While Crypto is still plenty strong in Apex Legends season 22, a different type of surveillance is now drawing the ire of players: the game’s kill cams.
Kill cams were introduced right at the beginning of the year in Apex‘s Mixtape playlist, giving respawn modes like Team Deathmatch, Control, and Gun Run a classic feature of multiplayer FPS games. In season 22, those kill cams started popping up in battle royale as well. But those kill cams simply don’t work in any sort of helpful way unless you’re the last person to be taken out on your team. Instead, players on Reddit and other social media sites have noticed the kill cam in battle royale shows you not how you got knocked down but rather how you actually died—showing you in great detail how your opponent has managed to shoot around your knockdown shield and thirst you. It’s not exactly what you’d call educational, or even remotely useful.
“There is a 66 percent chance that what you see is your sorry ass crawling somewhere and being thirsted on,” the author of one Reddit thread succinctly put it—and they’re right. The battle royale kill cam serves no purpose the majority of the time you’re seeing it. Instead of getting the angle of the person who knocked you and trying to figure out what you did wrong in the situation, most of the time, you just see yourself crawling behind a knockdown shield.
Most players in the thread were in favor of removing the feature from battle royale modes altogether, and it’s a sentiment shared by many others across various social media sites.
To make matters worse, many players are theorizing the kill cam feature is breaking the game in various ways. More than a few players have noted how the game’s requeue feature, which allows you to queue immediately after being eliminated from a match without needing to back out of a game and load back into the lobby, isn’t working at all since the split reset. Some players think that’s being caused by the kill cam itself confusing the game’s code—although they admit this is just a theory and no one has solid proof this is, in fact, the reason the requeue feature isn’t working.
It’s a precipitous fall from grace for a feature that initially garnered praise from the community. And while there’s no telling if the strange kill cams in battle royale modes are breaking other features in the game, the fact alone that so much of current kill cams are just replaying an enemy finishing a downed player should be enough for Respawn to push a hotfix.
