Apex Legends Season 21’s New Villain, Alter, Can Walk Through Walls–Not An Easy Ability To Implement
Apex Legends Season 21 is right around the corner, kicking off next week. The new season introduces the first major map update to Broken Moon, reintroduces Solos mode, and also adds a brand-new playable legend, Alter. The mischievous, tiefling-looking character hails from a never-before-seen reality in the Titanfall multiverse and has an ability kit centered around walking through practically any wall in the game–not an easy feat to figure out.
“Your instincts are good,” Alter designer Ian Holstead told me when I asked how hard it was to put a playable hero who could walk through walls into a 20-team battle royale, all of whom could feature an Alter. “It wasn’t the easiest problem to solve and we did have to develop quite a bit of tech to do it. And some of it is a little bit unconventional–it honestly was pretty cool tech development, but it was something that I was concerned about from a technical standpoint.”
They continued: “We also developed a lot of tools to help us test this–log issues, automated testing, stuff like that–because I knew that we were going to have problems all the way up until [the Season 21] launch and even after the launch because there’s just so many players and our maps are huge. If we were developing [Alter] from the start of Apex, we probably would change how we design our maps. But we don’t have that option when we have all these maps that are already out and so we have to make [her] ability [kit] fit to what we have. And so it was technically challenging, but I do think the results were worth it. I hope people will be really pleasantly surprised by how reliably it does work–people will find that you can go through pretty much anything and you can get really creative with how you place your portals.”