“The goal was to make it look the same as it did before, but that’s not what happened.”
Apex Legends developer Respawn acknowledged that there is a problem with Legends Bangalore and Caustic after a recent patch essentially nerfed soldiers’ smoking skills.
When Chaos Theory was released, the team made changes to the FX particle count for Legends that obscure the battlefield with smoke, making it easier for players to see – and, perhaps more importantly, shoot – their enemies.
It is a big problem for Bangalore, Caustic and Gibraltar in particular, as these characters have smoke coverage to support their teammates.
“We are investigating what happened here,” acknowledged the game’s chief designer, Daniel Klein, answering questions on the official subreddit page (thanks, Dexerto). “There was a change in the underlying VFX that we made with optimization in mind. The goal was to make it look identical to what was there before, but apparently that’s not what happened.
“We’ll let you know when we know more.”
Klein did not give a timescale, but players are hoping that a solution will arrive sooner or later.
ICYMI, Apex Legends has recently reached a new peak of simultaneous users on Steam. The free-to-play Battle Royale game – released on Steam in November 2020 after almost 18 months as an EA Origin exclusive – reached 198,235 concurrent players on Steam just a few weeks ago, its biggest spike in concurrent users.
The recent increase in new and old players who checked Season 8 means that Apex Legends saw the peak of the shooter as the fifth most played game on Steam, making it more popular than GTA 5, Rainbow Six Siege and Team Fortress 2 on PRAÇA.
It was also among the top ten most watched games on Twitch, which meant that more people were tuning in to watch Apex Legends than FIFA 21, CS: GO and Valheim at the time.