As Christmas draws near, Apex Legends director, Chad Grenier has announced that he is departing from Respawn Entertainment studio. The Apex Legends lead, Steven Ferreira will succeed his role, according to the announcement.
Today is my last day at @Respawn
It’s an emotional day for me. After years of making great games with some of the best in the biz, I’m saying goodbye to a studio that I love and helped form 11 years ago.https://t.co/c7UQlTOQMy
— Chad Grenier (@ChadGrenier) December 3, 2021
CHAD GRENIER
The video game veteran designer started his career at Activision as one of the designers for Call of Duty project between 2003 and 2010. The Call of Duty and the Modern Warfare series became a very popular FPS shooter game and soon spun off its Battle Royale title, Warzone. After former Activision employees, Jason West and Vince Zampella, were fired, they went off to set up Respawn Entertainment, which Chad Grenier moved over to help set up game studio.
Being of the early employees to set up Respawn during the early days, his first creation at the studio was Titanfall which was one of the huge successes Respawn had. Soon after, he moved over to create one of the top Battle Royale games, Apex Legends. Chad has a very strong affinity with FPS, where Apex Legends was awarded the Best Multiplayer Game in 2019 and the British Academy Games Award for Multiplayer in 2020. When the game was launched, it received a lot of attention for its fast-pace and innovative Legends’ abilities. The free-to-play game soon reached 1 million players within eight hours and climbed to 50 million players after 24 days. The game soon grew and expanded across consoles with the mobile version coming soon.
I’m also saying goodbye to coworkers who some of which I’ve worked with for half my life, and others I never got to meet in person.
I wish everyone at Respawn the best. There is unbelievable talent at the studio so I know they’ll continue making great games I’ll love playing. pic.twitter.com/5H8PcLuBJP
— Chad Grenier (@ChadGrenier) December 3, 2021
Apex Legends
Whilst Chad Grenier has made a huge contribution to the game’s success, Apex Legends also had its fair share of its problems. When the game was released, it was also met with many bugs in the game. There were several instances where the game would crash completely or receives server errors and become unplayable. Players were also complaining about getting stuck in some map locations and huge problems with audio instances regarding footsteps. The bugs include Legends’ exploits allowing Wraith’s unlimited portal, Octane’s jumppad issues and many more.
One of the biggest stumbling blocks for Chad was the amount of cheaters in the game. Shortly after each season, the game would be inundated with hackers and this affected the gaming experience greatly. Players were encountering frequent cheaters who could speed hack, aimbot or even spot enemies through obstacles. It subsequently brought more attention when an infamous hacker, Tufi, started harassing popular Apex Legends streamers such as ImperialHal, ShivFPS, etc. and continuously disrupted not only the streamers lobbies but also affecting game tournaments.
Despite Respawn’s efforts to deter cheaters via banning, it was not very effective and they continued to roll out new Legends and maps in each season. This brought a lot of unhappiness among the Apex Legend community especially when hackers went to the extreme to start crashing servers and exploit game lobbies. It came to a point where Respawn was unable to ignore and decided to rope in a security team headed by Conor Ford to appease the crowd. Although the situation is a little controlled, popular players were given better treatment of live banning via direct communication access to the security head and to date, there are still many cheaters out there.
With Steven Ferreira taking over the helm, he may still have a lot of work to do and it is not known what will be the future of Apex Legends. Chad mentioned in his farewell message that Apex Legends is in great hands and he is assured that the game and community will continue to be taken care of. Read more of his message here. While Chad Grenier has not revealed where he will go next but coincidentally, Vince Zampella was appointed to take over GM of DICE after EA had announced the departure of DICE general manager, Oskar Gabrielson.