When devs have to lie [Reblog]
I've been getting the impulse to boot up Apex Legends again…
It happens every couple of months, it's virtually the only service game I come back to every couple of months, and for lots of reasons.
One, I think it's still easily the best game to ever iterate the Battle Royale formula.
The speed, guns, movement, maps, abilities, squads, battles, comms, interactions, characters; it's all appealing for me.
I'll chuckle at Revenant's edgy dialogue before flying a couple Football fields to Shotgun somebody's armor off with a perfect charged shot.
It gives such a precise balance between a grounded world and over the top gameplay that I find, most other games just don't satisfy like Apex does.
However, this piece isn't about praising a game that pisses people off, it's instead about the circumstances that can lead to developers themselves being put into a bind.
It just happens to be that Apex is the game where I heard an example of this.
Most probably know about Apex Legends' Divetrails, colored smoke that follows each player and squad as they descend the map. Now for years, those who participate in ranked matches earn unique Divetrails based on their rank… but for just as many years, players have been trolled based upon trails, IE, a high ranked player can potentially have everybody gang up on them at the start of a match, purely because of the negative connotations of your Skydive trail.
To resolve this Respawn did…
Nothing.
So when in August of this year, Respawn said the reason they'd be removing ranked Divetrails was "due to the trails leading to toxic behaviors from others players, who would hunt down and specifically target players with trails when landing at the start of a match…"
That's a lie.
That, or your communications team is suffering a four year delay.
Now, why would they have to lie?
Take a guess…
Thing is, I don't fault Respawn, and highly doubt this was even their decision, or at the very least, not a team decision, and because of their business relation with EA, there's absolutely no way they could possibly come out and tell their audience…
"We're removing smoke trails to make them a monetized element of the game to boost Apex's profit margins so EA doesn't kill our game like they already did with Apex Mobile."
So they have to lie.
