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Today Respawn revealed and released its\u00a0foray into battle royale, Apex Legends<\/a>, a game set 30 years after Titanfall 2.\u00a0We\u00a0played hours of the game behind closed doors and chatted with Respawn executive producer Drew McCoy\u00a0about Legends’ development and combatting free-to-play skepticism.\u00a0We also talked about Respawn’s company culture\u00a0under EA and what we can expect from the Apex Legends and the Titanfall universe in the months ahead.<\/p>\n How long have you guys been working on Apex Legends?<\/strong><\/p>\n Since the spring of 2017.<\/p>\n Why the surprise release?<\/strong><\/p>\n Our goal for this game and our community is to be very transparent with them. To be completely honest, we know this game has skepticism around it. It\u2019s not Titanfall 3. It\u2019s a very different game than everyone excepted. It\u2019s battle royale, which for some people is a fad right now. Instead of trying to convince a skeptical audience over a period of time with marketing and interviews, why not just let the game speak for itself?\u00a0The best antidote for any skepticism is to see and hopefully believe.<\/p>\n How do you respond to players who say that EA is making you put loot boxes in your game or forcing you to be trend chasers?<\/strong><\/p>\n The response is play the game, check it out, and form your own opinion. But also, we<\/em> decided to make this game. Not to be throwing EA under the bus, but this wasn\u2019t the game they were expecting. I had to go to executives, show it to them, and explain it and\u2026not convince but more, \u201cHey, trust us! This is the thing you want out of us.\u201d<\/p>\n As a corporation, they can only quantify based on past data and they\u2019ve never done anything like this before. There\u2019s a giant rainbow question mark over revenue projections for this game. They\u2019re like, \u201cWe don\u2019t know! We can\u2019t predict.\u201d This is a game\u00a0where we had to say, \u201cThis is what we want to do. Help us get there.\u201d<\/p>\n They had no hand in development or anything about this game.<\/p>\n One of the goals for Apex Legends is to flesh out Titanfall\u2019s universe. Just how much are you fleshing it out within the context of this game?<\/strong><\/p>\n We have at least a year in plans right now for development. Like I said, we\u2019re going to be doing both in-game and out of game [storytelling]. Not that I think we could match them in any stretch of the imagination since they have a lot of experience in doing it, but the Overwatch CG videos are\u00a0a good example of storytelling and deepening of the world outside of the game. For us, it\u2019s the start of telling more stories in this world. There\u2019s a lot we\u2019re going to do with it. Apex Legends is a battle royale game but that\u2019s the start.<\/p>\n I think a lot of players are going to greet the news that there are no titans in Apex Legends with surprise. Can you talk about that decision a little bit?<\/strong><\/p>\n We started with the base of Titanfall 2, so the very first prototypes were Titanfall pilots and titans coming in and stuff. But when we sat down to figure out the goals for this game from a design and mechanical standpoint, it was really simple. We wanted a masterful, deep, and strategic team game.\u00a0That\u2019s the lens for which we were looking through for all the things [in Apex Legends]\u00a0we were making. Stuff like pilot mobility and wall-running, double-jumping ended up being incomprehensible, which made it not strategic or learnable. It\u2019s really fun when you\u2019re the one doing it but when you die to someone who\u2019s going a thousand miles a minute and you didn\u2019t see them, that\u2019s not a learnable moment. You\u00a0can\u2019t master that. That\u2019s someone else affecting you and you\u00a0have no control over, so that\u2019s why that stuff got cut.<\/p>\n As for the titans themselves, they were just an incredibly unbalancing force on the game. We tried a thousand iterations on them and that really speaks to what Titanfall and Titanfall 2 were trying to do. They were just power fantasies where you get to power up and stomp around and squish guys and go back to being a pilot \u2014 and those are just sort of opposed goals to this game. Just because it\u2019s cool in that game and they\u2019re both in the same universe doesn\u2019t mean that element fits here. When we were prototyping it all, we tried a bunch of versions where the titans were weaker or harder to get or there\u2019s only one on the map. The problem with that is once you get them balance and they\u2019re not destroying the integrity of the of game, they\u2019re no fun.\u00a0You don\u2019t get that power fantasy. You\u2019re driving around in a papier-m\u00e2ch\u00e9 titan. What\u2019s the point of that? That was actually a really big contentious point of development early on. We try not to be beholden to any preconceived notions about what we should be making. We let ourselves find the fun and that\u2019s where a lot of our decisions come from.<\/p>\n How long did it take to develop the characters you can play as in Apex Legends?<\/strong><\/p>\n We\u2019ve been playing with these guys for about a year and a half now in various forms. We playtest every day for an hour or two, which is a huge time investment. That\u2019s an hour or two across a hundred people \u2014 you could be developing during that time. However, playtesting is probably the most important part of development. It\u2019s crucial. The reality is that we didn\u2019t just say, \u201cThese are the eight characters we want. This is them.\u201d\u00a0 We prototyped two dozen or something. Sometimes this character was broken in one way but their\u00a0ability was really cool so we\u2019d put it with another character [and so on]. This is all before we had character names or personalities or even visuals. It\u2019s just figuring it out, basically.<\/p>\n We\u2019ve got incredibly talented designers who can think about the game in terms of player mentalities so it\u2019s not just \u201cis this mechanic cool?\u201d But it starts before that, with the mentality of a player who wants to be like\u2026a monster in the fog. That\u2019s where [the character]\u00a0Caustic comes from. It doesn\u2019t just have an impact on their abilities but also on their personality and their voice actor and the dialogue we write for them and all these things because it\u2019s the mindset of, \u201cI want to be the scary guy setting traps.\u201d So that character is not just a villain. He\u2019s deliciously evil.\u00a0<\/p>\n That\u2019s where a lot of it comes from. It\u2019s not from any one department or person. These characters are the star of the show and we treat them the way we would treat a Titanfall 2 single-player level. They get that much effort and care and iteration from all the departments from within the team.<\/p>\n Apex Legends is team-focused. Other battle royale games have solo modes for those who want to test their mettle alone against other players. Does the team have any plans for modes that cater to that sort of solo experience?<\/strong><\/p>\n A while back we nailed down that we wanted this to be a team game. We\u2019ve actually struggled with that internally because we have a lot of people in the office who have played hundreds of hours in PUBG, Fornite, and Blackout and they never play in parties. And yeah, I mean, we have to make choices to go deep, and if you\u2019re making both a solo and a squad game, you\u2019re not going to do things like the ping system or the jumpmaster system or even characters the way they are. Because we would make them singularly more powerful. Certain characters would be completely useless in a solo game.<\/p>\n We hear that players want that stuff and we\u2019re not shutting the door for all of eternity on that kind of experience, but at the same time it\u2019s like, \u201cWhy isn\u2019t there a 1v1 mode in Rainbow Six Siege?\u201d Because it\u2019s a team game and that\u2019s what all the mechanics are designed around.<\/p>\n Speaking of Rainbow Six Siege, you have characters locked behind progression walls in a\u00a0similar\u00a0fashion.\u00a0Why\u2019s that?<\/strong><\/p>\n That speaks to both the free-to-play nature of the game and progression. Since we\u2019re releasing Legends as a live service, that\u2019s going to be one of those things for people to chase. That\u2019s part of the progress as a player because once you get that character, it\u2019s a new thing to master. It\u2019s a new progression avenue for skins and banner cards and such.\u00a0For us, it\u2019s not entirely a business decision. There are design decisions in play there.<\/p>\n What\u2019s ahead content-wise for Apex Legends?<\/strong><\/p>\n I can\u2019t talk about much. I can say that in March we\u2019re starting our first season, so that\u2019s going to include new weapons, legends, and functional things as well as new cosmetics. We have a lot planned for the next year that you won\u2019t be seeing for months and months and months. We don\u2019t have the same mindset as Fortnite, with Epic doing big things and little things. We care a lot about the competitive integrity of the game so we wouldn\u2019t put something in that\u2019s incredibly unbalanced just because it\u2019s cool.\u00a0It has\u00a0to bake in the oven for a long time and be\u00a0balanced.<\/p>\n It feels like these games live or die by the service that comes after their release. Are you worried that without the constant little changes that people will drop out?<\/strong><\/p>\n We do plan on having constant updates to the game, but not in the sense of \u201cHere\u2019s a new gun that does double damage\u201d or something like that. I think Rainbow Six Siege is an example of a game that had a great foundation at launch but everything was broken around it and it had this core group of players who were like \u201cYou have something magical here. Fix it.\u201d The game continues to grow today. I don\u2019t think we have to make giant, meaningful changes to the game every week. Honestly, that\u2019d be ideal but this is our first live game. We\u2019re going to be learning for the first six months on how to do it right and we\u2019ve put an enormous amount of planning for our first year of post-launch content.<\/p>\n Are you worried about server issues at launch?<\/strong><\/p>\n With Anthem\u2019s demo last weekend, that\u2019s definitely been on our minds and we\u2019ve been digging into that. A certain set of core EA tech is in all their games like telemetry, authentication, purchasing. Those were the systems that were falling down during that demo as far as I\u2019m aware, so we\u2019ve been doing investigations into whether or not it was Anthem\u2019s limitation of that telemetry feature or is it the limitation of the Frostbite engine. Since we\u2019re not on Frostbite we have to do things differently. We\u2019ve been trying to figure out in why that was falling over and how confident are we. We\u2019ve done a lot of load-testing because with a game like this there\u2019s no way to tell how many people will show up. Could be a thousand people. Could be five million. So we\u2019ve had to prepare for wor\u2026well, best case scenario, which would be millions of players. Titanfall 1 and 2 launched with barely any hiccups. We don\u2019t expect any road bumps next week.<\/p>\n Is Apex Legends running on a modified version of Source still?<\/strong><\/p>\n Yeah, it\u2019s an evolution of what we used on Titanfall 1 and 2.<\/p>\n Are you worried about competing with other battle royale games?<\/strong><\/p>\n There\u2019s a common Reddit mentality that the world is filled with battle royale games. I don\u2019t think that\u2019s actually true. There\u2019s been a lot of games that have tried and died unfortunately but there\u2019s really only three: Blackout, PUBG, and Fortnite. I\u2019ve lived through a lot of eras of games in my time when there were a lot more than three that were active at one time. It doesn\u2019t feel like battle royale is oversaturated at this time.<\/p>\n We have put such firepower behind this game. This is the biggest team we\u2019ve ever had. Titanfall 2 had 85 developers, now we\u2019re about 115. Aside from Fortnite, there is no AAA battle royale game. They\u2019re all modes. They\u2019re all side-dishes or they\u2019ve died. Our goals for this game are very different than a Fortnite and how we\u2019re trying to achieve them is very different from a PUBG or Fortnite. We\u2019ve had a lot of people in the office who have played hundreds of hours of Blackout. I\u2019ll ask ’em, \u201cAre you going to stop playing Blackout when Apex Legends comes out\u201d and they\u2019re all, \u201cNo, I\u2019ll just split my time between the two. They scratch different itches.\u201d<\/p>\n I think going back to your question about surprising everyone, that\u2019s one of those things. If you hear this is a battle royale game, you\u2019ll just shut your mind off to it completely. But if you hear it\u2019s free-to-play and then you\u2019ll find it compliments what you\u2019re already playing or it\u2019s not for you, and that\u2019s a big reason for free-to-play.<\/p>\n Is Apex Legends indicative of a new approach to Titanfall? Will we see other Titanfall games in different genres?<\/strong><\/p>\n There have been an untold number of pitches for other types of games in the Titanfall universe. We operate in a way that\u2019s different from most studios in that we do just go, \u201cWhat\u2019s striking our fancy right now?\u201d After we started Respawn, people were clamoring for another Modern Warfare-killer. We showed up with a multiplayer-only, with story in multiplayer game, with giant robots. No one expected that because that\u2019s where our noses led us to. Same thing with this game. Could have gone in any number of directions. We prototyped a ton of\u00a0random stuff.\u00a0 This was the most popular.<\/p>\n For more on Apex Legends, check out our tips<\/a> and impressions of the game.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Today Respawn revealed and released its foray into battle royale, Apex Legends<\/a>, a game set 30 years after Titanfall 2. We played hours of the game behind closed doors and chatted with Respawn executive producer Drew McCoy about Legends’ development and combatting free-to-play skepticism. We also talked about Respawn’s company culture under EA and what we can expect from the Apex Legends and the Titanfall universe in the months ahead.<\/p>\n How long have you guys been working on Apex Legends?<\/strong><\/p>\n Since the spring of 2017.<\/p>\n Why the surprise release?<\/strong><\/p>\n Our goal for this game and our community is to be very transparent with them. To be completely honest, we know this game has skepticism around it. It’s not Titanfall 3. It’s a very different game than everyone excepted. It’s battle royale, which for some people is a fad right now. Instead of trying to convince a skeptical audience over a period of time with marketing and interviews, why not just let the game speak for itself? The best antidote for any skepticism is to see and hopefully believe.<\/p>\n How do you respond to players who say that EA is making you put loot boxes in your game or forcing you to be trend chasers?<\/strong><\/p>\n The response is play the game, check it out, and form your own opinion. But also, we<\/em> decided to make this game. Not to be throwing EA under the bus, but this wasn’t the game they were expecting. I had to go to executives, show it to them, and explain it and…not convince but more, “Hey, trust us! This is the thing you want out of us.”<\/p>\n As a corporation, they can only quantify based on past data and they’ve never done anything like this before. There’s a giant rainbow question mark over revenue projections for this game. They’re like, “We don’t know! We can’t predict.” This is a game where we had to say, “This is what we want to do. Help us get there.”<\/p>\n They had no hand in development or anything about this game.<\/p>\n One of the goals for Apex Legends is to flesh out Titanfall’s universe. Just how much are you fleshing it out within the context of this game?<\/strong><\/p>\n We have at least a year in plans right now for development. Like I said, we’re going to be doing both in-game and out of game [storytelling]. Not that I think we could match them in any stretch of the imagination since they have a lot of experience in doing it, but the Overwatch CG videos are a good example of storytelling and deepening of the world outside of the game. For us, it’s the start of telling more stories in this world. There’s a lot we’re going to do with it. Apex Legends is a battle royale game but that’s the start.<\/p>\n I think a lot of players are going to greet the news that there are no titans in Apex Legends with surprise. Can you talk about that decision a little bit?<\/strong><\/p>\n We started with the base of Titanfall 2, so the very first prototypes were Titanfall pilots and titans coming in and stuff. But when we sat down to figure out the goals for this game from a design and mechanical standpoint, it was really simple. We wanted a masterful, deep, and strategic team game. That’s the lens for which we were looking through for all the things [in Apex Legends] we were making. Stuff like pilot mobility and wall-running, double-jumping ended up being incomprehensible, which made it not strategic or learnable. It’s really fun when you’re the one doing it but when you die to someone who’s going a thousand miles a minute and you didn’t see them, that’s not a learnable moment. You can’t master that. That’s someone else affecting you and you have no control over, so that’s why that stuff got cut.<\/p>\n As for the titans themselves, they were just an incredibly unbalancing force on the game. We tried a thousand iterations on them and that really speaks to what Titanfall and Titanfall 2 were trying to do. They were just power fantasies where you get to power up and stomp around and squish guys and go back to being a pilot — and those are just sort of opposed goals to this game. Just because it’s cool in that game and they’re both in the same universe doesn’t mean that element fits here. When we were prototyping it all, we tried a bunch of versions where the titans were weaker or harder to get or there’s only one on the map. The problem with that is once you get them balance and they’re not destroying the integrity of the of game, they’re no fun. You don’t get that power fantasy. You’re driving around in a papier-mâché titan. What’s the point of that? That was actually a really big contentious point of development early on. We try not to be beholden to any preconceived notions about what we should be making. We let ourselves find the fun and that’s where a lot of our decisions come from.<\/p>\n How long did it take to develop the characters you can play as in Apex Legends?<\/strong><\/p>\n We’ve been playing with these guys for about a year and a half now in various forms. We playtest every day for an hour or two, which is a huge time investment. That’s an hour or two across a hundred people — you could be developing during that time. However, playtesting is probably the most important part of development. It’s crucial. The reality is that we didn’t just say, “These are the eight characters we want. This is them.” We prototyped two dozen or something. Sometimes this character was broken in one way but their ability was really cool so we’d put it with another character [and so on]. This is all before we had character names or personalities or even visuals. It’s just figuring it out, basically.<\/p>\n We’ve got incredibly talented designers who can think about the game in terms of player mentalities so it’s not just “is this mechanic cool?” But it starts before that, with the mentality of a player who wants to be like…a monster in the fog. That’s where [the character] Caustic comes from. It doesn’t just have an impact on their abilities but also on their personality and their voice actor and the dialogue we write for them and all these things because it’s the mindset of, “I want to be the scary guy setting traps.” So that character is not just a villain. He’s deliciously evil. <\/p>\n That’s where a lot of it comes from. It’s not from any one department or person. These characters are the star of the show and we treat them the way we would treat a Titanfall 2 single-player level. They get that much effort and care and iteration from all the departments from within the team.<\/p>\n Apex Legends is team-focused. Other battle royale games have solo modes for those who want to test their mettle alone against other players. Does the team have any plans for modes that cater to that sort of solo experience?<\/strong><\/p>\n A while back we nailed down that we wanted this to be a team game. We’ve actually struggled with that internally because we have a lot of people in the office who have played hundreds of hours in PUBG, Fornite, and Blackout and they never play in parties. And yeah, I mean, we have to make choices to go deep, and if you’re making both a solo and a squad game, you’re not going to do things like the ping system or the jumpmaster system or even characters the way they are. Because we would make them singularly more powerful. Certain characters would be completely useless in a solo game.<\/p>\n We hear that players want that stuff and we’re not shutting the door for all of eternity on that kind of experience, but at the same time it’s like, “Why isn’t there a 1v1 mode in Rainbow Six Siege?” Because it’s a team game and that’s what all the mechanics are designed around.<\/p>\n Speaking of Rainbow Six Siege, you have characters locked behind progression walls in a similar fashion. Why’s that?<\/strong><\/p>\n That speaks to both the free-to-play nature of the game and progression. Since we’re releasing Legends as a live service, that’s going to be one of those things for people to chase. That’s part of the progress as a player because once you get that character, it’s a new thing to master. It’s a new progression avenue for skins and banner cards and such. For us, it’s not entirely a business decision. There are design decisions in play there.<\/p>\n What’s ahead content-wise for Apex Legends?<\/strong><\/p>\n I can’t talk about much. I can say that in March we’re starting our first season, so that’s going to include new weapons, legends, and functional things as well as new cosmetics. We have a lot planned for the next year that you won’t be seeing for months and months and months. We don’t have the same mindset as Fortnite, with Epic doing big things and little things. We care a lot about the competitive integrity of the game so we wouldn’t put something in that’s incredibly unbalanced just because it’s cool. It has to bake in the oven for a long time and be balanced.<\/p>\n It feels like these games live or die by the service that comes after their release. Are you worried that without the constant little changes that people will drop out?<\/strong><\/p>\n We do plan on having constant updates to the game, but not in the sense of “Here’s a new gun that does double damage” or something like that. I think Rainbow Six Siege is an example of a game that had a great foundation at launch but everything was broken around it and it had this core group of players who were like “You have something magical here. Fix it.” The game continues to grow today. I don’t think we have to make giant, meaningful changes to the game every week. Honestly, that’d be ideal but this is our first live game. We’re going to be learning for the first six months on how to do it right and we’ve put an enormous amount of planning for our first year of post-launch content.<\/p>\n Are you worried about server issues at launch?<\/strong><\/p>\n With Anthem’s demo last weekend, that’s definitely been on our minds and we’ve been digging into that. A certain set of core EA tech is in all their games like telemetry, authentication, purchasing. Those were the systems that were falling down during that demo as far as I’m aware, so we’ve been doing investigations into whether or not it was Anthem’s limitation of that telemetry feature or is it the limitation of the Frostbite engine. Since we’re not on Frostbite we have to do things differently. We’ve been trying to figure out in why that was falling over and how confident are we. We’ve done a lot of load-testing because with a game like this there’s no way to tell how many people will show up. Could be a thousand people. Could be five million. So we’ve had to prepare for wor…well, best case scenario, which would be millions of players. Titanfall 1 and 2 launched with barely any hiccups. We don’t expect any road bumps next week.<\/p>\n Is Apex Legends running on a modified version of Source still?<\/strong><\/p>\n Yeah, it’s an evolution of what we used on Titanfall 1 and 2.<\/p>\n Are you worried about competing with other battle royale games?<\/strong><\/p>\n There’s a common Reddit mentality that the world is filled with battle royale games. I don’t think that’s actually true. There’s been a lot of games that have tried and died unfortunately but there’s really only three: Blackout, PUBG, and Fortnite. I’ve lived through a lot of eras of games in my time when there were a lot more than three that were active at one time. It doesn’t feel like battle royale is oversaturated at this time.<\/p>\n We have put such firepower behind this game. This is the biggest team we’ve ever had. Titanfall 2 had 85 developers, now we’re about 115. Aside from Fortnite, there is no AAA battle royale game. They’re all modes. They’re all side-dishes or they’ve died. Our goals for this game are very different than a Fortnite and how we’re trying to achieve them is very different from a PUBG or Fortnite. We’ve had a lot of people in the office who have played hundreds of hours of Blackout. I’ll ask ’em, “Are you going to stop playing Blackout when Apex Legends comes out” and they’re all, “No, I’ll just split my time between the two. They scratch different itches.”<\/p>\n I think going back to your question about surprising everyone, that’s one of those things. If you hear this is a battle royale game, you’ll just shut your mind off to it completely. But if you hear it’s free-to-play and then you’ll find it compliments what you’re already playing or it’s not for you, and that’s a big reason for free-to-play.<\/p>\n Is Apex Legends indicative of a new approach to Titanfall? Will we see other Titanfall games in different genres?<\/strong><\/p>\n There have been an untold number of pitches for other types of games in the Titanfall universe. We operate in a way that’s different from most studios in that we do just go, “What’s striking our fancy right now?” After we started Respawn, people were clamoring for another Modern Warfare-killer. We showed up with a multiplayer-only, with story in multiplayer game, with giant robots. No one expected that because that’s where our noses led us to. Same thing with this game. Could have gone in any number of directions. We prototyped a ton of random stuff. This was the most popular.<\/p>\n For more on Apex Legends, check out our tips<\/a> and impressions of the game.<\/em><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/s3.amazonaws.com\/prod-media.gameinformer.com\/styles\/body_default\/s3\/2019\/02\/03\/735dd77b\/al4.jpg\")
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