Respawn Entertainment CEO Vince Zampella said his Apex Legends development team will be sticking with seasonal updates for the game over quality of life for the team and the game itself.
Speaking to Gamasutra during the GamesBeat Summit event taking place this week, Zampella offered a few details on the post-launch support for Apex Legends regarding update schedule, new content, and the balance of life and work for the developer.
“Our intention was to always be seasonal, so we’re kind of staying with that,” says Zampella. “The thought was ‘hey we kind of have something that’s blowing up here, do we want to start trying to drop more content?’ But I think you look at quality of life for the team.
“We don’t want to overwork the team, and drop the quality of the assets we’re putting out. We want to try and raise that.”
Zampella’s conversation with Gamasutra happened the same day Polygon reported on the extreme crunch that Epic Games employees have experienced since the release of Fortnite: Battle Royale, detailing 70 to 100-hour work weeks and potential fear of being fired for not working overtime for weekly updates to the game, though did not specifically mention the piece or the work culture at Epic Games.
Apex Legends released last February with the beginning of its first season of content and Battle Pass launching a month later. Since release, Respawn has been patching the game with small updates concerning hitbox fixes, the new Havoc weapon, weapon and character balancing, a patch that needed an emergency update for an account reset bug, and a bonus XP event.
Zampella noted that the first season had been light on newer content, but will correct that next season instead of changing the developer’s original plans for pacing.
“There are a lot of people that are like ‘hey where’s the weekly updates, Fortnite does this.’ And it’s like, we’re not set up to do that. We never intended to.”
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