Respawn CEO explains why they have ‘gone dark’ on Apex Legends content

Vince Zampella, Respawn Entertainment’s founder and CEO, has admitted that the Apex Legends developers don’t know how quickly they should be coming out with new content for their hit battle royale game.

Titanfall developers Respawn surprised gamers when they launched Apex Legends without warning on February 4, but it became an overnight success, with many Fortnite players keen to test out the new game. However, thanks to Fortnite Battle Royale’s fortnightly updates, it’s an audience that has become accustomed to regular fresh content.

Speaking at GamesBeat Summit 2019, Zampella admitted that the success of Apex Legends had taken Respawn by surprise too.

Apex Legends was hailed as a Fortnite killer when it launched.

How often should Respawn update Apex?

Perhaps it would be unfair to compare Apex to Fortnite, but Zampella said that his team was still struggling with the pace of change.

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“We didn’t expect it to be as big as it was,” he said. “We’re still figuring out internally what the cadence of content has to be and how we support it. We’ve been a little dark because we’re kind of figuring out internally what we have to do.”

(Zampella begins speaking at 4:33:37)

He also said that Respawn had been caught out by the bugs that the game’s players had discovered – fixing these has diverted their attention away from fresh content.

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“When you get that many people stress testing the game, you find flaws that you never imagined,” he explained. “We’ve been fire fighting, fixing things. We’re gonna put the focus back on those quality of life issues and make sure everything is perfect before we really start to build more content.”

Apex Legends has gotten off to a fast start but there’s still a long way to go.

Apex Legends has a lot of bugs that need fixing

There is a large hacking problem on PC in Apex Legends, something the console players are able to avoid, but there are some serious bugs that affect all of the platforms too, some of which have existed since the game’s launch.

The developers have said fixes are coming soon, but there’s currently no definitive timetable. At the same time, the game has only had one new weapon and one new ‘legend’ character since launch, and not a single change to the map – leaving some players wanting more.