If you’ve ever been headshot by a Kraber and downed instantly in an 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Apex Legends match, you’ll knowꦿ how broken and unbalanced the one-shot weapon is. However, if you’ve ever carried one into the final circle and 360 no-scoped your way to a win, you’ll understand it’s the perfect sniper rifle that should be left well alone when it comes to balances and reworks.
This is the eternal question when balancing a competitive video game. The Kraber is intentionally overpowered. It’s a rare spawn and should have weight to it, figuratively as well as literally. That sense of expectation is palpable at the 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Apex Legends Global Series, as an entire crowd audibly draws breath whenever a player aims downಌ the sights of the devastating weapon. The Kraber represents one of the most fun parts of Apex Legends esports, but for pro players, getting one-shot after so much preparation feels unfair.
“The pros were quite loud abo👍ut it,” explains lead weapons designer Eric Canavese. “It was a very strong, very decisive weapon. They wanted it removed from competitive, and instead of removing it entirely and making the game play differently than it does in the retail version, we decided that the healthiest way was to actually listen to their problem, figure out what it is that’s frustrating about the Kraber – which is being deleted from the game without ♐any counterplay – and adjust the sharpness of it.
“You can still get one-shots with it. It's just we wanted to do it in a way where on the counterplay side, if you were doing good looting, you were farther into the game, you had a good helmet and a good shield, then that was how you could survive it. Earlier in the game, or if you had poor loot, those would be the ways that you would be taken out with the head shots.
“We felt like, instead of just removing it, we can file it down a little bit. But it's a very iconic weapon for Apex, so on the main stage, we like it when players have the Kraber, and we all get excited when they're lining up those headshots – we still wanted to retain that because it's just so fun to watch.”
Balancing feedback from pro players and casual fans of the game is a d🍰ifficult task. Pro players are always online and often have huge followings, so their voices naturally get heard. For the average player, maybe the Kraber didn’t need to be nerfed, but striking that balance between powerful and overpowered impacts the professional game more acutely than it does for someone running through a public lobby after work.
As the game’s l🐼ead battle royale designer, Jo✨sh Mohan’s work is often less tangible than tweaking weapon strengths. However, his fingerprints are all over the latest season of Apex Legends thanks to a major rework of how the ring works – a change that has increased the pace of matches for casual players and esports competitors alike.
“With these changes, we focus a lot more on the late- and mid-game,” he explains. “We're able to pull all the dead air out of the match while still preserving people's ability to loot and rotate in the early game.”
Mohan is “really happy&🌼rdquo; with the changes, which mean the ring now does more damage in the early stages of the game and less in the𒅌 latter stages, compared to their previous rates. The ring also moves in faster. All of this is to push players together, force fights, and keep matches action packed in that middle period that could get a little dull. Mohan isn’t the only happy one, however, as he says that he’s received a lot of positive feedback on the shift.
“People have felt these matches have been some of the best in recent memory,” he says with a smile. “[They enjoy] the pacing of the match and feeling like there's action throughout.”
Changes are never easy, and rarely quick. Occasionally, a hotfix is needed when something is really broken – when the Bocek first released far too strong, for instance – but for the most part, it takes time to rework things into new iterations. Canavese explains that the new Charge Rifle took a year of tweaks to get to its current state, and with 37 weapons in the current Apex Legends armoury, it seems like it’ll be a while befor𓆏e it gets looked at again. As for the number of weapons in the game and the fact that new additions are slowing down to an almost annual rate, Canavese says that Res⛄pawn isn’t looking to hit an arbitrary number of guns in the game, it will only add weapons if there is a gap in the meta.
“Our approach to when and how we're building new weapons is letting the game tell us what it's missing or what it needs,” he explains. The logic tracks with the game’s updates, which saw eight new weapons added in the first 11 seasons of Apex Legends, to just one in the seven since then. That was the Nemesis Burst AR, which filled a gap in the game’s armoury, too. It’s an easy-to-use Assault Rifle akin to the R-301 or Flatline, except with Energy ammo. It’s also a burst rifle, of which there was only one other at the time, the Hemlok.
“Each of our weapons has their own personality,” Canavese says. “And has their own role in Apex. At this very moment in the meta, everything has a place, and we don't want to release a new weapon that would straight up challenge another weapon.”
"As designers, the onus is on us to get feedback from the pros, read Twitter and Reddit𓃲, and hear all those anecdotes" - Eric C🎶anavese, lead weapons designer at Respawn Entertainment
Giving players options is an important tenet across Respawn’s departments. Mohan, too, is always sure to steer clear of any additions that would create an “optimal” way of playing the game, removing difficult decisions from players’ minds. Of course, metas are inevitable, but h𒁃e wants to ensure that ☂every meta has counterplay and that every option is at least somewhat appealing to players as they play through matches.
“When [players] are making rotations or choosing their next objective, if it's a foregone conclusion, this is an awful way to play, and I'm not doing my job,” Mohan says. “I should be making interesting things for players to chase that make the game a little more complicated and dynamic every time. We tune things like the ring, and we change numbers, but we also sometimes add new objects that mix up gameplay for people.”
Whether it’s PvE opportunities like prowlers and spiders, or rotation options like ziprails, Mohan wants to ensure that there’s never one ‘correct’ way to play the game. His attention to this is shown in the ALGS, where Alliance often goes to fight in the IM🎶C Armory in the northeast of Storm Point, but other teams avoid the PvE zones because they can make you an easy target as you exit. Whether we could see ziprails, a high-speed rotation option that debuted on Broken Moon, appear in other maps, Mohan gives nothing away.
“There's nothing stopping us,” he says cryptically. “Look at tridents, for example. Tridents launched with Olympus. These things often start with a map because the map is almost showcasing it or designed around it, but when those things make sense in other maps – like we saw tridents going to Storm Point – by all means, I love seeing that cross pollination of these tools being used in other maps where they can solve interesting problems over there as well.”
The pair received lots of feedback in-person at the ALGS Championship, from competi🐟tors and fans alike. Balancing the feedback can sometimes be as difficult as balancing the game itself, but do they value🌱 feedback from pros with five figures of hours in the game more than casual players who just got one-clipped by an R-301?
“It's all valuable feedback,” Canavese says diplomatically. “As designers, the onus is on us to get feedback from the pros, read Twitter and Reddit, and hear all those anecdotes.
“[We] look at the raw data, dashboards full of numbers,” he follows up, noting that most decisions are based primarily on data. “We spend a lot of time looking at the data breakdowns for weapons and Legends and world systems in the [battle royale]. There's a number that represents everything you could possibly think of in Apex. It's our job to compile all of that stuff and parse it in a readable way and have conversations with our team to make sure that we're making the healthiest choice for the pros and the casual players, because it's all one game.”
Mohan echoes this sentiment, rebuffing the idea that the level the ALGS competitors play at is unachievable for regular gamers. “The important thing is they're playing with the same tools, playing two different games with the same set of blocks.”
Ultimately, all players carry the same weapons across the same maps, just at very different levels. Balance changes have to benefit all of those players, from the kids messing about with friends to those c꧑ompeting for millions of dollars. Canavese and Mohan got a chance to experience feedback firsthand for once at the ALGS Championship, and Moist pulled out a 720 no-scope with a Kraber to make it that little bit more memorable, too.