Eric Canavese is Apex Legends’ Head of Weapons and Loot, overseeing weapon balance, reward management, and the competitive meta in Respawn Entertainment and EA’s battle royale. We sat down with him at the ALGS Championships in Sapporo to learn more about his approach to balancing one of the world’s most popular competitive battle royales. With Apex Legends‘ fifth anniversary on the horizon, we were quick to ask him about his goals and aspirations for the next five years of the game. Below is our full chat.
Weapon balance is a grind, what metrics do you use to decide where to intervene, and what’s your workflow for implementing them?
“First of all, when it comes to balance, we rely on our internal playtest data and our user experience because the whole team plays Apex at home in their free time, we are part of the community. From there, we get ideas about where we can take the meta, what is overwhelming and what is disappointing. Then we buff and nerf and do a lot of prototypes. It is essential for us to fail often and early in the development process: that is how we get closer to the result we really want to achieve. I have been working on the meta in Apex for 6 years now, I have a certain instinct about what can be fun, what has been seen before and how to proceed, that does not mean that we do not often procede by trial and error: maximizing the fun is always our goal because what works today may not have worked six months ago or may not work in six months”.
When you decide to create a new weapon how do you proceed in terms of role, fantasy and effect?
“We’re not interested in releasing content that doesn’t fulfill a specific role or put the player in a specific fantasy. We don’t make weapons that feel the same, they each have their own personality, their own handling, they solve a problem or bring to the table a new perspective. That way we create meaningful and exciting content, not just new things for new thing’s sake.
Every week we have a meeting with the design and balance team and we talk about whether what we see is healthy for the game and in those conversations someone always comes up and says ‘it would be so cool if we did this!’ and we start a prototype from those ideas. Then we play a lot of games, find a lot of good ideas and get inspired, we can make Apex versions of almost anything and that exists, this keeps us fresh and on top of the competition.”
What is your team’s relationship with Titanfall? How often do you take something from there and implement it into Apex?
“I played a lot of Titanfall before working on Apex: the Titanfall 2 story campaign is one of my all-time favorites, and a gold standard in the FPS industry. Titanfall is always part of the conversation about the future, we constantly go back to it to get inspired or take weapons and abilities because it’s part of our DNA. At the same time we have to make sure that Apex is a unique and separate experience: we have to Apexify all of the content, the Car, for example, is a weapon from Titanfall but it’s been adapted to the new experience, it’s about finding a new home for that content”.
How do you imagine Apex in five years?
“We will be the frontier of innovation in the world of first-person shooters. Not only that, we aim to be the reference for the battle royale genre”.
