Respawn Entertainment released an update for Apex Legends today that addressed several issues in the game, including a bug that affected Bloodhound’s new Prestige skin and a penalty for players who leave Control mode matches early.
Last week, Bloodhound’s new Prestige skin was bugged, making it impossible for some players to log the kills necessary to make progress toward unlocking the second and third tiers of the cool, but expensive new outfit for the Technological Tracker. The update should address that issue, along with other difficulties affecting stat trackers on Bloodhound.
Another change to the game pushed in the update is a leaver penalty for Control mode. This marks a significant change for the newest limited-time mode in Apex. Control matches, with timed respawns and unlimited ammo for guns, tend to play out as a more casual alternative to battle royale or Arenas. Now, players who might be waiting for friends to join their party or those looking to briefly warm up their aim will be penalized for leaving a game of Control before it’s over.
If social media hype is any indication, Control seems like a highly popular mode, perhaps more than the release of Arenas last year, and many fans have called for it to be made permanent. This change is likely to improve the quality of matches while Control is around for the next week.
Finally, the update addresses FPS issues on console. Respawn has promised the patch released today will just be the “first of several” updates to come. Since the last major update to the game that added Control, those playing Apex from consoles have experienced severe frame rate issues, mostly in the form of wild variations in frame rate and drops to glacial pace, sometimes as low as 20 frames per second, when the action gets to be too much to handle. Hopefully for those fans, this patch will help the issue, which has made Apex difficult to run for a large portion of its playerbase.
