Well, well, well… Apex Legends got a little less interesting. On the heels of a massive update, Respawn Entertainment’s community has split in two opposing factions: wall kicks and roll landings? AWAY! Don’t they just feel like the sudden vanishing of a Mirage decoy in the middle of a firefight?
The developers were adamant about being sneaky here-they even tossed out a tweet from on high with a fiery emoji and a link to their rationale. “We intend to continue to evaluate new movement features for the future with learnings from these movement capabilities in mind,” they say. That means “We’re taking these out for now, but who knows, maybe they’ll come back… or maybe something even crazier will replace ’em.”
If you’ve just begun to traverse the deeper trenches of Apex, you might even wonder, wall kick, first off? Quick rewind: Wallkick was an easy method for players to bounce against walls mid-air to gain extra momentum or just gain repositioning during a fight; while roll landing was that smooth recovery after a hard fall, as players would roll away from the adverse landing with momentum instead of stumbling around like a drunk Pathfinder. These were both high-skill techniques that distinguished the sweats from the casuals.
Now? They’re gone. Just like that.
Responses? Twitter warzone time. A ton of people began shouting, probably for the first time in a 5 million-plus followers channel, that Respawn just “killed movement tech” and turned Apex into “another boring shooter,” while some say, “Good, those mechanics were janky anyway.” Then there were the in-betweeners asking, “Okay, but what’s replacing them??”
For a while now, Respawn seems to have been in a major movement-tinkering spree: nerf tap-strafing first (RIP), then messing with slide jumps, and now this? Sounds like an attempt to whip the movement into a coherent framework maybe either for accessibility reasons or to pave the way for new mechanics. Who really knows.
Definitely, the pros will need to get some new measures under their belt. Gone those madcap wall-kick escapes, roll-landings to dodge bullets. The pace is definitely going to start changing soon, for better or for worse.
So what now? “Evaluating,” according to Respawn, meaning just about anything; maybe a brand-new movement system is in the making, or maybe they’re just testing the waters without such tricks. Then again, maybe they’ll bring it all back once the outrage gets really ugly.
Until next time, Legends, start adapting. The Outlands just got a little less wild.
But low-key? Keep your eyes peeled for datamines-you know someone’s gonna find some hints for the next big movement tech real soon.
