In an interview with Dexerto, Apex Legends Lead Legend Designer Chris Winder broke down why the team feels confident in both Wattson and Crypto’s place in the pecking order heading into Season 14.
Defensive characters have always been something of a niche pick in the ultra-aggressive world of Apex Legends, but the dev team has held strong on their belief that these characters are serving their purpose as intended.
While calls for buffs to picks like Wattson and Crypto have remained strong over the last few months, Winder thinks that any future adjustments would have to be careful to not change their core too much.
Crypto and Wattson likely to stay the same for a while yet
After a question about whether or not the dev has certain Legends they expect to never break into the top of the game’s pick rates, the Legends head explained that identity is more important than utility when the team approaches any kind of buff or change.
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“We’re always actually careful not to push them out of their playstyles because I think that characters like Crypto or Wattson sort of own a very specific space in the gameplay for Apex,” he said.“ We could do things to those characters to make them meta if we wanted to. But the goal isn’t to make all the characters really good in every way.
Design Director Evan Nikolich backed up this style of thinking by pointing out how Seer went under the radar for a while after his post-release nerf but is now soaring back up the charts at the end of Season 13.
“We also don’t want to knee-jerk react. We just added those Crypto buffs, so we’ll have to see how the community reacts and really learns how to use him. But as Chris said before, it’s a really delicate balance across the sandbox.”
It’s clear that Respawn is content with these picks for now, but with the addition of Vantage in the upcoming season, who knows how things might ultimately shake out
