Apex Legends Mobile is bringing the Apex Legends experience to portable devices worldwide, and it boasts a series of tweaks and features not in the PC version of the game to ensure it’s true to the fast-paced action you’d find in the Apex Games.
More than just familiar maps and legends (and even throwing some new faces in the mix), the Apex Mobile team “really wanted to capture the experience and feeling of everything that makes Apex so amazing and bring it to mobile players in a way that’s authentic to them,” according to senior director of product Myke Hoff.
This means Apex Mobile is “a standalone mobile experience” that was “built from the ground up with mobile-first optimizations” and “mobile-first content,” according to Hoff, making it a unique experience that’s close enough to the base game to strike a familiar feeling with veterans of the franchise, but also unique enough to be its own version. Though the biggest difference between the two is arguably the input method, Apex Mobile and Apex Legends face similar features and design decisions—including whether it should have aim assist and how strong it should be.
Does Apex Legends Mobile have aim assist?
Players who aren’t used to aiming with their thumbs on a mobile device don’t have to worry too much. Apex Legends Mobile has its own degree of aim assist. Aim assist on Apex Mobile “is definitely stronger than the PC Apex game,” according to design director Jordan Patz.
“When you’re using a thumb on a small screen, your level of fidelity in aiming is just gonna be lower, especially in a game that allows players a lot of advanced movement options like Apex,” Patz said in a press conference ahead of the game’s launch. “So we’ve got a little bit higher aim assist.”
To offset both aim assist and the spacial awareness issues that come from playing on phones, Apex Mobile also has a slightly higher TTK, according to Patz.
Not all weapons have the same aim assist values, though, so the design decision was to keep the strength of aim assist as part of the weapon profile. “Weapons that are made to be engaged in shorter range will potentially have more [aim assist] on, weapons that have higher risk versus reward will potentially use other types of knobs,” Patz said.
This doesn’t mean aim assist can’t see any changes in the future. Since the feature is part of weapons, the mobile team can tweak it on specific targets. Apex Mobile is also a live game, meaning it’s open to changes. Aim assist, for instance, was stronger in the earlier betas, but the team toned it down after player feedback, according to Patz.
If you don’t want to use the feature, you can also toggle aim assist in the settings menu, giving players the option to tweak the experience to their taste. Just hope your enemies also have it turned off.
