Apex Legends has just released a massive mid-season update, adding Selectfire to the Charge Rifle to turn it into a fully automatic sniper and buffing both Mirage and Loba. If you want all the juicy details and patch notes about the Apex Legends Season 23 mid-season update, follow that link. However, players were most upset about changes to high-level movement techniques like tap strafing.
Respawn has now reverted the change.
Apex is built on movement. While it doesn’t feel as kinetic as Titanfall 2, it’s the slick slides and massive momentum that keeps players coming back to the game. When I’ve become tired of Apex’s latest event and dabbled back into Warzone or Fortnite, it’s the sluggish momentum that puts me off and brings me back to Storm Point and e-District.
Top Players Cracked Apex Legends’ Movement
But there is so much more to Apex’s movement than just sliding. While players like me or you with mere thousands of hours in the game can zip around with ease, there are players far above us who worked out even more complicated techniques.
The most important high-level movement technique in Apex Legends is called tap strafing. It involves changing your keybinds in order to rapidly change direction in mid-air, meaning that you can bamboozle your opponent (provided your aim is good enough to match your movement).
Tap strafing is also popular in the Half-Life 2 speedrunning scene, which isn’t surprising considering Titanfall 2 and Apex Legends run on modified versions of Valve’s Source Engine.
There are multiple movement techniques built on this one. Wall bounces, bunny hops, lurch strafes, convoluted strategies utilising Octane’s jump pads or Pathfinder’s zip lines, they’re all built on tap strafing. And for a brief period after the new patch, we thought it was all gone.
Ch-Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes
“Tap strafe cannot be saved,” wrote Yuga ‘YukaF’ Horie, a Japanese player who is known for inventing and/or perfecting some of the most outrageous movement techs in the game. Watch his perspective of any ALGS tournament to understand where the ceiling in Apex truly is. Seeing him unable to move through a fight with his usual balletic grace is heart-wrenching, and the fact that he believes he is unable to crack the code like he has so many times before is damning.
Other pro players said they would have to “relearn” movement, but this change went deeper than just the pro scene. Even average players felt the difference, and suddenly the game felt a lot clunkier than it used to.
Apex Legends can’t feel clunky. It’s what sets it apart from other games. What’s stopping players from leaving to play Warzone or flavour of the month Marvel Rivals?
Thankfully, Respawn quickly reverted the change,
“We just reverted the change that negatively impacted tap-strafing in @PlayApex,” Respawn posted on X. “For movement aficionados, feedback and feel around movement systems are critical, and there’s legitimate skill expression that we intend to preserve. Our goal is to continue to combat automated workarounds and degenerate play patterns, which includes some advanced movement tech that warps combat in unhealthy ways. This change affected more than we intended. We’ll continue to seek external input, and you can expect a more elegant solution in the future.”
Respawn is trying to punish cheaters and people who use configs in order to perform mouse and keyboard-level movement techniques without bothering to spend the hours learning to do them. But it has to be careful. Movement is at the heart of Apex Legends. Tweaking it too much can kill the enjoyment of the game for everyone at every level of the game. Thankfully, Respawn quickly reverted this change, but it needs to be more cautious in future.
Metas will come and go, you’re never going to please everybody. But changing the game’s fundamentals, the things that make Apex Apex, is a dangerous game. Apex has plenty more juice left in the tank, but genericism is the killer of live-services. Keep your game innovative, keep your game interesting, and keep your movement slick.
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