Apex Legends’ developer, Respawn Entertainment, has disclosed that the audio and graphics flaws that plagued players throughout the 16th season of the game were all caused by a single line of code.
As a result of the problem, gamers noticed that numerous audio and visual features of the game were broken. For example, assault weapons did not make any sounds, random particle effects appeared on the screen, and grenades completely vanished despite the fact that they were doing damage.
The development team for Apex Legends posted an explanation for the glitch on the Apex Legends subreddit. According to the post, the bug was caused by the way the game handles graphics and synchronization in relation to the number of players it is able to accommodate in a single match.
To avoid getting too technical, the game’s servers are capable of displaying 128 different effects in each and every frame of gameplay. The majority of the time, these effects also include commands that start or stop the effects for a variety of things, such as weapon effects and the impact of physics. Effects that are sent to the server after the maximum of 128 effects in a single frame are ignored by the server.
Respawn has confirmed that a patch has been implemented on all of its servers as part of an update that went live on Thursday, and the development team has been monitoring the situation ever since then.