Respawn plans fixes for hit registration, audio, and slow motion bug in Apex Legends

In its latest community post, Apex Legends developer Respawn Entertainment told players that many highly sought after requests for change have been heard. Respawn gave an update on its progress in assessing several aspects of the game, including hit registration.

Hit registration issues have been the bane of many players’ experience in Apex. This refers to when a player shoots another player on their screen, but the server hasn’t updated to match that the player’s crosshair was on their enemy, the server would count that shot as a miss. Likewise, some misses would be random and unfair hits, such as being shot behind a wall since the server hadn’t updated yet.

Respawn has fixed many things that cause this issue, but the developer isn’t done yet. Respawn said that this will take some time to solve, but promised players that their hit detection will be extremely satisfying when it’s completely fixed.

The community update also addressed the Fortified passive. Caustic and Gibraltar weren’t very viable options for play because their extremely large hitboxes made them easy to shoot and kill. This made Caustic and Gibraltar players liabilities for their team, so Respawn quickly wanted to fix that with the Fortified passive.

This passive gives both legends a flat 10-percent damage reduction to any kind of damage, making them almost bruiser-type characters in the game. But players quickly found out that the 10-percent reduction was actually being taken as health damage even when shields were equipped. This has been fixed in the next patch, which should finally make the tanky duo a bit more viable.

The slow motion bug is another problem that anyone who’s played Apex for an extended period of time knows about. At the beginning of the game, players would experience an issue where they moved considerably slower, and the game would feel sluggish and unplayable. Respawn said that some servers had faulty hardware, so they had been removed from hosting games, but a root cause for this bug hasn’t been found yet. Respawn promises continued updates for the solution to the bug, and players will no doubt be relieved once it’s found.

Respawn is also focused on two areas for audio adjustment. The first area is general audio fixes, such as distortion and dropping sound. Many players attributed this issue to general launch bugs on release, but the persistence of these issues worried players and Respawn. The next patch will fix many of these problems, but Respawn is asking for players to submit clips of any other issues so it can address those as well. Footstep audio adjustments might also be made to attune them so that they’re fairly representative of how far away enemies are and how many of them there are.

Respawn isn’t going to go easy on players who are caught piggybacking, either. Piggybacking is when a player on a team essentially does nothing to help the team win a game, but just follows them around and hopes to win. This behavior was rare on release, but the introduction of the battle pass and the grind for experience led to a proliferation of this kind of behavior.

Respawn will start temporarily banning players who do this. If they continue to piggyback, this will lead to a permanent ban. The developers have made it very clear that trying to make the game not fun for other people, especially teammates, is unacceptable.