“We were in the middle of a shoot when suddenly the world collapsed,” Respawn’s animation director Moy Parra remembers the exact moment when his mo-cap studio shut down for the COVID-19 pandemic. “From here we went back to the studio, started using Zoom and Slack – I didn't even know what Slack was at the time. It started a different sort of vibe.”
168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Apex Legends was a little over a year old at the time, and Parra’s animation team was working on capturing footage for Rampart, the Season 6 Legend. In 2024, Respawn is fully remote, with staff able to commute to three main offices in Los Angeles, Vancouver, or Wisconsin if they wan🍨t. How has a game this successful, with five years of non-stop additions dropping every season, been developed almost en♒tirely from home?
“The day of launch was one of the most exciting days in my career,” Parra explains. Apex Legends is probably the most successful shadow-dropped game in the medium’s history, and was an instant hit when it launched in February 2019. While the developers were proud of the game they’d created, not even they had an inkling of its immediate impact. “I don't think anybody thought that Apex would launch to the degree that it launched.
“Of course, it was a really big surprise and a really huge challenge, but it was a good challenge. It’s a situation that developers want to be in – a good problem – but it was definitely a challenge in that we launched something that we thought was cool and then it exploded. Then it's like, ‘oh s**t’. Trying to maintain that has been a challenge and it's been a really wonderful opportunity too, and a testament to all the departments working together to be able to not only keep things fresh but give players what they would like and what we think is best for the game.”
Parra admits, however, that balancing the tightrope of the developers’ vision for the game versus what players want has been a fraught process. It’s the blessing and curse of live-service, and something that hundreds of games fail to navigate. For the most part, Apex has successfully sailed through these choppy waters, or else it wouldn’t be here five year🌟s later.
“That’s usually a tricky balance,” Parra explains. “What does the community want, and is that really what's best for the game? Sometimes some of the decisions that are made internally we feel are what's best for the game and sometimes they clash a little bit with what the community actually wants. So there's always a back and forth balance between that and finding that right spot is more tricky than it sounds, I've come to learn.”
"I would be lying if I said that it wasn't chaotic when [the pandemic] happened." - Moy Parra, animation director at Respawn
Respawn’s LA studio is deserted, barring the legion of press who’ve been invited to check out Apex Legends Season 20. I see just two employees in the office working, while another handful have flown in specifically for😼 interviews. Either they’ve all been cleared out so we don’t ask questions, or most work from 💮home. Parra explains that the team has found a balance between in-person meetings and home-based work, but he doesn’t think the game could have been released if the team was fully remote from the beginning.
“I don't know that we could have launched Apex in a fully remote situation just because it required so many different intricate conversations, spontaneous chats going into people's offices, pitching an idea, having that rejected and having another one. All of that collaborative stuff had to happen in-person.”
Parra acknowledges that Respawn didn’t do everything right, but hindsight is famously 20/20, and the deve𒉰loper was trying to deal with a far bigger audience than it expected. From server issues to keeping players engaged with new seasonal content, everything had to be better, quicker, and more impressive to keep the momentum going. However, these challenges paled into insignificance compared to the shift to remote working that came with COVID-19.
“In retrospect, there's a few things that we could have done differently,” he explains. “For instance, an immediate [challenge] for us was all of a sudden, we didn't have motion capture, which was a really big punch in the stomach because the expectation was still there. It's not like all of a sudden we could ship less or [worse] quality animations… I would be lying if I said that it wasn't chaotic when that happened.”
Motion captur♏e is a mammoth undertaking – Catalyst alone had at least seven actors portraying her movements on Respawn’s motion capture stage. Under the watchful eye of mocap technician and shoot supervisor Mark Grimenstein (and carrying his hand-made props), actors embody their characters in front of 100 cameras that capture every conceivable angle. As well as the weapons and heirlooms (all made from PVC pipe to exact specifications – they’re a lot larger than you think), you can still see the marks of the pandemic on the mocap studio floor. Taped crosses and pathways mostly show actors their marks, but a wide route around the stage remains from when everyone on set had to be socially distant, a faded era memorialised in blue🦩 tape.
"It created animosity betwee🍸n certain divisions," - Devan McGuire, lead game designer🌠 at Respawn
The move to remote work didn’t just impact Parra, Grimmenstein, and the mocap team, however. The whole studio was forced to💙 bedrooms and laptops, but lead game designer Devan McGuire thinks it could have been a blessing in disguise.
“While [the pandemic] was chaotic because it was pushing everything together and forcing us to work remotely, It actually – given the support infrastructure from EA – made us better at doing that as a un๊ified team because it forced us to solve those problems directly rather than avoid them, which we had been doing for a little bit too long as isola🍬ted groups.”
Respawn already had multiple offices working remotely from one another, even if the staff were i🅷n those offices full-time. Communication between those offices☂ was a problem, even if not everyone realised it at the time. COVID pushing that remote work to the extreme may have been a long-term boon for the developer, even if it wasn’t all smooth sailing along the way.
“It was rocky,” McGuire admits. “It created animosity between certain divisions. But ultimately, it gave us the tools to know how to handle design and cross-disciplinary reviews of things🍌, how to put forward ideas and get them channelled into the right things that made it into the game. It wasn’t easy, but I think it set us up for success for the environment that we can have to bring on a new team within Wisconsin.”
Check🎀 out all the changes and the b🃏rand new skill trees in our rundown
Game design director Mike Renner is based at that Wi✃sconsin studio, which has been open for about a year at this point. He says it’s been incredibly helpful to use the existing studios as measuring sticks for Wisconsin’s growth. Despiღte that, he still believes that meeting other studios in-person is the best way to get things done.
“You're constantly learning and figuring out what works best,” he says. “Then making these face to face connections is like, okay, now we can sit down and have that conversation and get through these challenges instead of just some remote individual that doesn't have their camera on.”
Renner believes that the in-person environment is electric, and the infectious energy ♈of getting like-minded individuals together for meetings or playtests is irreplaceable. However, Respawn’s hybrid approach feels like the best of both worlds. While Parra also acknowledges the benefits, he believes that remote working goes hand in hand with live-service🍒 development. If he were to make a whole new game from scratch, he’d want to be back in the office full-time, he says.
“I get tꦬo do my job well and be able to spend time with my family,” says Parra on keeping the Apex machine trundling on. “If I was doing an entirely new game, I think it would be completely different and very likely I would want to be much more in the office. Becaus💫e creating something new or even a sequel of something at the very beginning, I would 100 percent very much prefer to be much more involved in-person than remote.”
Lead battle royale designer Josh Mohan acknowledges another benefit of Respawn’s remote system: it’s a great leveller and opens game dev opportunities to those unable to move to Los Angele🔜s, Wisconsin, or Vancouver.
“One thing that remote work has enabled, and the Wisconsin group is a great example of that, is you get people from all over the world, you get new people from different areas, different locations and they bring a new energy,” he explains. “If you work on a game for ten years straight, inevitably some of that ‘forest for the trees’ element starts to set in and you need people coming in from a different angle or different perspective. That’s something that I do enjoy, it allows the team to broaden and you get fresh energy infusions an🍨d fresh perspectives from people coming in from all over, and that’s been important to the lifeblood of our game.”
Every developer I spoke to acknowledges how difficult navigating the pandemic was, and admitted that they couldn’t have released ෴Apex Legends in those conditions. But it’s clear Respawn adapted quickly to the new normal of remote working, taking it in its stride to continue updating the game month after month. Season 20 could be the most g🍨ame-changing update to date, despite no new Legend, weapon, or map. And it’s not been an easy process, but it was almost entirely developed from home.
“When we were shipping Season 8 in the middle of the pandemic, figuring out, ‘oh my God, how do we get this out the door when we don't know what anybody's doing with this part of the game’ was a nightmare,” says McGuire. “And that has slowly become a much more refined process. It's been challenging, but it's been essential to our survivability as a multi-studio, cross-continent company.”
Development of Apex Legends may have started normally, but Respawn has been forced to adapt thanks to unprecedented circumstances. Live-service titles are in a more precarious position than regular games, and Respawn’s quick adaptation put it in great stead for further years of development. Now in a hybrid system with🍎 a focus on working from home, developers can better manage their work/life balance, see more of their families, and work on game-changing updates to the battle royale at the same time.
The future is never set in stone, and Respawn may well need to adapt again in the coming years. Its prior expe🎉rience in shifting development so dramatically – and with no noticeable repercussions on the game itself while doing so – will only put it in good stead for future hurdles. Passion flows through the office, walls are adorned with as much Titanfall imagery as Apex. But most importantl𝓡y, it flows through the veins of the developers themselves. Whether they continue to make Apex Legends from their bedrooms or from one of Respawn’s offices, that passion remains, and that passion is what will fuel the game for years to come.
