Respawn says it's "investigating" accidental changes to Apex Legends' smoke cover

Apex Legends developer Respawn has told fans it is "investigating" after a recent tweak to the in-game particle FX count has severely impeded the abilities of some of its Legends.

Though the change was supposed to improve matters, instead it's made the smoke and gas from characters like Bangalore, Caustic, and Gibraltar essentially useless, as opponents can now see, and accurately fire through, a smokescreen.

Responding to a question on the game's subreddit, lead game designer Daniel Klein acknowledged the team is on the case, although there was no mention of how or when the fix might roll out.

"We're investigating what happened here," Klein wrote (thanks, Dexerto) in response to a question about the issue. "There was a change to the underlying VFX that we made with optimization in mind. 

"The goal was to have it look identical to what was there before, but apparently, that's not what happened. We'll let you know when we know more."

ICYMI, two years after it first released on PC, Apex Legends recently hit an all-new concurrent user record on Steam.

Thanks to the new arrival of Season 8 and all-new Legend Fuse, the battle royale has sparked new interest and set a new simultaneous user record of just shy of 200K players – 198,235, to be precise.

It has a long way to go before PUBG's staggering peak of 3,236,027 players looks to be in jeopardy, of course, but it's an impressive feat for a game that's just celebrated its second anniversary and had initially been exclusive to EA's Origin platform on PC.

As for its recent Switch port? Alex worries that Apex Legends is the latest victim of the Nintendo Switch's multiplayer FPS problem.

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