Letting Apex Legends players go guns akimbo was harder than you might think

The latest season of Respawn Entertainment's battle royale game Apex Legends introduces a beloved shooting style made iconic in the 1980s and '90s by filmmaker John Woo: dual-wielding pistols. Ever since Chow Yun Fat slid down that banister in Hard Boiled, game developers have tried over and over again to capture that particular mix of style and action—but in a medium that has all kinds of shooting genres (top-down, first-person, third-person, etc), it's a surprisingly tricky mechanic to get right.

Why? Well you only need look at the "Akimbo" system in Apex Legends to find out. According to an email chat with a few developers from Respawn, implementing it required "monumental" technical work, a more grinding task than the "art" of developing Season 22's new map "E-District."

While developers like lead level designer Steve Young and map designer Garret Metcalfe got to experiment with building novel locales designed around the new character leveling system, lead systems BR designer Eric Canavese and his colleagues had to crawl back over 5 years of content and code to bring basic pistols like the P2020 and Mozambique into a dual-wielding era.

Apex Legends' akimbo system opens up new design possibilities

According to Canavese, Respawn originally conceived of Akimbo weapons as being unique guns that players could pick up. That way all the animations, design, and code requirements could go through the process of being designed as any other new weapon.

Related:The secret to Apex Legends' gorgeous first-person animation? Mouth cameras

While "evaluating" that idea, Canavese said the team saw a window to build out an entire dual-wielding system—one that could jolt life into lower-tier weapons and make them attractive options throughout the whole game.

But even with a more open-ended system aimed at capturing that John Woo action fantasy, Respawn's solution highlights the constraints first-person developers find themselves in. Grabbing another gun increases the firing speed of the given weapon, enables automatic fire, and tightens the hipfire to a more narrow zone.

Already you can see one missing piece of the fantasy: the player's weapons are locked in one direction, axing the possibility of pointing the weapons in different targets. This limited system also doesn't let players dual-wield different weapons like they can in the Halo and Wolfenstein series. Those aren't terrible tradeoffs—but then you encounter the hardcore development challenges the team ran into.

Apex Legends is a five-year-old game, and though some core functions (like supply bins) have been updated over time, there's legacy code and design direction from five years ago that still has to be accounted for. Respawn's high-quality first-person animations are deeply embedded in weapon and character design, and holding a gun in each hand begins to rack up animation headaches.

For instance, adrenaline-fueled speedster Octane has custom animations that let players see him using his "stims" in many different states of motion. Players already push his animations to the limit when they activate his speed boost while reloading a weapon, taking actions that in theory would require a third hand to complete. If Octane was going to get in on the dual-wielding party, he'd need special animations that would juggle his stims and guns.

All those animations grow more complicated on zip lines, where players ostensibly coast along with one hand—but need both hands to fire their guns.

Then came the balancing. Just giving players two pistols with equal statlines wasn't quite enough. Canavese said they had to be "completely reevaluated" in their base form to ensure when you doubled up on them, it felt like a big power spike (but not too big).

Going all-in on this overhaul had major payoff—it made two weapons that were "largely irrelevant" before season 22 into powerful options.

There's something to be said about having weapons in a multiplayer game that never find their niche—but get their moment in the sun when a team has resources to build new systems dedicated to them. It doesn't just make that weapon more fun now—it affirms the decision to make it in the first place. Sometimes in a live service game, you need five years or so to make some good ideas stick.