After Respawn Entertainment revealed the patch notes for Season 7’s Fight Night Collection event, professional Apex Legends players logged on to Twitter to express their concerns that the game is leaning too much on Legend’s abilities.
Character skills have always been a central pillar of Respawn’s design philosophy around Apex Legends. Each Legend has its own set of special skills that set them apart from the others and the developer works hard to ensure that all characters remain fun and balanced.
Despite the impact that skills have on the Apex, the Respawn BR experience is simultaneously based on the use of firearms. Senior game design Daniel Klein exposed this on Reddit saying “you can learn to be good at controlling Flatline, and now you are good at controlling Flatline with any character.”
With the Fight Night event with the Pathfinder theme scheduled to start January 5, Respawn released its patch notes for the update. After seeing what the developers planned in terms of Legend’s skill tweaks, several Apex professionals voiced their concerns on Twitter.
Apex needs to stop honing Legends’ skills or I won’t even recognize the game I’m playing anymore
– TSM Snip3down (@ Snip3down) January 1, 2021
Eric ‘Snip3down’ Wrona of TSM criticized Respawn for increasing Legend’s abilities to an extreme level. The professional player expressed concern that if more skill buffs are added, he “will not even recognize the game I’m playing anymore”.
Several other professional Apex players responded to the snip3down tweet in agreement, including Phillip “ImperialHal” Dosen from TSM and Nathan “retzi” Telen from Sentinels. Retzi joked that “we will not be able to recognize him [Apex] through all the gas ”, referring to the changes in the caustic with which the community is dissatisfied.
Snip3down replied to ‘retzi’ clarifying that he agrees with changes to the goal, but argued that “we cannot continue to give each character the Gibby treatment where we shine it until you almost have to.
The Apex is, in fact, being vigilant at this rate. Used to be the one who could shoot harder now is the one who can use his skills best
– ceryal (@ceryal_) January 1, 2021
Other professional player Andrew ‘Ceryal’ Vargas tweeted similar concerns. The professional and the streamer noted that, with all the recent buffs of Legend’s skills, “the Apex is really becoming vigilant at this rate.”
The popular Apex streamer Diego ‘diegosaurs’ Raymond Navarrette responded to Ceryal’s tweet accordingly. He joked that “I feel like I’m [Soldier] 76 and everyone else is Roadhog ”, referring to a severely unbalanced goal – something that Overwatch players have often dealt with.
While some responses to Ceryal and Snip3down’s posts were negative, the majority of the community seems to agree with their feelings. Although buffing legends like Rampart can be seen as Respawn trying to make it more viable, players did not accept the additional caustic buffs that are in the pipeline.
yes, except i’m getting to the point where i feel like i’m 76 and everyone else is roadhog playing with these thick boys with fucking lmfao mastiffs
– diego (@diegosaurs) January 1, 2021
Ceryal’s comparison of Apex to Overwatch is actually the opposite of the mindset that Respawn previously identified in terms of game balance. On the same topic as Season 7’s Reddit where he discussed Flatline, Klein also mentioned Overwatch specifically.
“Overwatch is primarily a skill-based game, and Apex is primarily a weapon-based game,” he said in response to the Legend balance. After discussing these differences, Klein changed his point of view about Flatline and the importance of focusing the game around weapon balance.
It seems that the professional Apex scene thinks that Respawn has strayed too far from its original design philosophy. The developer did not respond to any of the posts at the time of writing, and it remains to be seen whether they will reverse any of the balance changes in Fight Night based on community feedback.