So let me start by saying that this post has nothing to do with Apex Legends servers or internet connection. I also want to mention beforehand, that I constantly fully power cycle/ restart my Xbox One S console, free up space by removing games, have capture settings disabled, and every other ‘at home’ possible fix I have tried. I’ve spent years and years gaming and have always battled to play games that my laptop wasn’t meant to. This means clean installing windows, running diagnostics, tweaking config files, installing lightweight versions of OS’s, updating drivers, making registry adjustments, literally EVERY possible way to improve a video games performance, I have tried. Believe me. Now with that said, I am running Apex Legends on an Xbox One S. I have played since season one and quite enjoy the game. Typically, up until this season, the game always ran completely fine. Occasional server lag or internet drops and stuff but no actual hardware performance issues. I am making this post as a two fold statement. To start, I want to simply bring awareness to an ongoing issue that I have seen many people posting about on the Reddit forums, and secondly I want to hopefully address my particular console’s issues.
The main issue I have been experiencing is classic hardware frame lag. Typical symptoms of what a Pc would have issues with when the game has not enough RAM or video memory. During larger fights, but sometimes smaller ones as well, I go to peek one way around cover, and then attempt to ‘juke’ back the other way to confuse the enemy (a very common tactic used in almost everyone’s gameplay) and the game will have a ‘hitch’ or ‘stutter’ or ‘frame drop’ where a few frames are not displayed, and then when the system recovers, the enemy is already exposed from cover and already has shots on me. This sometimes happens simply when inputting a lot of controls into the game like fast twitchy movement or sweeping the camera aggressively around in a 360 or similar circumstances. I know that from the 10 or so Reddit posts I have seen, as well as the 2-3 support tickets I have read already, that your support team has been quick to dismiss this as a player error. What I mean by that is you want us to try to cycle our console, or fully restart, or give you more detail, or try again on another day, or a plethora of other non useful ideas. I’m here to tell you that I personally have tried all of these solutions. The game ran fine before on previous seasons. Something is wrong with the game itself and more specifically, something to do with the new update. Something is clearly not optimized for the consoles that the game was initially released on. This is a huge issue. I’m hoping that you might read this and actually take the time to send more than a quick message to the development team about these issues. I fear that the development team is not currently aware of such issues and so it will go unfixed. There are many players experiencing this issue, and for myself, it is not limited to one map or game mode. There is less of this issue in Arenas, but the issue still remains there as well. I strongly believe that this has nothing to do with the hardware that the game is running on, other than the simple explanation that the new update contained new expansions, code, textures, scripts, functions, models, physics, particle effects, bullet physics, or something pertaining specifically to the performance of the game during peak demand on the console’s hardware(during fast camera movements or rapid fights in which the console is typically demanding more performance). Like I mentioned before, I have tried all the potential fixes on my end, and also strongly believe that this is not an internet issue. It is not the typical symptoms of a connection issue or latency issue. I have even directed my Xbox in the display settings to output the video signal in 720p to try to improve performance but to no avail. My last comment is that some users have reported that this issue is less prevalent on SSD containing devices, but I hope you can understand that many will not simply go and buy an SSD just to run Apex, especially when the game ran fine on the standard HDD before. This is key to me because it seems to be a glaring issue that you cannot have a game, in which you sell in game products for monetization, for which it used to run on a certain set of hardware, but no longer runs well on the same hardware. It cannot be so that you would expect players who used to play (what is largely the same game) to stop playing it because the same hardware that used to run the game doesn’t anymore. I hope that I have been able to give you a good explanation of the issue and that from this you might initiate a probe into the potential fix of such issues. Please let me know if you need more details.
