Apex Legends, the battle royale motion shooter developed by Repsawn Entertainment, is it is no stranger to controversy. Because Vertex It supports cross-platform games, PC and Console players have been reinforcing for a while the slight differences and advantages that each band gets from their chosen platform. All of this paved the way for the online clamor after the recent announcement that plug strafing, a PC-exclusive motion technique, would be removed from the game.
Apex Legends, as a direct descendant of Titanfall 2, prioritizes the fluidity of movement, chaining jumps, sprints and slides to turn the battlefield into a canvas for expressive speed and grace. The amount of technique required makes them incredibly difficult to play at first. Entering a match of Apex Legends as a novice shooter of movements is … quite an experience. As you stumble looking for anything to defend yourself, your opponents will launch rockets around you, jumping shit and catching everything within a radius of thirty meters from the landing point in a matter of seconds. Then they will shoot you dead.
One of the top level techniques in the game that makes this domination possible is, or was, known as cap strafing. Fixing the touch allows someone to jump into the air and perform a total of 180 while maintaining their momentum before touching the ground. It combines a lot of different movement skills along with some peculiarities of the Source engine to create some really wild shit. It is also only possible on PC, which is why it was released in late August.
I will break it down into its component parts. First, it requires that you be able to buy bunnyhop. Bunnyhopping is the process of jumping the same frame that your character puts in contact with the ground to keep up the momentum and quickly move your box of hits, making it harder for you to hit. Bunnyhopping is possible, but it’s hard on drivers because it has a pretty tight time. It’s much easier on the computer, where you can link “jump” to the scroll wheel, allowing you to enter dozens of jump entries every second. It is a fairly common strategy in basically all first person shooters.
There is an advanced version of this technique known as strafe jumping. Moving diagonally in a video game is faster than advancing because that’s how triangles work. You are moving the same distance forward in the same amount of time, with movement added to the side. You can then combine it with bunnyhopping. Once you’re in rabbit shape while making tapes, you can quickly move the mouse in the direction it covers to turn the side speed into forward motion. This allows you to move incredibly, albeit with a slight curve.
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Throw the tapes built on this technique with a peculiarity of the Source engine. The source engine checks the direction and momentum of the player each time the forward movement key is pressed. Therefore, if you touch forward while facing a different half-jump direction, you could change the direction you are going. You can do this by literally tapping the forward movement key or just doing the rabbit trick again and tying forward towards the scroll wheel. By doing this, you can radically change your direction in the air, allowing you to move in incredibly wild ways.
This movement technique is only possible with a mouse and a keyboard, which gives PC players a huge advantage in a crossover game such as Apex Legends. Respawn has been trying to get his PC and console communities to play well for a while, and it hasn’t gone well. Removing tap tapes is his latest attempt to level the playing field.
Although this particular situation is not surprising Apex’s the story highlights the difficulties that developers will continue to face as cross-gaming becomes increasingly common throughout the medium. Having to balance not only the variety of weapons and characters, but also the differences in hardware, presents an incredible challenge in the future.