Respawn Confirms Variable Apex Legends Bullet Speed is Unintentional
A recent post on Reddit has drawn the attention of the Apex Legends community by seemingly demonstrating that the bullet speed of different shots from the same gun actually varies. A Redditor who goes by ‘TinyBabyBread’ posted a chart showing the differences in speed per shot of different weapons, showing how the speed rises or drops. The post has even attracted the attention of Respawn, who admitted that the Apex Legends bullet speed variability isn’t intentional.
Apex Legends Bullet Speed Variation Isn’t Intentional
When it comes to the issue of bullet speed in Apex Legends, different guns certainly do fire their shots at different speeds. That’s hardly unusual. In fact, a Respawn developer on Reddit who goes by ‘RespawnSean,’ explained that; “Energy rounds are always the fastest in their weapon class. Fun fact, the highest velocity rounds in the game are fired by the Devotion”. In a separate comment, they went on to clarify that Respawn thought it would be ‘cool and fun’ to have energy ammo weapons fire faster than others.
However, TinyBabyBread’s chart seems to confirm two things. Firstly, that different weapons fire at different speeds, which is normal. However, it also shows that the speed of each shot from the same gun actually varies slightly. This slight variance between bullet speeds appears to have been something Respawn wasn’t even aware of; “We saw this post and are taking it seriously,” clarified RespawnSean; “It’s definitely not intended behaviour for projectiles from the same weapon to take a variable amount of time to hit the same target. […] We are looking into the OP’s findings for sure. The last thing we want is for our learnable, predistable gunplay to be compromised with unintended randomness.”
It’s unclear just how much impact this variability has on gameplay. However, some of the variability between shots is quite significant. The G7 Scout, for example, showed more than a 25% increase in bullet speed from the 1st shot to the 2nd. If this is indeed occurring, Respawn will no doubt start looking into a fix.