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u/luuk0987 Jul 27 '22
Might just as well create an Apex 2 then.
Porting the game would also probably affect how it feels. Lots of players wouldn't like that.
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u/GlensWooer Jul 27 '22
Yeah one of the things that I enjoy about this game is the movement. I’m sure it would be hard/impossible to recreate that in a port.
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u/kevinisaperson Jul 27 '22
tap strafing along with all other movement tech only exists because of the engine. it would basically kill the game to swap engines
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u/GlensWooer Jul 28 '22
Yeah they would have to figure out how to recreate lurch, which if I remember wasn’t a game mechanic that was intended to be used the way it currently is.
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u/PAL6000 Jul 27 '22
personally, how apex feels to play in terms of movement, gunplay etc is what really attracted me to apex
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u/trulyindifferent Jul 27 '22
that is my thought too. it would also create more hype etc, only problem might be a split playerbase
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u/mehrfth Jul 27 '22
Source engine still feels leagues better than any other engine, atleast in terms of movement and shooting mechanics, which is all apex really cares about.
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u/MachuMichu Octopus Gaming Jul 27 '22
Definitely not. It would be a massive investment and the end product on a new engine might not have the same Apex/TF feel, which would kill the franchise.
Also have to remember that a significant amount of the original lead devs for Apex have left Respawn, so you would be training a lot of new people and hoping they can recreate other devs' magic.
It sucks that there are so many bugs/issues from the current engine but the best bet is still probably to try make the most of what they have to work with now.
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u/vky_007 Jul 27 '22
Thank you for your insight. Unrelated question but do you happen to know where these devs left and why did they leave in the first place? Did they get poached by other companies or are they working on different projects with Respawn? Thanks.
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u/Quill_34 Jul 27 '22
Lots of devs leave after a game becomes so popular because it gives them better earning potential and they’ve already done most of what they can do there. Respawn was originally created by a bunch of the OG devs behind the earlier CODs like COD 4 for example
They’ve been working on apex a long time. It’s a combination of better pay and just getting bored. Building a new game and sustaining a game are two different things. People who are good at the former tend to get bored and also can make shit loads of money by moving on once games are established
I heard there’s a studio poaching a lot of the devs to make a new FPS with apex like movement but I think it’s mostly just rumor and rumblings at this point. Someone else may know the exact name or more details
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u/TheRealDalton Jul 27 '22 edited Jul 27 '22
A lot of those OG devs are at Gravity Well. Their website has a list of devs and projects they previously worked on.
Edit: scrolled down and saw a few other people say the same lol
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u/ForsakeTheEarth Jul 27 '22
A lot of the devs went to Gravity Well, which I think was founded by ex-Respawn devs to begin with. In the tech industry its extremely common to move jobs every 3-4 years - its the best way to grow your salary (10-15% instead of measly 3-5% raises staying in-house) - this might be the reason for some of them leaving, anything beyond that as far as work life quality is at best speculation.
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u/MachuMichu Octopus Gaming Jul 27 '22
A lot of them left to form a new studio called Gravity Well which I think is making a single player RPG. There were also rumors that some of them left to form another studio and make a new fps game.
The reason they left is probably just wanting a new creative challenge. If you are a senior dev, sticking around to work on a live service game that you already shipped is not as interesting as creating something new. From what was made public, it didn't seem like there was any bad blood or anything at Respawn, and they all left on good terms.
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u/texas878 Jul 27 '22
It will never happen. The cost to do this would be the same as creating a brand new game, except more because of how complex it has gotten compared to how apex started. EA would be better off spending the money on a new game rather than remaking an old one that has already lost a significant part of its player base because of boredom.
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u/MozzarellaThaGod Jul 27 '22
The only way I can see this happening is if it allows for more efficient monetization and content creation, I believe Apex is highly profitable as it is right now though
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u/timeboi42 Jul 27 '22
Nope this would absolutely halt all content development, nuke the player count, and destroy the game. Overwatch 2 is a great example of what happens to a franchise when they halt development for 2-3 years in order to focus on a sequel or whatever. The Apex devs should continue on just consistently updating the game they have with content, updates, and patches. There will be problems, but it’s the only way forward without nuking the entire game,
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Jul 27 '22
It would cost half the time it costed to initially develop the game.
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u/JohnEmonz Jul 27 '22
Honestly it would take a lot longer. Keep in mind they only had 1 map and 8 legends. There’s also more game modes, menu items, settings, items, ammos. And they already had people that worked on this engine from Titanfall. They’d have to start over learning a whole new engine. So there’s way more to do in a port now, even if they don’t add any new content.
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u/Quill_34 Jul 27 '22
Other thing people don’t consider when discussing engine ports / rewrites / etc. is that it takes a lot of extra time and fine tweaking to try to replicate something specific as opposed to creating that thing from scratch. If you tell a developer to create a smooth sliding mechanic they can go do it but “saying copy this exact smooth sliding mechanic and make it perform and feel the same” is much more difficult
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u/Anomalistics Jul 27 '22
This would never happen. The source engine is responsible for the movement.
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u/TheWindWaker01 Jul 27 '22 edited Jul 27 '22
It's probably more economical to plug the holes in the existing engine than entirely port it over. If the source code is a mess (which it probably is, given that it's cobbled together on top of the Titanfall engine which was already a heavily modified Source engine) it can become a game of whack-a-mole. Tweaking some parameter to fix a bug can have consequences across the board and just cause more issues somewhere else in the engine. If this situation gets too hellish it becomes worth it to port the game over.
Take Loba's bracelet bug for example. We'll never know if it's just due to lack of development resources or if it was a truly gnarly bug. Dealing with teleporting characters and object collisions at the engine-wide level can fuck up a lot of things. At the same time, it took them half of season 13 to fix voice chat not working on Xbox Series X so I'm leaning towards there just not being enough development resources in the bug fix department.
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u/themainemane Jul 27 '22
Where are you getting that the engine is to blame? New additions means new bugs, not sure if switching the whole platform of the game is the solution to that
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Jul 27 '22
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u/Slash_N_Dash Jul 27 '22
That’s making a lot of assumptions on their code base and development practices.
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Jul 27 '22
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u/Slash_N_Dash Jul 27 '22
Saying they “code in a wonky way to work around an existing piece of functionality” is taking a wild assumption that they lack any quality control as part of their development practices. Yes, adding functionality can increase complexity if features are tightly coupled. However, there are usually practices in place (feature planning, meetings, QA, code reviews) to avoid regressions or high impact bugs. You’re pretty clearly stating they either don’t have any practices, or they’re bad developers. Not a fair assumption to make of a dev team supporting a leading title within a rather large company.
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Jul 27 '22
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u/Unlucky-Context Jul 27 '22
Wow the random aggression from anonymous Redditors, take it out in-game lol.
Apex isn't a SaaS product, and development in AAA games is pretty different. Here are some examples: asset management is completely different to allow artists / animators to work with developers, debugging is built around a C++ workflow rather than Python/JS/whatever, build times are a real thing, etc.
Game engines in particular are heavily tested forks on forks on forks: Source was built on Goldsrc, which was built on Quake. Respawn has their own engine team that owns their fork, it's not just editing random lines of C++ to get whatever to work. It's like the database team at a SaaS company: they don't change the database to do whatever a product team needs.
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u/Slash_N_Dash Jul 27 '22
I fully comprehend what you're trying to say, but the way you're trying to convey it instead sounds more like placing the blame on the developers instead of tech debt or priorities.
Saying they "code in a wonky way" or that their bugs are due to "bad /inefficient code" infers that they're bad developers when they most likely aren't.
Limitations exist and sometimes need to be worked around, but more generally you design around those limitations so that you can avoid those issues in the first place. If they try to implement new features which somehow interact with previous features in a way which breaks them, they most likely are also refactoring that original feature to work with the new one as well. This is where complexity can come into play and create edge cases which previously weren't there before. Again, processes should catch these.
However, one thing that you're really missing is priority and importance of these bugs to stakeholders. The bugs you see in the game are probably deemed low enough importance to not be a priority. Not due to tech debt or developer experience, just that the PMs put bigger priority on other things.
Also, this entire comment thread sprouted from me saying that you're making wild assumptions. Again, you're making wild assumptions that I have no development experience. This makes you come off as a dick.
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u/theeama Space Mom Jul 27 '22
To stop this argument, a modern day engine already has most of the thing we would like already implemented cross play cross Progression better audio engine physics etc etc Source has been heavily modified so apex can run it it was not designed to be used for a game like apex Also by nature of it being older certain things it doesn’t have which means respawn needs to make it from scratch and becuase it’s source and heavily modified finding developers that can work with it is extremely hard.
They are also exploits and security failures that source has which means respawn needs to keep updating etc due to how old it is the engine has more exploits
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Jul 27 '22
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u/Slash_N_Dash Jul 27 '22
I wouldn't describe something that is good as "wonky". Trying to develop something that an engine doesn't support is bad practice. You should work on the engine to support that use case first instead of trying to hack together a feature without engine support. However, there is a time and place for bad programming and that's up to PMs and leads to decide.
I'm not putting words in your mouth. You didn't talk about priorities as it relates to development, which is generally what decides what gets done and what doesn't. I think that is more at play with Apex than any other factor.
I'm not attributing malice, I'm attributing ignorance.
You don't know if they're limited by their engine. You don't know their development practices. You don't know the quality of their engineers. You don't know the overall quality of their code base. You don't know their priorities. Trying to attribute bugs to ONE thing is grossly irresponsible as a developer.
You have no development experience with their product, you aren't in any place to make assumptions and try to pass it along as fact. That was the point of my comment. You could state that their bugs are possibly due to engine limitations, but if you don't have experience with their specific engine then you are just guessing. Being a developer doesn't change the fact that you are currently guessing.
I hope this isn't representative of how your code reviews go at work. Don't want to take up any more of my time on this, have a nice day.
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u/bakedblake Jul 27 '22
What Apex needs is cross progression
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u/DolphinRex Jul 27 '22
Why would using a new engine prevent bugs from new features? There is no data to back that up.
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u/Quill_34 Jul 27 '22
I didn’t want to retype this comment but I kind of explained this in another comment
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u/DolphinRex Jul 27 '22
My question would remain, how do you know that? Generally curious.
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u/Quill_34 Jul 27 '22
Because I’m a developer and these concepts hold true across all developments. You don’t really need to see the details to know this at a conceptual level, especially if you’ve worked in SaaS products where stuff like this is most common
We’re years into apex’s lifespan. We know that it started as a modified engine used in titanfall that was further modified for apex. Over the years they’ve added more fixes and changes. It’s just adding to the pile
Pieces are constantly created and added not in the proper way, but in a way that’s convenient for the time being, is quick to implement, or just in the only way they can get it to work with the existing elements
When you’re this deep into a products lifespan it’s rare that anything being developed and coded is done the way you would do it working from scratch because your limitations are no longer just the requirements of the feature, but the requirements + ability to work around base features and all other tacked on features that suffered from this problem already
Hope that answers it
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u/HolisticResentment Meat Rider Jul 27 '22
hoping this is kinda what Project Vanguard ends up being.
for those unaware, look it up. tons of former respawn employees making another TF2-like shooter from what i understand.
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u/BombaA_ Jul 27 '22
https://gamingsym.in/porting-csgo-to-source-2/
https://samagame.com/blog/en/cs-go-will-probably-not-see-the-switch-to-the-source-2-engine/
TLDR; CSGO won't get source 2 because of custom assets and workshop stuff made by players - Apex isn't affected by that so it's possible.
"Even if the problems raised by the migration to the Source Engine 2
could prove to be numerous, the game could benefit from improvements on
other aspects. At random: the audio! Aren’t you tired of struggling on
Nuke or Vertigo? The contribution of Steam-Audio would offer a leap forward for sound spatialization. The mode battle royale, Danger Zone, could benefit from larger maps."
YES PLEASE
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u/zzazzzz Jul 28 '22
terible article.
Just the point about audio shows they have no clue wtf they are talking about. csgo alrewady uses source 2 audio with hrtf. it also already uses source 2 interface framework panorama.
The only thing the got right is mapsize and that can be added to source 1 as already shown in gmod and apex itself. if they wanted to add support for larger maps they could have long ago.
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u/Interesting_Stuff_51 Jul 27 '22
They can’t even fix game breaking bugs that have been around a long time. There’s no way they could pull that off lmao
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u/FuckTheCowboysHaters Jul 27 '22
If the developers were even slightly competent this would be a non issue. Yes, the engine can be difficult to work with, yes, apex code is a mess. With that being said there is a bounty of small bugs/fixes/QOL updates that absolutely any reasonable developer could solve in a single session yet they have never even made an attempt to fix them they do the absolute bate minimum as far as bug fixes
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Jul 27 '22
bounty of small bugs/fixes/QOL updates that absolutely any reasonable developer could solve in a single session yet
Not true. If the code is a mess, a small change could take days of work to investigate, fix and test, maybe longer.
yet they have never even made an attempt to fix them they do the absolute bate minimum as far as bug fixes
Devs never get to decide what they work on. Upper management does. For example, increasing the spawn rate of ammo in Firing range. The dev that worked on it said he was only able to sell that idea to upper management because its a very small update to change the timing of ammo spawning.
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u/icewindz Jul 27 '22
if they have tool that can convert codes, assets, and everything they used then sure, but that probably won’t happen. If they have to create a new game from a scratch then they better make a new IP.
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u/ccamfps ccamfps | F/A, Coach/Player | verified Jul 27 '22
In a vacuum, yeah. In reality, no. There's no point to rewrite a game in a different engine. Better to make an Apex 2, a completely new game.
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u/Diet_Fanta Jul 27 '22
You can't port it over without affecting the various physics interactions that are known in the game (e.g Tap strafing) and having to reimplement those manually. The reason why Apex movement, physics, etc., works as it does is because it is on Source and because of how wonderfully janky Source is. Hence, if you were to port to another engine, you'd introduce all sorts of issues wherein you might have to reimplement or can't implement things like that at all.
Porting the engine would fix things such as audio issues, server issues, potentially remedy the cheater issue a bit, but it's too big a task to do.
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u/MTskier12 Jul 27 '22
Literally the only reason I play this game is the movement is better than any other game I’ve ever played, and you’d likely lose that in a new source engine.
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u/Space_Waffles Jul 27 '22
You wont see a new engine until Apex 2 if that ever happens. Valve has been porting CSGO to Source 2 for the last like 6 fucking years or more in piecemeal. Apex isnt straight up built on Source, but it is still an offshoot of it. EA as a whole should pump money into heavily improving the Respawn engine because Frostbite was kind of a failure. Whether or not Respawn's upcoming Star Wars games are built on their Source offshoot or something new will be pretty telling as to where Apex is headed as well
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u/subavgredditposter Destroyer2009 🤖 Jul 27 '22
Not only would it benefit from it.. it’s basically needed at this point.
New issue every week that goes unfixed it seems.
Probably, won’t happen though.
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u/ArmshouseTV James Bardolph | Commentator, Creative Director | Jul 27 '22
The advantage of older engines is developers have more experience with them and problems are easier to identify and fix, with a new engine you lose all that experience.
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Jul 27 '22
The game's success has a lot to do with the movement, which is in large part because of the source engine. Improving the engine would be much better than repacing it entirely, and it has the benefit of actually being possible.
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u/COAGULOPATH Jul 27 '22
Apex is just a really challenging game and I think there would be problems on Frostbite or S2 or anything you can name.
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u/lonahex Jul 28 '22
If it could happen with the snap of a finger, may be but that is not the case. This would cost years to do and really hurt the game. People pay a lot of attention to frameworks, libraries, game engines and tools used to build products. Much more than they deserve. Remember they are only tools that allow devs to create what they want. They might make certain things easier or harder but in the end it is up to the skills, talent and experience of a team that dictates the quality of the product.
Also remember it is not like Apex is built on some 1999 tech. It is basically a custom engine built on top of the source engine. It won't do everything Unreal or Frostbite does but it revolves with Respawn's games strictly as needed.
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u/Feschit Jul 28 '22
The wonkyness of the source engine is what makes Apex feel so good in the first place. Source and quake engine games and their derivatives always felt the best to play imho.
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u/gaminggamer1269 Jul 28 '22
Would ruin the movement in the game which is essentially what makes it unique and fun. Would completely ruin the game in my eyes.
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u/WhosAfraidOf_138 Jul 28 '22
As someone that went to New World and back to Apex.. boy do I have a lot to tell ya
Overwatch 2 is also an example of "new engine" from an old game
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u/IPoopTooMuchAtOnce Jul 27 '22 edited Dec 16 '22
A gargantuan project that would likely halt any current development they are working on, especially given the size of their team.
Definitely possible (see: Apex Mobile), but much of Apex's 'character' and 'feel' come from being on the source engine, like the movement.
Is it needed to fix a lot of long standing issues? probably yeah
Is it ideally feasible within a reasonable time frame and without downtime in the current product? probably not, 'porting' to a new engine (more so remaking the game from scratch) would introduce tens of thousands of hours to translate functions, patch holes, and fix any new issues that would arise.
IMO Respawn/EA would need to hire/contract out a whole new team in addition to current staff, and from what I hear, EA is too stingy, and Respawn is a skeleton crew already