A rather bizarre interaction in Apex Legends causes bullets to ricochet off falling care packages.
With the lone exception of the select-fire mode on the new Havoc rifle – which acts as hitscan, meaning it will hit the first thing in its line-of-fire at the exact moment that the trigger is pulled – bullets in Apex Legends are projectiles, with varying travel speeds.
Like most games with this style of projectile-based weapons, Apex also incorporates bullet drop-off, with the trajectory of the shots curving down over distance, again to a varying degree depending on the weapon in question.
Other than these effects, however, players don’t usually have to account for other influences on the direction of their shots. There is one scenario, however, in which shots will be thrown entirely off course despite no obvious boundary.
Once an in-coming care package gets low enough to the ground, it seems to create a reflection field of sorts that causes incoming shots to be redirected. It turns out that in this event, the bullets will still register damage should they ultimately impact an enemy along their new path, as u/william2699 demonstrated.
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It’s a very specific instance in which this occurs, as while the care package is still high in the sky there is no such invisible barrier, while the package itself will still operate as a regular surface. The gap in between, however, is where the ricochet field occurs.
This is the only known instance of bullet ricochet in the game, as regular surfaces simply absorb shots, rather than causing them to bounce off.
It may not have many practical applications – perhaps if the stars aligned it might be used to bounce a shot or two around a corner – but it might be worth keeping this unusual quirk in mind if you ever find yourself wanting to pull off a particularly spectacular trick shot.
