Apex Legends aim assist was broken on consoles, Respawn confirms

Apex Legends developers, Respawn Entertainment, acknowledged that players were not crazy when they started noticing issues with how aim assist works on consoles following the latest Season 11 patch.

Apex Legends Season 11 started yesterday and the huge update brought an abundance of new content and changes. But instead of talking about the new legend Ash, brand new map Storm Point, or Wattson's rework, the community was baffled with seemingly unannounced changes to how aim assist works on consoles, effectively nerfing the feature to work with the same values as it has on the PC version of the game.

And it turns out the community wasn't wrong, Respawn admitted their mistake and they have reversed aim assist values to the previous state, before the Season 11 patch.

Apex Legends aim assist on consoles unintentionally nerfed in Season 11

Less than 24 hours have passed since the Season 11 update, and during the previous day, Apex forums and subreddit were flooded with people complaining about the new state of aim assist on consoles.

"There's a reason games have aim assist on console," wrote Reddit user GoingGone7 in one of many threads discussing the issue. "It wasn’t a big issue, people didn’t complain about it often anyway, and it should be reversed if it really did get nerfed."

A number of players first thought that this new aim assist behaviour has something to do with the new weapon, the CAR SMG, as most of the players opted to test the new weapon first once the update went live.

But after they had tried other weapons, it was clear that the problem is global on consoles and that aim assist has been significantly toned down.

Once people started complaining, some community members decided to further investigate the issue, and Redditor yrrejl quickly discovered that aim assist values on consoles were switched to PC aim assist values, providing his side-by-side comparison video to corroborate his claims.

As you can see in the Reddit video above, weapons were behaving almost exactly the same on seemingly different aim assist settings.

Fortunately for console players, Respawn was quick to admit the mistake, openly confirming that the values were indeed changed, but now they are back to normal.

Well, we goofed. With the launch of Escape, aim assist on console was unintentionally set to PC values. It's back to normal now.

— Respawn (@Respawn) November 3, 2021

"With the launch of Escape, aim assist on console was unintentionally set to PC values," the developer confess. "It's back to normal now."

Interestingly enough, not a small amount of players wrote that they have actually felt better while playing without aim assist on standard values and they will keep experimenting playing without it.

The matter of aim assist for consoles has been one of the most controversial themes among various FPS communities over the past couple of years, particularly because cross-platform play has become a norm in the last year and a half, which means that more and more console players are entering lobbies with PC gamers, who mostly play the game without aim assist, and thus many finding it unfair.

Was this seemingly accidental "goof" actually an intentional change by Respwan to test the waters? Most likely not, but this would definitely not be the last time seeing the community divided over this sensitive topic.

• Read more: Will Storm Point save Nickmercs from getting third-partied in Apex Legends?

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Featured image courtesy of Respawn.