Pathfinder is one of the more popular Legends in Apex Legends, but one players has found a frustrating issue with how its hitbox performs in-game.
Hitboxes are areas on a character’s body that register damage from bullet fire and explosives, and one of the earliest issues in Apex Legends when it was first released was the inconsistency with how the hitboxes worked in-game.
While Respawn have certainly put in a lot of effort in resolving these discrepancies, it appears that the Pathfinder’s hitbox has come under scrutiny once again.
Player discovers Pathfinder hitbox issue
On April 18, a Reddit user posted about an experiment he had performed in Apex Legends to test out which areas of the Pathfinder’s body was considered part of its official hitbox.
What the player discovered was that there were large gaps between the Pathfinder’s hitbox and its actual body shape as it appears in-game, especially when more elaborate and higher end skins are equipped.
The image below shows that the hitbox-to-body ratio of the Twitch Prime skin on the right is considerably off, as a lot of the Pathfinder’s body is actually not considered part of its hitbox.
Even the skin on the left, which has a more reasonable ratio, still has parts of it that will not inflict damage upon the Legend if they get hit by bullet fire or explosives.
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Why are the hitboxes like this?
While one can never be too sure as to the reasoning behind this system, it would seem that Respawn have coded Pathfinder’s hitboxes like this to keep it consistent to its default body shape.
As a result, any skin equipped the enlarges the body ends up creating a lot more surface area that does not count towards the hitbox, and therefore cannot be fired at to cause damage.
Why is this an issue?
At first glance, the reasoning for this kind of hitbox structure makes sense, as Respawn probably did not want to punish players for equipping skins that had larger body shapes.
However, this leads to a major issue for players who have to face Pathfinders during the course of a match, and gunfights can end up becoming very confusing since players will not get damage feedback for firing at large portions of the Legend’s body.
What’s worse is that the Digital Threat sight will flash the entire body red, but bullets fired at certain areas of the character will simply pass through.
All of this can cause players to feel as if they’ve been cheated by the game and that their bullets are simply not registering despite being fired clearly at a parts of the body.