Apex Legends finally fixes its biggest problem, ruining my excuse for my terrible K/D

Apex Legends is probably my most-played videogame. While its movement falls short of its progenitor, Titanfall 2, it's still far smoother than any other title that features in our list of the best battle royale games. However, it's not without its issues. Balance is sometimes a little funky, and new additions don't always hit quite right. The most egregious problem since the game launched has been with audio, however - the ability to hear when opponents are close, which direction they're coming from, and where you need to be on the lookout for danger. Thankfully, that issue is finally being addressed, nearly seven years into the game's life.

Apex Legends' audio is more unreliable than downright bad, I'd say. Too often your teammates' footsteps are louder than the enemy's. The mixing is off and, worst of all, sometimes you get surprised by someone running full pelt around a corner in complete silence. There's clearly no easy fix, but we're long overdue a change.

The first improvement is to mixing. We can now opt for a 'Focused Mix', which optimizes audio for threat detection (i.e. hearing enemies) and will be enabled by default when it launches with Season 27 next month. The TLDR of this mix is that is lowers the audio for your weapons and abilities, completely removes the footstep audio for your squadmates, and makes enemy footsteps louder. Developer Respawn Entertainment says that it will "be making adjustments over time" to maintain this system.

Respawn has also been working on a dynamic threat system, which determines the priority of certain audio components. This assesses audio data (e.g. enemy proximity, line of sight, bullet proximity), and tweaks the audio mix to compensate. For example, ambient or audible flavor sounds (I imagine this encompasses things like loot bins being opened) will have their volume lowered during combat.

Now we're getting technical. Respawn is also adding multiband sidechain compression in Apex Legends Season 27. Put simply, this reduces cluttered audio and allows you to hear more things, better. The example shown in the blog post shows Fuse using his Knuckle Cluster tactical ability. Without multiband sidechain compression, it's the only thing you can hear. With the system enabled, however, you can still clearly hear the footsteps of the opponent running nearby.

There's another update which makes ambient sound more immersive - fading the audio between indoor and outdoor presets as you approach a door and so on, which should boost immersion but won't have a huge impact on gameplay.

Finally, Respawn has developed an advanced monitoring system so it can see when footstep audio is culled "for performance and/or audio clarity." This usually happens when there are more footsteps than can be effectively discerned, the developer says, but its new tools should help it to identify when and where the system is going wrong.

On this note, improvements have already been made. The average footstep interruptions per player-match fell from around 125 in Season 24 to around 20 in Season 25, when the developer removed foley and movement audio from being tracked. Hopefully this new tracking system, in tandem with the widespread improvements to the game audio, can beckon in a new era for Apex - an era of crystal clear audio. The only problem is, I no longer have an excuse for my terrible K/D.

Apex Legends Season 27 will release on November 4, these audio updates along with it. You can download it here and read the full blog post, graphs and all, here.

If this has got you in the mood to really hear some footsteps, I'd recommend picking something from our list of the best FPS games. If the audio fixes are bringing you back to the game, make sure you've got the best Apex Legends settings to maximize performance.

Is this enough to get you back into Apex Legends, or is it too little, too late? Let us know in our community Discord server, where staff and readers squad up to discuss the latest gaming news.