Overview
Season 6 was a larger release than season 5 for the game overall, with new major systems like crafting being introduced. Season 5’s smaller content amount (coinciding with the beginning of COVID-19 protocols) and much higher player counts and hours played (again, likely due to covid) pushed us to make season 6 significantly larger. On the weapons side of things, we pivoted from our plan of shipping no weapon for season 6, as we did in season 5, to trying to ship a less expensive weapon that could be completed in the accelerated schedule. The Volt was an SMG in the previous Titanfall games, which meant a good amount of art and sound content work had already been done and the updates to make it shippable would take far fewer resources than a totally new weapon. For season 6 I also worked on some major systemic changes and gameplay updates with the health/shields systems.
The Volt SMG
Volt
The Volt is an energy ammo SMG with a moderate fire rate and decently controllable recoil. The weapon doesn’t have any major differing mechanics, partially due to the development time. However, it stands apart from the rest of the SMG roster due to being the only SMG to take energy ammo, and its longer effective range. The energy ammo element interacts with the higher level ammo collection and team sharing gameplay. Additionally, the energy nature of the weapon allowed me to push the ballistic properties of the weapon into a different space than other SMGs, as energy weapons tend to fire faster projectiles with less bullet drop. Using these starting points, I created and tuned a recoil pattern and various numbers to push the Volt’s effective range to the upper SMG limits, placing it as a sort of SMG/AR hybrid weapon.
Volt recoil pattern without any control from user
Systemic Armor Changes
All Evo Armor
One of the most impactful changes I was responsible for in season 6 was the updates to armor/shields in Apex. Previously, armor in Apex was a loot item that could be found on the ground or taken from slain enemies. The rarity/quality of the armor determined the amount of maximum shields that the wearer had. With season 6, we changed it so that all armor found in the game was “evo armor” (armor that gains max shield amount over time as the wearer does damage). Additionally, players automatically got a “level 0” armor on drop, so they could begin evolving that armor immediately without needing to find one on the ground. Various rarities of armor could still be found as loot, so players could upgrade to a higher tier through looting in addition to doing damage.
This had a couple of major benefits. Most notably, it reduced how much loot variance and luck affected combat power. Providing players with an avenue to progress along one of the most powerful loot axes (health/shields) without relying on luck improved the feeling of competitive integrity and skill expression. Furthermore, the “all evo armor” provided a good solution to a problem we had tried to tackle with Apex since it’s launch: the lack of meaningful long range gunplay. In Apex, it is very difficult to do enough damage to an enemy squad at long range to gain an actionable advantage. The biggest hurdle we as designers kept hitting while attacking this problem was the “net fun” issue of long range kills — it feels “worse to lose” than it feels “good to win”. The nature of “all evo-armor” provided an excellent solution space opportunity! Rather than trying to give attackers enough advantage to defeat an enemy squad, we instead pointed the focus at giving enough long-term advantages to the attacker in ways that didn’t rely on a zero-sum loss to an enemy. Because the armor rewards dealing damage, not kills, it is valuable to get hits on enemies at long range even if they can heal it all up. In this way, the attacker gains long-term power and is rewarded for marksmanship while the victim doesn’t lose enough to feel highly negative!
Reduced TTK
The second major change to armor was a reduction of shield values across the board by 25 points (~12.5% reduction from standard max shields). In essence this change reduced the TTK of the game overall. The goals of the TTK adjustment fundamentally lies in giving players access to more short-term and medium-term goals to help improve stickiness for casual players. The goal was to shift the balance to give a little more power to positional advantages and “getting the drop on someone”, which are easier to learn and practice in the shorter term while mechanical mastery is a very long term chase.
Launch Reactions and Adjustments
While the reception to the “all evo armor” change was positive, the reception to the TTK change was quite vocally negative. We expected an initial negative reaction because it was a significant game-wide change and people would need time to adjust their playstyles to the new TTK, so we closely monitored sentiment and data for a short while. Eventually, we decided that the negative experiences and forcing engaged players to adjust their understanding of what plays they could make successfully was not worth the potential upside for new players (esp. since new player numbers were decreasing as the game was 1.5 years old at this point). So, we reverted the TTK change! Thankfully, this could be done very rapidly — we knew the changes were risky so I implemented the script in a way that allowed us to test all combinations of these features being on/off and made it trivial to turn them off post season launch.
This was a very valuable learning experience! It helped me become more comfortable with larger changes and taught me to be less afraid when thinking about the possibility space of changes to a game. Thankfully, as a live game, we were able to quickly react to sentiment on new updates. Utilizing this blessing gave me freedom to try broader, scarier changes, which was very exciting and helped me learn a great deal about how live games react to being pushed in various directions!