Apex Legends season 16 has been the source of many audio bugs in the competitive Respawn FPS game, with players reporting missing sound effects, or proper flash and particle effects absent from their weapons. Now, with Apex Legends season 17 just around the corner, heralding the arrival of new legend Ballistic, Respawn reveals that many of the recent bugs can be blamed on a single line of code, specifically connected to the new Nemesis assault rifle.
If you’ve been cutting your way through Apex Legends this season, you might have noticed a few errant instances where your weapon sound effects wouldn’t pop, or grenades would seemingly fail to explode, despite the fact that they still inflicted damage on your opponents. No matter where your main lands on the Apex Legends tier list, no-one has been safe, with entire servers blanketly affected by the annoying audio glitches.
Now, after a lot of testing, investigating, and game-making wizardry, Respawn reveals exactly the source of the problem – and it’s no wonder it was so hard to find.
“We first noticed the problem soon after the release of Season 16,” Respawn says. “This had not occurred during our Season 16 playtesting, could not be reproduced internally after initial reports, and was very difficult to pin down using live gameplay videos as the root cause was not always shown in the player’s POV. This left us with a complex issue that we knew was impacting our community, but was hard to reproduce.
“After a preliminary investigation, the primary suspect was found to be the system our servers use to dispatch ‘start/stop’ commands for various effects. A single line of code was identified to be the root cause of the issue. Season 16’s new weapon.”
Essentially, the Nemesis has its own particle effect that kicks in whenever the gun starts to heat up. When the gun isn’t being fired, and therefore isn’t heating up, there’s a line of code that ensures the particle effect isn’t being deployed – Apex Legends is telling the Nemesis ‘you know that effect you make when you’re heating up? Yeah, don’t do that.’
The problem, however, was that this command, this line of code, was basically being sent over and over again – for every frame that a player, or players, weren’t using a heated-up Nemesis, Apex Legends was saying ‘don’t play particle effects, don’t play particle effects.’ This had the effect of cancelling other particle effects and weapon sounds throughout Apex match servers.
“Every time the server simulates an input from the weapon’s owner, this particular line of code is executed,” Respawn continues. “This means that every single player with an uncharged Nemesis would create a ‘stop particle’ ‘effect’ on the server every frame, and this line of code was being called even when the weapon was holstered.”
After identifying the issue, Respawn has since issued a fix, and says that it is keeping a “close eye (and ear)” for any further audio and particle issues. But there you have it. It was the Nemesis’s fault. If it weren’t such a beast of an AR, I’d almost be angry.
Check out the Apex Legends Season 17 release date, plus everything we know about the next big update. You can also preview all of the Apex Legends Ballistic abilities, to get to grip with the new shooter ahead of time, or take a look through our refreshed Apex Legends character and abilities list, to see if it’s time to pick a new main.