and the fundamental rules shared across all characters and weapons. Characters and weapons are "branches and leaves" that support and add color to that "core". Attempting to provide freshness through superficial adjustments to "branches and leaves" easily broke "the core".
From that standpoint, taking action against Cheats is unavoidable. Conversely, I take a cautious stance on a dedicated PvE mode. I believe those needs could be met by reverting Bot Royale to a pure NPC mode and allowing for adjustable difficulty levels.
About Elite weapons, I understand the objective of utilizing unpopular weapon slots to test new ideas while minimizing resource costs. However, the problem lies in how they disrupt the balance and are allowed to remain—like the RE-45—with performance that deviates from its intended category, without any fine-tuning.
About the story, while I recognize the demand, it is a low priority for me. Given the labor costs of writers and the risk of confusion caused by creators who cannot remain behind the scenes, I cannot help but be cautious. I believe it is more rational for those who design the skill sets and overall balance to handle the story as well.
I agree your criticism of "stopgap measures" to chase immediate numbers. However, there is a possibility that the current priority is the sale/acquisition process. Since the company will go private after the completion of the deal. It may shift from a short-term outlook to a mid-to-long-term perspective.
About implementing in-game community tools, although there have been past failures, I agree the idea in terms of reducing the burden on players.
It is reasonable to prioritize the acquisition of new players, as the FPS genre has a rapid turnover rate.
However, the method for doing so must not involve "destroying the core of the game." I view that Characters and weapons should exist to complement "the core" fundamentals of the game.
Younger players are no fools; they will eventually feel "the core" of the game. If "the core" is compromised, even the new players won't stay too.
About PvE, I believe Bot Royale had the potential to fulfill that role within Apex. However, with the recent changes allowing other players into the same match. I don't think it's a good sign. It could have served as a true sanctuary when the game balance collapsed, but that possibility is now gone.
Aren't you guys forgetting a thing ...
Just my geuss: Apex has been on a graveyard or limited dev team for quite a while. A big chunk prolly worked on BF6 and now on other games.
Maybe Apex 2.0 will be on an other engine since the roadmap for current Apex goes to S32 , and porting to another engine takes time and work depending on the size of the team - speculation here - Best case, a large part of the base team of apex early days now works on apex 2.0.
That's why the game is pretty stale with only meta changes and hardly new content imo (since way too long).
Wildcard was cool as an addition, but now it's getting stale too after only 3 seasons, 3 months - one map, gets very booooring and stale after a while. And now with Olympus, after only 3 days i already wished they nuked POI 'Estates ' into the ground. 3 Axles in Wildcard is insane, a travesty of Apex. BOT sqauds are ruining this mode too.
I hardly play BR anymore, pretty hard as a solo queue player and no pre made sqaud.
Furthermore i can agree, what's the point of moving to a high speed movement based game if halve the legends are slow slugs and others not? Arena shooters like Quake (or more recent Titanfall 2) in the days evened the playfield in this case, everyone could be fast with practice and skill (rocket and strafe jumping and stuff). I guess that's what you get when catering to 100's of thousands, even millions of players.
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