Apex Legends devs admit characters are too complex for casuals, but they always aim for “base level simplicity”

Respawn Entertainment has reworked one of its heroes, Lifeline, for the latest season of Apex Legends. In an interview with VideoGamer, Apex Legends lead legend designer Devin McGuire revealed that they try very hard to make everything appeal to casual players, but admitted that there are too many complexities for some to get to grips with.

As well as making sure new characters release in an overpowered state, McGuire revealed that every tool needs to have a “base level of simplicity” to appeal to casuals and newcomers. But with the casual playerbase seemingly disappearing, is Respawn doing enough?

Apex Legends needs “simplicity”

In an interview with VideoGamer, McGuire explained that the “extra complexity” is a key area of concern for new characters and fresh reworks. With this in mind, the team works to make sure new additions are instantly recognisable by casuals, even if they don’t understand what they’re actually doing.

“In general, when we’re developing characters, we have pillars that we go after on the gameplay side. One of those pillars is the clarity of the utility of the action. You need to be able to, with any character, press your button, throw that element out into the world and have a general idea of what it’s good for, why I should use it, and what opportunities it’s going to give me, even if you don’t see the full potential of that suite.”

“The simplicity ends up being the easier thing [so] that players can be creative.”

LEAD LEGENDS DESIGNER DEVIN MCGUIRE

McGuire explained that, with Lifeline, it was important to keep the basic nature of the character in place so that casuals could still benefit from the game’s new complex mechanics.

“With Lifeline, we wanted to make sure that there wasn’t any situation where you would press the button and nothing would happen. When you throw it [the drone], if there’s no target on the screen to, to auto assign, then he immediately goes to you. He’s still doing the area of effect healing that he always had before. And it maintains that core base level of simplicity.”

The Apex Legends dev explained that every character must be at least somewhat “clear and understandable” McGuire said the team needs to be careful to “remember what Apex is”, to make sure “the most successful ability have that clarity of purpose”.

“[The] extra design fuel to kind of like make it extra cool always ends up kind of over complicating the ability,” McGuire explained. “And the simplicity ends up being the easier thing [so] that players can be creative.”

Apex Legends is available now as a free-to-play game on Xbox, PlayStation, PC and Nintendo Switch.