Apex legends will be sticking to a seasonal update according to Respawn’s CEO, Vince Zampella. The developers are keeping in mind both the quality of each update and the well-being of the developers.
Zampella addressed the Apex Legends community’s comparison of the game to Fortnite in an interview with Gamasutra. “There are a lot of people that are like 'hey where’s the weekly updates, Fortnite does this,’" he said in the interview. "And it’s like, we’re not set up to do that. We never intended to.”
Zampella thinks that even though the game was a massive hit in the world of battle royale, it’s best for the team to keep on moving at the same pace. A Polygon report said that the success of Fortnite was the fruit of months of immense crunch for the whole team in Epic Games. Both current and former employees shared their experience of 70-hour weeks, with some even going up to 100-hour weeks. Employees stated in the report that executives are focused on continuously patching and updating Fortnite to keep it relevant, which is obviously taking its toll on the employees.
Although Zampella did not mention the grief of the employees of Epic Games due to Fortnite, he did say something about the well-being of Respawn employees as a priority. “Our intention was to always be seasonal, so we’re kind of staying with that. The thought was ‘hey we kind of have something that’s blowing up here, do we want to start trying to drop more content?’ But I think you look at quality of life for the team. We don’t want to overwork the team, and drop the quality of the assets we’re putting out. We want to try and raise that,” he said.
According to Zampella, the team is working on the next season and admits that the last one didn’t deliver as much content as expected, “All the resources on the team are focused on getting this game in a better position so it plays well, so we have enough content, so the seasons are better,” he added.
I personally think that Respawn is going down the right path. They aren’t being pressured by the players’ demands, and are instead focused on the overall well-being of their developers as well as producing content that is not rushed and well thought out.
Apex Legends is available for PlayStation 4, Xbox one, and PC. You can buy a Battle pass for 950 Apex coins ($10) or Battle Pass Bundle for 2800 Apex coins ($30).
