Developer Respawn Entertainment has revealed that audio and graphical bugs that were plaguing players in Apex Legends during the game’s 16th season were all caused by a single line of code.
As part of the bug, players were noticing various audio/visual aspects of the game were glitched, from assault rifles not making sounds, to random particle effects showing up, to grenades outright disappearing despite dealing damage.
The dev team took to the Apex Legends subreddit to explain the bug, which was apparently caused by the way the game handles graphics and synchronisation for the players it can support in a single match.
Without getting too technical, the game’s servers can show 128 effects in any given frame of gameplay. Typically, these effects also include commands that start or stop effects for various things, like weapon effects and physics impact. Effects received by the server after the 128 effects limit in a single frame are dropped.
Respawn has stated that a fix has been rolled out on to its servers in an update released last Thursday, and the studio has been keeping an eye on things since.