Respawn has claimed that a single line of code caused numerous bugs for months in Apex Legends.
The bugs, which players started reporting when the game’s 16th season kicked off in February, included visual issues such as damage being dealt via grenades that seemed to fail to explode, and weapons firing loud bursts when only being shot once.
The discovery of the bug was detailed on Reddit by Respawn, which was described as finding “a needle in a haystack.”
Apex Legends | Stories from the Outlands – Encore
The team described it as a “complex issue that we knew was impacting our community but was hard to reproduce despite detailed reports” and “had minimal leads internally.”
The cause of the issue was reportedly the new Nemesis rifle, which was introduced at the start of Season 16. The gun has a particle effect which “ramps up when heating up”, but Respawn decided that when the gun is uncharged there’s no point showing the effect, since the effect would be using up resources despite being hidden.
Every player in the game with an uncharged Nemesis was sending a “stop particle” command to the server on every frame, which was leading to issues if too many players had the weapon equipped (even when it was holstered).
“14 clients with a Nemesis running at 180fps would be enough to cause FX to begin being dropped”, Respawn explained. A fix has since been deployed.
Apex Legends Season 17 will kick off this month. Titled Arsenal and due to release on May 9, the latest season of content will introduce a new hero, Ballistic.
Originally a competitor in the Thunderdome Games, the disgraced Legend is coming out of retirement in a bid to stop his son from participating in the Apex Games.
