The start of Season 1 has been pretty smooth sailing so far for Apex Legends. Player morale is at an all-time high and everyone seems to be enjoying the new additions to the game so far. As time goes on, Respawn Entertainment continues to work on the game and improve it. Another one of these regular updates came out today in the form of Patch 1.1. The update is now out for PC, PS4 and Xbox One players.
Changes in Patch 1.1
Unlike the previous major Season 1 Battle Pass update, Patch 1.1 is a much subtler patch. It doesn’t add any ground-breaking stuff; and instead of that, it focuses mainly on quality of life improvements. These are the things that you might not notice at first glance but collectively play a big part in improving your overall gameplay experience.
The first thing the new update brings is the ability to team up with your squad from the last game. So, if you had a really good squad in the last game, you could invite those people back and play another game with them. This also means that players will be able to have longer sessions with the same players resulting in better group cohesion and thus, gameplay. So, the frustration of finding that good match-winning combination over and over again might actually be a thing of the past now. In order to invite squads back, you need to navigate to the Friends menu. This is an optional thing so you don’t have to worry about bad players acting like leeches and following you into your next game.
Another addition to the update is a mute button on the legend screen. We’ve all been there when we’re just trying to have a nice solo game of Apex and someone in your squad starts blasting weird music through their microphone. Before the update, you would have had to wait for the game to load in order to mute the annoying random guy. However, with the patch, you can mute squad mates directly from the Legends screen. Just another nice little improvement. More options for reporting players on PC have also been added. Players can now choose whether to report someone for cheating or other issues. PC users will also be able to get more information out of game logs when it crashes to troubleshoot.
Problems with the Update
The contents of the update were nice but the same could not be said for the roll out. Usually, things like these are caught during testing or quality control of the updates. However, even multimillionaire companies can sometimes be prone to blunders. The update was accidentally rolled out with a feature that was not ready for release yet, leaving penalties. In a blog post on Reddit, the Community Manager for Respawn said that they had been testing the feature internally. However, there was no intention for it to go live alongside the latest update.
“There was a piece of script that was missing and caused the leaving match early penalty to be turned on when it shouldn’t be”, stated the Community Manager. As the change was not intentional, it was not mentioned in the patch notes either. This resulted in hundreds of thousands of players being banned from playing the game for some time after leaving a match. They’ve now updated the script and the unintentional feature has been disabled for all platform.
Another strange problem with the update resulted in players losing their data. In another blog post, Respawn stated that players were unintentionally moved to the wrong servers which deleted all their progression. A lot of players were extremely furious at losing all of their progress just because of an update. However, since the records were saved on previous servers, the fix was rather simple.
The question needs to be asked though, what is up with so many weird quality control issues seeping into the game. Yes, these issues were fixed but there could be far more impactful problems slipping through as well. What would Respawn do then? A game and company of this size cannot afford to make any mistakes like this again. Is this a sign that there are slight problems with the game’s net code? Or is it just a random thing that just happened purely by mistake. We just hope it is the latter and the game continues its transition into the future as smoothly as possible.
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Patch Notes for Update 1.1
Quality of Life
- Added the ability to party up with the last squad you played with. After the match you will see buttons in the lobby that display the last two people you played with and can invite them to your squad.
- Additional behind-the-scenes improvements for squashing cheaters.
- Added Mute button during the intro and Legend selection.
- When using the Report Player button for PC, you now have the option of selecting Cheat or Other.
- Added informative messages that appear on PC for crashes due to:
- Running out of memory.
- CPU errors best explained by overclocking/overheating.
- Added better collision to the turrets on Supply Ships.
- Stability fixes to all platforms.
Bug Fixes
- Fixed issue where the Battle Pass rewards page would not have a default item selected, resulting in a mostly blank page.
- Erased bug for PS4 and Xbox One where sometimes attempting to use a keyboard to chat could cause a fatal script error.
- Fixed bug with Banner Cards not showing up during and at the end of a match.
Jump Pad Phase Walk Interactions
- Octane’s Jump Pad no longer affects players when using Into the Void ability.