Apex Legends' Hit Registration Bug Throws A Wet Blanket On A Great Season

When Apex Legends isn't broken, the game is having one of its best seasons. Unfortunately, it's been really broken.

Apex is having a major, fundamental problem. People are landing shots, but they aren't being registered by the game. I watched this happen myself while playing. A bullet sailed through my opponent, but the damage counter never popped up. I simply assumed I was bad at the game and wasn't seeing things correctly, but when I visited the Apex Legends subreddit later that day, it was flooded with examples of the same issue. This video illustrates the problem extremely well.

This is the kind of bug that doesn't make Apex Legends unplayable so much as pointless. Battle royale games are about steadily increasing stakes and tension, leading to battles where any mistake could be fatal and every shot counts. Which means the shots need to count.

It's particularly frustrating that these issues are happening now, when Respawn Entertainment's surprising hit is at the start of a really exciting season. The game clicked with me when it launched, but something about Season 5, which introduced new hero Loba and also a Player vs. Environment mode has made me feel like Apex is hitting its stride. Respawn is making bold choices with the narrative of the game and its gameplay, and the players are invested and eating it up.

In particular, they've finally reworked himbo icon Mirage, and the changes made to the character made me feel like Respawn understands not just their own mechanics, but also how players actually play with each other. Instead of sending out decoys that act autonomously, players can now take control of decoys, allowing you to manipulate other players. Mirage's formerly useless ultimate ability, which sends out a cluster of decoys that run in all directions, follows the same principle, with the decoys all mimicking the players' actions. It's an ability that allows you to manipulate and freak out players outside of the game, which is incredibly fun to pull off. Thoughtful changes like these make me want to play the game every day.

A developer from Respawn has said that the studio is aware of the issue and are working on a fix. A server wide patch was rolled in on the 14th, but according to Respawn's Apex Legends bug tracker, it didn't fix hit registration for all players, and they're still investigating the issue.I know that not every bug is an easy fix, but wonky hit registration makes playing a first person shooter pretty unfun in the meantime. Between now and whenever that fix rolls out I'm blaming all my missed shots on the hit registration bug. It's either that, or I stop playing for a while.