Apex Legends pro wants Respawn to address “unnecessary” particle effects

Cloud9 pro Jamison ‘PVPX’ Moore is asking Respawn Entertainment to look into the particle effects in Apex Legends that have been shown to obscure players’ vision to a punishing degree.

Since the release of Apex Legends in 2019, players have noticed that lingering audio and visual effects in the game can sometimes clutter the screen and make the gameplay experience suffer as a result.

While the devs have mostly done away with the biggest offenders, there are still some annoyances to address like the dust particles and bullet interactions that can get tricky to play around.

“$50 to whoever can guess the character I’m shooting at,” PVPX said in reference to a screenshot that showed a plume of dust with seemingly no one on the screen.

Soon after, he followed up with a video showing an opponent in close-range who soon disappeared from sight after bullet interactions with a nearby boulder created a small cloud of effects in front of the player.

“The fact that barely anyone can guess the right character speaks volumes about the unnecessary particle clutter during gunfights,” he said.

He asked Respawn entertainment producer Josh ‘lowkeydbjosh’ Medina if it was “feasible to add a setting to remove this dust/smoke effect from the gunshots & rocks getting hit” in hopes of dealing with the problem.

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It’s not a detrimental part of Apex but like muzzle flash and Evo Shield’s upgrade animation, these are visual cues that players would rather have toned down.

In those cases, shooting a weapon would create distracting muzzle flashes that would make it hard to see the thing you were supposed to be targeting in the first place.

Respawn nerfed that effect around March 2019 after waves of player requests flooded in about reducing the blinding effects.

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It’s unclear if the studio will be looking to tone down the particle effects that boulders and such can create in Apex Legends, but there are players who wouldn’t mind seeing a change implemented to clear up the battlefield.