Overview

Season 9 was the last season I shipped on the Apex team, and included the release of the Bocek Compound Bow weapon which had been in development for over a year at that point. There were other updates as well, but I will be focused on the bow here as it was my most noteworthy contribution to the season.

As a quick side note on the name: Respawn has a semi-tradition of naming things after developers, including the Flatline/Vinson, the Kraber, Lastimosa armories, etc. While we were working to come up with a name for VO recording very early on in the process, the narrative lead decided to name it after me — despite my protests that it was a bad weapon name. I am deeply honored and humbled to have my name in the game in this way, but as with anything the bow was a massive team effort and I am far from deserving of the most credit. On launch I wrote up a tweet thread naming the contributions of those involved, and you can find it here: tinyurl.com/bowcredit

The Bow’s ballistics behavior are decently straight over medium to medium-long range, but then the projectile rapidly reduces in speed and drops off in height.

Due to the unique shape and positioning of the bow, we were struggling to get standard optics to work. We attempted to do just one default sight on the bow, but the optics felt really desirable in playtests to get FoV variation and for more loot interaction. One of the reasons we decided to delay the bow launch was to get in bigger content features like this — once we pushed the release season from 7 to 9 we had the opportunity to create new optics geo to let standard optics go on the bow! Below is a gallery of the ADS view for each optic, starting with the default “ironsights”:

One of the biggest challenges with the bow was giving it enough connection to the loot game. Many standard attachments like magazines, barrel stabilizers, and stocks just don’t make any sense on a bow. We playtested many options and cheaper potential solves: e.g. just letting barrel stabilizers get added and not explaining it, trying to let optics affect FoV with no model, using energy mags or similar and having a bow magazine that would need to be reloaded, etc. Ultimately, we took some extra time to do things at a higher quality bar instead of just pushing it out the door, and this extra time let us do some higher effort updates in this space. The primary loot elements for the bow were the optics (shown above), 2 new hopups, and the ammo scarcity driver.

The bow is the first weapon to be able to equip 2 hopups simultaneously, and I also developed 2 new hopups for those slots. The first hopup, “Shatter Caps”, gives the bow or the 3030 (another semi-auto precision weapon) the option to fire a shotgun like spread pattern in addition to the standard single shots. This helped provide some short range power to the weapon which otherwise struggled in high screen-space mobility close combat engagements.

Additionally, I added “Deadeye’s Tempo”, a hopup which could go on either the bow or the Sentinel. One of the main “depth minigames” to master with the bow is firing as soon as it reaches max charge repeatedly. This maximizes damage and projectile flight at max charge and maximizes fire rate by not wasting time at max charge before firing, providing optimal DPS. The Deadeye’s Tempo hopup increases draw speed if players repeatedly fire at the “perfect moment”, which is at or very shortly after when the bow reaches max charge. This encourages and rewards this playstyle of keeping in the flow of rhythmic firing, providing a huge DPS boost with a high skill ceiling.

Deadeye’s Tempo could also be equipped on the Sentinel, increasing rechamber speed if the player fires shortly after the previous rechamber is finished.

Finally, the bow has a unique ammo type to Apex: Arrows. I wanted to avoid polluting the loot pool with too many niche ammo drops, and I wanted to push the bow-like fantasy and encourage more map movement and other looting style macro behavior. The solution we used is for arrows to stick into the environment and enemies, where they can be picked back up later on. This added a fun visual element and allowed us to reduce the ammo drops and encourage players to retrieve their fired ammo.