Overview
Season 4 was the first season where I owned the weapon updates and balance for the entirety of the season’s development. However, the new weapon, the Sentinel sniper rifle, already had a very basic prototype and the art was in progress. So, the choice of what weapon would come out in season 4 was already set up before I took over. Still, I owned the creation, implementation, and design of the weapon, as well as all of the weapon meta changes for season 4.
The Sentinel sniper rifle.
Sentinel
The Sentinel is a bolt action sniper rifle. It has the capability to be “energized” for a short time to deal massively increased damage to enemy shields.
By expending a valuable shield healing consumable and some time, players can energize the Sentinel, giving it highly increased damage against enemy Shields. The energize state decays slowly over time, and is consumed in chunks with each shot.
Animation of the Sentinel being energized. I did all of the scripting of the ability and implemented the UI.
The Sentinel functions as a high skill long range precision weapon, and has strong fight opening potential with the energized rounds destroying all shields in one body shot.
Season 4 Large Meta Changes
In addition to the Sentinel, I made some other notable changes to help the season 4 update feel impactful.
In Apex Legends, there is a special class of powerful “airdrop” weapons that can only be found in exposed mid to late game airdrops. The season 2 weapon introduced to Apex was an airdrop weapon, the LSTAR. The LSTAR is an energy LMG that shoots large powerful projectiles that has a heat mechanic, where firing the weapon for too long overheats the weapon and causes a firing cooldown animation. For season 4, I moved the LSTAR out of the airdrop and into the regular loot pool, and moved another energy LMG, the Devotion, into the airdrops, adjusting the power levels accordingly. Because the LSTAR was only in airdrops before, it was rare and difficult to come by. Introducing it into the regular loot pool felt somewhat like adding a whole new weapon to the game, as now many more players could find and use it far more regularly. In addition, I removed the LSTAR’s limited magazine size and reloading requirement, as it felt redundant and unfun to have 2 separate mechanics (limited mag size and heat) which served to limit extended firing. Now, the LSTAR is the only weapon in Apex without a magazine, which required many upgrades to the games loot scripting. It even required me to update and add logic to the UI for each of the games optics, which usually show magazine fraction, to instead be able to display heat fraction for the LSTAR.
For season 4, I also introduced a new ammo type to the game, sniper ammo. Sniper weapons were changed from their previous ammo types to sniper ammo, and new extended sniper magazine attachments were added. Sniper ammo loot bricks give much less ammo than other ammo types, and the stack size in players’ inventories is much smaller. This meant snipers, which are much more ammo efficient than full auto weapons, now had to engage in the ammo scarcity game. Taking multiple snipers in a squad also now put more pressure on the squad’s inventory load, helping reduce sniper teamshotting which overly locked players down and restricted interesting positional movement.
