-
Ever wanted an RSS feed of all your favorite gaming news sites? Go check out our new Gaming Headlines feed! Read more about it here.
-
We have made minor adjustments to how the search bar works on ResetEra. You can read about the changes here.
Respawn CEO: Sticking to seasonal updates better for Apex Legends devs
- Thread starter No_Style
- Start date
There isn't though. You can theoretically "always" leave more money on the table in the short term which is what everyone wants, content and shit to grind/buy for now. Im using this to critique the corporate culture in the states in general, for shareholder you can always lay off X amount of employees/cut x amount of corners in QA/trade x amount for cheaper ingredients or build quality today to look like a leaner company and have the stock go up but long term...
The question is do people really think that Vince and them are leaving 5 hours early, crumpling up resume's and throwing it in the trash while playing wastebasket basketball.
We can't complain about all the games that had potential that got rushed to their deaths but when a developer is like "this is the pace we are comfortable with" be like too slow!
This is exactly what I was going to say.
Everyone ITT is so quick to celebrate that Respawn is allegedly not putting their team through the wringer, churning out weekly content for Apex. Meanwhile, they DO have a multitude of other projects in development. I wouldn't be too surprised if their staff was under serious crunch and pressure, having to juggle so much at once.
The only content update I need is a different mode. The "mined" Recruit and Survival modes sounded absolutely amazing. Standard BR is so damn boring for me but Apex has superb art-style, characters and that perfect shoot feel that i enjoy it.
New modes and proper fixes to the lag and hit detection and i'm back in.
New modes and proper fixes to the lag and hit detection and i'm back in.
I would agree if you said the character backgrounds. The diversity of the cast is fantastic, but they pretty much all look bad and make me not want to collect the boring skins they put out for each character.
I think they just need to uncap the levels and give non battle pass people something to advance. Even if it's a trickle of more boxes.
I didn't play any BR games before Apex and so I'm not conditioned to expect weekly updates. I didn't ever think that was going to be the schedule and haven't been demanding it. It's looking like we will only be getting one character this Battle Pass, and one gun before it launched, and I was expecting something more than that though, I guess. I'm ready for a new character now, Octane already feels old, and the season isn't over until Mid-June? Just feels like a really long time from now without anything new. I've had a lot of fun with the game and I am looking forward to playing a lot more of it but I think that once I finish off the Battle Pass I probably won't boot it up again until Season 2 starts.
Last edited:
Weekly updates for video games are literally insane. How do people keep up? Nothing better to do? Not to mention the obvious developer crunch time. Monthly/seasonal updates sound much better
We've gotten a roadmap though. For example, we know that there is still one more character and one more weapon coming this season, as well as the hinted map changes.
Apex Legends has become my go to game to kill a couple of hours. It's fun and if Respawn wants to develop content at a rate that allows them reasonable hours and polished content, I'm all for it.
After that reveal of EPIC damn near killing its staff, you can't really blame them. Just gotta make sure the updates are substantial.
I can't help but to think this is some PR talk to get APEX in the favor of gamers. If true, this is awesome and good on Respawn. I also hope this extends to their other teams. Not just their APEX team. If this isn't true and it is just an excuse as to the slower updates, but their workers are still crunching, then that is bad.
Yeah I'd much prefer this over just Apex getting fortnite level of updates.
There's still one more character and weapon coming before the end of this season.
I wish more people understood this point, but sadly, most of the Fortnite user base are little kids with no knowledge about how their games get made and how the world works, they just want to play with their new updated toy now and nothing else matters. I'm hopeful for a future where parents try at least to explain this kind of things to their children.
Personally, I'm totally fine on how Apex Legends is structuring their future content, they are a "small" team, and while the latest cosmetic additions have been underwhelming, they can keep the solid gameplay flowing.
It's not just little kids, I heard game industry and streamers saying this on....for example....Destiny and Division podcasts.
"Why can't we get content as quick as Fortnite"
Probably because Massive and Bungie actually cares about their employees well beings. It's an unreal production goal.
There is. Posters on a forum commenting that they are letting the opportunity to be the next fortnite die isn't the same as saying because they are doing this the franchise is dead.
Yeah, you are absolutely right and is a shame that is trending to become the norm in the industry. Seeing all this thirst for good and quick content makes me wonder how these people would have survived through, for example, the active Team Fortress 2 development days. Top notch content, but the thing took ages to release. A game like that wouldn't have survived in our current age.
There was no real alternatives, people were having a blast just playing what they had.
Yeah and they solved that by just continuing the concept of FOMO from being Eververse exclusive with a pointless nonexistant end game, to including FOMO in much of the end game with seasonal content to keep player retention.
I was one of those people who criticized the lack of meaningful content and gear to chase in year 1, because there was NOTHING for months.
We can have a balance between having nothing to do, and having so much to do that even playing every week will leave you left behind. I don't get people who want the latter.
Also:
Absolutely. Destiny 1 handled it so much better. I always had a lot to do and could come back any time I wanted.
I recently went back to the 360 version to see about grabbing the achievements and to have an excuse to replay it and gosh this game is so fun. I hate that I'm missing out on iron banner gear and one of the ghosts in the tower and the dawning and all that.
Not really a specific reason to this specific studio, but at least some counter-points:
- it's extremely hard to expand aggressively in the games industry; there simply are not enough experienced people available, and recruiting costs are very, very high for Senior+ staff (not to mention 6+ month leadtimes aren't far from the average)
- it's not easy to expand aggressively, most games studios simply have not had enough time to consider that aspect under the pressure of getting the game out asap (IE dedicating time for scalable pipelines, documentation, leadership, hardware, studiospace etc.) when these things often fall under the priority of getting the game out and as good as possible
- scaling up means effort from people, which mean less effort to short-term development of the game as time is spent on onboarding staff
- you (as a company) need to have plan for these people beyond just the single game; what will they do for the studio if/when a game winds down, does our PnL support the risk of developers that weren't planned into the earlier company/financial roadmap?
and the list goes on, but the point is that scaling a game team "aggressively" is riduclously hard, expensive, risky and it's very hard to avoid overworking and overpressurizing the team and culture when doing it
Personally, having being tasked with the initiative to grow a team and game with a huge potential, it wasn't easy and we did make short-term cuts into the actual releasable contents to ensure people could work normal hours, they were brought into the team with healthy expectations (though personally in retrospect I learned lot from it, and know how to do it better next time even if no-one burned out or worked 50+ hr weeks due to the growth), but in the long-term we have a healthy cycle in which we know how to push for better quality faster.
As a reference, both Epic and DE (Warframe) had it quite a bit easier as they were companies with staff in other projects that could be pulled into these hit-projects, effectively making the scaling process quite a bit easier (of course to the point they had staff not allocated to these projects).
Last edited:
Did I miss something? Perhaps I did. Everything that I've seen has been super vague.
Nah.
What you're arguing is literally posters on a forum dictating on how a multimillion dollar studio should run their stuff because We (collective gamer 'we') are hungry for content. Because of the recent Fortnite article we see what it is on one extreme...I just don't think that Apex is the other extreme. This is what game development should look more like if the grunts in the pipeline were treated fairly, except we are used to on piles of on demand GaaS to sneakily take money out of our pockets.
Fortnite level of product offerings isn't sustainable for the industry across the board; from gamers to developers to publishers...the system makes them all suffer with no real winners. Gamers get ripped off by half finished games and nickeled and dimed, developers get burned out, publishers cannibalize their sales by propping up a 'there can only be one!' winner take all approach to selling games.
Were they caught flatfooted by their success and how they had fortnite on the ropes? Absolutely. Should they have held onto the game for a few more months before release until they had more quality content? Probably. But that rushed battlepass is what happens when its all about getting ahead of the competition.
That's fine. But they do need to decrease the battle pass time and they need a shared pool of experience across all platforms.
Nah, i like the style in which their gear is rendered and their overall looks. To each their own.
Is someone plays a game for 4 hrs a day then says they get bored after 3 weeks and demands more content, that's on them. Put the damn controller down and do something else for a bit.
I'm really enjoying the incipient developer push back against the hunger for constant updates and gratification.
I'm really enjoying the incipient developer push back against the hunger for constant updates and gratification.
They say that now after the Fortnite article? Seems a bit suspect.
Good on them if it's true, but the timing of it is just...
Good on them if it's true, but the timing of it is just...
Bullshit. Solos I can understand not having but Duos is absolutely needed. Maybe if they had these modes then people would still be playing the game.
I'm essentially playing 2v3's every match because our random has never touched a controller in their life. We still win most of the time but the random might as well not even exist because they either die right at the beginning/quit or do <100 damage while we go 2000+ with 10+ kills.
I want to play duos.
If every multiplayer game has to directly compete with Fortnite to be successful then the entire industry is fucked and everyone should go home. Please get some perspective.
The game was shadow dropped less than 3 months ago. For those saying "should've hired more people", how quickly do you think they could've hired a bunch of qualified developers, gotten them up to speed on their tools/processes, planned and churned out decent content every week at Fortnite level? Expectations of some seem a bit nuts.
Seriously, I was in training for six months at my job and I edit legal documents.