Aim assist has become a major point of discourse in the wider Apex Legends community as time has gone on. Despite much of the competitive scene starting out on mouse and keyboard, there’s been a gradual exodus toward controllers in both ranked and tournament play, mainly due to the input method’s incredibly potent aim assist values.
While Apex players shouldn’t expect that to change when season 18 launches on Tuesday, Aug. 8, Respawn did confirm in a recent press conference that changes to aim assist are coming a little later down the line.
It’s something the devs “want to address,” in the words of design director Evan Nikolich, but the process of changing it is one that is a challenge to tackle.
“We’re definitely looking at aim assist,” he said when directly asked whether updates were on the way. “We don’t have any changes at this time, but it’s definitely something we want to address. I think it’s becoming more apparent that the reason the SMG meta is the way it is is because of controller. But it’s a challenge—it’s a technically deep and complex system. We’re going to have to unspool a lot of stuff to get to a point where we feel like it’s in a better spot.”
Related: Apex Legends season 18 patch notes
Aim assist values are a difficult beast to tackle as even a small tweak can be a major disruption to how the game feels to play on controller. With how Apex prides itself on its gameplay, any nerfs to aim assist need to be handled with care.
“If you could see the amount of code that goes into every trigger pull, it would probably blow your mind a little,” Nikolich joked.
Eric Canavese, the lead weapon designer, also pitched into the discussion, stressing how much work had to go into addressing this specific issue.
“When we make changes, we have to validate them over a longer period of time because we’re messing with game feel and controller feel,” he said. “It’s a very fragile system that we don’t want to make any silly changes too early and then push them live. We want to really make sure the changes are healthy and are an improvement. It just takes time to get it right because getting it wrong is pretty detrimental to the feel of the game.”
An unknown point in the future might not be as soon as some Apex players are hoping for when it comes to aim assist getting hit, but it’s clear Respawn is working to tackle it behind the scenes. But with Apex Predator leaderboards overflowing with controller players exclusively and the vast majority of pro players having made the switch to controller too, an update can’t come soon enough if the scales are to be balanced once again.
