In a blog post made yesterday, Apex Legends executive producer Drew McCoy shares his thoughts on the state of the game and how Respawn will proceed with it moving forward.
McCoy starts off by saying that while Respawn is thankful that the game reached 50 million new players in its first month, it has also led to some unexpected problems.
“Getting a huge player base in a very short period means exploits, bugs, cheaters, and more come fast and frequently. We’ve had to react and direct resources to play whack-a-mole with lots of unexpected issues," McCoy said in the post. "Since launch, we’ve shipped a number of server and client patches that have addressed a range of issues.”
It would seem that Respawn was relatively caught unawares by the unexpected success of Apex Legends. It received very favorable reviews from critics, with some even calling it a worthy opponent to Fortnite, currently the king of battle royal games. The game was developed by Respawn Entertainment and was made relatively early into their incorporation with Electronic Arts.
However, this has not gone on without growing pains, as constant issues such as the server lag and hordes of cheaters are threatening to drive the game back into obscurity. McCoy goes on to state that, “while we’ve made some good progress towards a healthier game, as our community grows issues have come up that need to be addressed. The stability of Apex Legends is very important to us, and we’ve been doing a lot of work internally to improve our processes across the board.”
To that end, he has also listed some of the more critical issues that they are currently working on. Here are some of them:
- Slow server performance at the start of every match – they are still yet to nail the root cause for these issues, but they have figured out that it affects some datacenters more than others, and the problems pop up on different server configurations.
- Cheaters – McCoy points to a previous Reddit thread on the issue and says that they are being secretive about what steps they are taking in order to avoid making their moves known to the cheaters.
McCoy and Respawn has also promised to improve communication across the board, and hopes that they can be more transparent with the community on future updates for the game.
The full blog post can be read here. Apex Legends is now available to play for free on PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.
