Respawn scrapped Seer’s old audio-based abilities for Apex Legends

The newest Legend to join the Apex Games in Season 10, Seer, comes equipped with some very powerful abilities, including a heartbeat sensor and tracking drones. But, Respawn told us that he went through three different variations, and was actually an audio-focused legend at first.

The team at Respawn Entertainment have been creating a new Legend every season since release now, and continues to up their game to keep things fresh, with characters featuring a fleshed-out backstory, extravagant skins, and brilliantly acted voice lines.

Seer is no different to this trend of Legend releases, following the immensely popular Valkyrie who released in Season 9.

Immediately after the reveal of Seer’s abilities, fans were optimistic that he would be strong, but cautiously so, worried that he might even be overpowered on release. But, when we spoke to some of the team at Respawn shortly before the release of the new season, they revealed that his kit wasn’t always this way.

Seer was an audio Legend

Respawn explained that the original plan for Seer was to make his abilities all about audio, rather than visual. The first version of his tactical was a decoy grenade, that would sometimes imitate weapons firing, and other times imitate footstep audio.

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However, despite fooling people in playtests at first, it quickly became apparent that ‘fake’ audio would become too problematic, as it would make the entire game’s audio unreliable for players, and “kinda broke the game.”

His ultimate was a similar sphere-like ability as it is now, but instead of tracking players within it, it would lock all sound inside. The idea behind this was to prevent 3rd-party attacks.

Overall, it’s not surprising that these abilities didn’t see the light of day. After all, Apex Legends can be a loud and noisy game at the best of times, and audio is so crucial to the experience. Not to mention, Respawn has been in a battle with all the contesting sounds in the game, which has led to players complaining about not being able to hear crucial elements such as enemy footsteps.

After moving away from the focus on sound alone, Respawn tried out a proximity mine tactical for Seer too. Eventually, they moved to the Seer we have in-game now.

A better Bloodhound?

But, in the end, they settled for what we have now – another recon/tracker-like character, in a similar vein to Bloodhound.

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We also asked Respawn if they were concerned Seer would make Bloodhound less popular. But, they’re confident that the two characters play differently enough, with Bloodhound focusing on the “breadcrums” players leave behind, while Seer is much more up close and personal with his abilities.

Equally, Crypto is deemed to be the ‘long range’ recon Legend, so the developers still believe he will have his place in the meta too.

We’ll have to wait and see how the meta shakes out in Season 10 to see which of these three recon Legends are top of the pile.