While gamers blaming developers is nothing new, some might be wondering why almost all communication from a studio goes through a PR (public relations) representative and not just directly from the developers themselves.
Over on the Apex Legends subreddit, Respawn Entertainment “Scriptacus” posted a long message in answering a player regarding the Apex Legends leaving early penalty feature that was accidentally rolled out, but pulled back in for further testing. In the thread, Scriptacus replied to a player and explained why developers are hesitant to announce new features, fixes, and the like without going through proper channels first.
To answer your first question; because the artists that make the skins, and the operations folks who update the store don’t implement gameplay, nor are they in charge of game direction.
As for everything else, there’s far too much there to answer individually, and a lot of it I’m not at liberty to answer. There best answer I can give you is: We will continue to support and improve the game to the best of our ability.
Unfortunately, there are far more things for us to spend our development time on than there is time, so we have to prioritize. In the end, that’s going to leave someone unhappy because what they feel is important isn’t prioritized as highly as they think it should be. That’s just reality, and we can’t make everyone happy.
As to why I don’t give specific answers about unannounced or requested features (like alternate modes); far too often it’s unwise to do so. Just mentioning this kind of stuff gets taken as a promise. The timeline starts the moment it’s mentioned… and everyone has a different expectation of what’s a reasonable timeline… and many people heavily underestimate what is required.
I’ll give you my somewhat cynical take on how this stuff tends to go. If I were to say “Yes, feature X will come to the game someday.”, (aside from instantly becoming a promise, which we are now obligated to add) it would likely get picked up by blogs and gaming news sites, posted as “Respawn says X is coming to Apex”, and depending on how those articles are written, they’re going to set expectations incorrectly for a lot of people. Eventually, people would talk about how Respawn “announced X ages ago”, saying that it’s taking too long, or speculating about why it has been delayed. A lot of this can be helped by careful wordsmithing, but even that can be taken out of context, or misquoted like a bad game of telephone, leading to the same issues. So I leave that to those whose job it is, and post what I can, when I can, in my free time (hello Sunday afternoon).
I don’t know about you, but that response makes a ton of sense, right? And it doesn’t apply to just Apex Legends, either. So the next time you’re wondering why a studio doesn’t just confirm or say something, use that reply as a reference.
Are you fine with the developer’s response or do you think there’s a better way of handling this overall?
In other Apex Legends news, make sure to read up on this blow by blow account of a cheater repeatedly banned! Trust me, it’ll make you smile just a bit.