Hi, I'm Mohammad.

I am the narrative lead on Apex Legends.

And I'm Griffin Brennan Dean,

I'm a game designer on Apex Legends.

And today we'll be talking about

each and every Legend in Apex Legends.

[You Are The Jumpmaster by Stephen Barton]

[Octane] New season, let's go.

Awesome, whoa, what a rush.

Our first new character drop,

his name is Octane, Octavio Silva.

Octane's main thing is speed.

We're bringing back Stim, from Titanfall 2,

and we really liked the idea

of the people running the Gauntlet in Titanfall 2

and putting up the YouTube videos, and the way they did it

was by launching themselves with a grenade blast.

So, Octane's backstory is

that he blew off his legs with a grenade blast

trying to beat the world record

at the Gauntlet, and now he's got

these brand new- Robo legs.

Robo legs, that make him, basically, be able to run fast,

and he uses Stim.

He is 100% about the adrenaline rush,

more than anything else.

He feels like someone who's involved in extreme sports.

[Mohammad] Yeah, yeah, he's an athlete.

He's an extreme athlete.

He's an extreme athlete, yeah.

You can go really fast when you use the Stim ability.

He inflicts a little bit of health damage to himself,

but his passive is that he regenerates health

over time, at a slow rate.

He's got this little dialysis machine attached to him

that's basically filtering his blood very slowly.

Filtering the Stim out of it.

His ultimate is a jump pad that the whole squad can use

and you can bounce grenades off of it

or other character abilities.

You can use it to launch yourself over enemy squads.

You can use it to launch yourself up on the ledges and stuff

the way you would use a pathfinder.

My personal favorite thing is you can do things

like bounce a Gibraltar bubble dome off of the thing

and wherever it lands- You follow. [laughs]

You can then, it will deploy and you can follow it.

You can bounce jump pads off of jump pads

and create chains of jump pads.

[Bangalore] Real men use iron sights.

I use heavy artillery.

Unlike previous characters that upheld right,

it was a strong black woman people, right?

[Griffin] Yes, yeah.

And I remember one of our audio guys told me like

his sister was a Marine and their whole family

came from this like very, very proud military background.

[Griffin] Yeah, military service.

And it was super, super important to them.

Bangalore comes from a strong military background.

[Griffin] Exactly.

And she's actually ex-IMC which I know is often considered

the bad guys of the Titanfall universe,

but not from her point of view.

From her point of view,

she has a very proud military history,

and I like that about her.

She's definitely a good guy.

So, my senior editor at the time hated Bangalore. [laughs]

'Cause you guys wanted, basically,

like an easy-for-beginners-to-understand soldier character.

It was trying to solve a couple problems.

It was trying to make a meat and potatoes,

straight-forward soldier character.

It was trying to solve the major offensive problem we had

in our maps, which is how do I advance a squad

against a defensive position

over a large swath of open ground?

Where it's like, before Bangalore, you could charge,

but you're just gonna get hosed.

A lot of people ask where the name Bangalore came from.

There were two things that were influencing it.

One is the Bangalore torpedo,

and it found service clearing defensive structures

like the barbed wire on the beaches of Normandy.

The whole mechanical set for Bangalore

came from the Punjab soldiers that served

in the Indian arm of the British military in WWI.

Those soldiers had to cross massive swaths of no-man's land,

and all that stuff, and so smoke,

and the type of bombard that Bangalore employs

was what's called the creeping barrage,

and so, that's a barrage that you synchronize

with a group of infantrymen,

where it lands about 50 to 100 yards out.

Basically, your team needs to move with it, encroach on

the enemy position, yeah. Exactly.

I'm personally proud of what the team

has accomplished in terms of the characters.

I feel like, mechanically, writing-wise, animation-wise,

in terms of voice acting.

You're not just playing a mechanical set

that has a personality, you are that character.

That combination of the determined tone,

and you're not gonna knock me over,

I'm gonna knock you over.

When you get shot at, you don't have to get hit,

but when you're taking fire and you're running,

you double-time, you move faster.

We implemented that to give people confidence

to just close with people.

You can be under withering fire

and just keep pushing, no matter what.

The smoke launcher allows you to advance your squad,

and you can use that in a defensive role, an offensive role.

It's highly flexible.

It deals damage, and so, the hit numbers

can tell you how many occupants of a building there are.

And then, there's, of course, the bombardment.

To me, the whole thing ended up being very powerful

as an entirety, as well, because it ended up being

an homage to African-American regiments

like the Harlem Hellfighters who fought during WWI, right?

That actually was one of my inspirations.

[Bloodhound] Never forget the eyes of Bloth Hundur.

Bloodhound's one of my favorites, actually.

[Bloodhound] I am Bloth Hundur.

The important thing to take away with Bloodhound,

is that Bloodhound is a character

that is designed all around starting and entering fights

from as best a tactical perspective as possible,

in that you have information

about where enemies have been, what they've done.

The ultimate allows you to see through

a lot of defensive obfuscations, smoke, gas,

and all that stuff, and track people better.

So, if someone's trying to flee from a Bloodhound,

it's just not gonna happen.

They're the ultimate hunter.

Yeah, if you're wounded and crawling away from Bloodhound,

unless someone's covering you, it's just not gonna work.

I'm sorry, you're just kinda done at that point.

The character doesn't inherently have

any defensive abilities.

The idea is, if you understand

what your enemy is capable of, your enemy's position,

then you have more information about your enemy

than they have about you, you can make decisions and control

when the fight happens, where it happens, and if you make

all of those things favorable to you, you win.

And, if you know you're being followed by a Bloodhound,

you can actually use the fact that

the Bloodhound can follow you reliably,

to bait them into traps, to ambush them.

As we go through all the characters, we'll talk about this,

but a lot of them are designed in an ecosystem

where they're meant to have strengths and limitations

so that they're inter-reliant as a fighting unit.

I think that's what makes

the baseline squad play interesting.

It's not any hard counters to anything.

Yes, and also, you have three members,

and there are four roles, so we have our offense,

defense, recon, and support characters.

And so, there's four roles,

but you're always lacking one role in the squad,

which means that you have to supplement that deficit

with teamwork or strategy.

The squad is always going to have

some weakness in some area.

I think the community has been very accurate

with the Bloodhound-Bangalore combo.

Yeah, absolutely.

So, they're both a very powerful assault unit,

in that the Bloodhound can say,

This is where the enemies are,

and the Bangalore can focus on the obfuscation

or the smoke with the pulse and the ultimate.

[Mohammed] That's the key one, right?

[Griffin] It is, definitely.

[Mohammed] Like, one specializes in blocking the vision,

the other one sees through it.

Yes, if you are playing Bangalore,

you always want to listen for Bloodhound audio cues,

because if you hear a Bloodhound

that is not your Bloodhound,

the combat [mimics sounds],

you know the [mimics alert sound].

You don't want to put the smoke down.

Yeah, you don't want to put the smoke down.

'Cause it only hurts your team, basically.

So the tracking ability,

one of the big things we had a problem with was,

originally, it was not tied to mobility.

So, things like mantling, running, all that stuff,

didn't generate evidence markers.

It was only things like gunshots, blood.

Fighting isn't a moving thing.

It's more like a puddle.

So, you've got this big cluster, and you're like,

Yeah, there's death boxes and people fought here,

and you're telling me what I already know.

So, adding the mobility element to that

really helped so that it was much more,

you get more breadcrumb trails across the map.

Bloodhound was a tough one.

I based it, the character's personality,

off of an amalgamation

of one of my favorite Viking characters

and a couple of my close personal friends.

One of them is non-binary and the other one is gender fluid.

They had a big impact on me,

and I realized I would really like to have

a character that represented a non-binary person.

[Bloodhound] It is your honor to face me.

I knew from the beginning,

because I was making a non-binary character,

that I wanted them to have an androgynous voice.

Because I wanted anyone to be able to feel

like they could put themselves into that role.

It's super important to the whole company

to have inclusion, and diversity, and representation.

The people who make these games, us included,

the people who play these games,

they come from all walks of life.

Like, the world is diverse.

There's so many cultures

and so many things that people haven't seen before

in their daily lives, or they may not be familiar with.

Definitely not, that we hit everything on,

but we're trying.

We're trying, we're working on it.

We're trying. [laughs] Yeah, yeah. [laughs]

There's more characters coming. [laughs]

It's a process, it's a process.

[Caustic] This is my favorite part.

Gas-man. Yeah,

Gassy Boy, as the internet says.

Originally, when we wrote Caustic,

we wrote him as a good guy, right, remember that?

[laughs] I can still remember that meeting.

Something doesn't feel right.

I'm going around gassing people.

I don't feel like I'm the good guy.

The original fantasy, from a mechanical standpoint,

was sort of a monster in the fog.

You can't see very well, you can't breathe very well.

You can just hear this ventilator coming through the gas.

And, you don't know where he is,

but he's getting closer, and it's sort of our game's version

of the hatchet drag in a horror movie.

When the first pitch to make him sympathetic came through,

I remember bringing up the actual guy

who invented mustard gas in WWI.

That nature of warfare

is such a inhumane method of conducting warfare,

that I think it's weird to say

that I'm glad that Caustic came to embody that.

The good guy angle,

[laughs] Good guy gas mask.

It wasn't working, I was like,

All right, let's take this back to the drawing board,

and I remember, I hard that conversation with you,

and I was like,

All right, let's turn him into a sociopath.

Very pragmatic, human life means less than science attitude.

Yeah, one of the hardest things

to bring this character to life,

it's gonna sound weird, but the head.

So, there was a version where he looked

like the Pyro from TF2. Oh, I do.

That was old, though.

That was super old,

and then, there was the bee-man costume.

The Haz-Mat, yeah the bee-man costume.

We referred to him as bee-man Caustic,

because he looked like a beekeeper,

like just a big, yellow beekeeper.

And, he couldn't move his neck,

so he was going this weird, like.

It was worse than Batman.

It wasn't like, because if he was sideways,

you basically couldn't see his face at all.

You could tell he was looking at you to fire at you.

We kept it a long time, we tried to work with it,

but animation was having one hell of a time with it,

and eventually, we ended up going

with the goggles, gas mask, crazy hair, beard.

And, as soon as we saw that concept, we were like,

Okay, that's clearly awesome.

The biggest debate that we sort of had with him,

more or less, was the gas affecting teammates.

In some of our previous projects,

we had team-colored abilities, and all this stuff,

where this would be this color if it was good,

this would be this color if it was bad, and all this stuff.

From a simplicity standpoint, we tried to make it

that all Caustics are immune to all Caustic gas.

Everyone else is affected.

We don't want team damage, because it feels-

Well, it's a synergistic team game,

if your team is damaged,

then they have to stay away from you.

In all games, including battle royale, and ours too,

there's a lot of just learning.

Like, for example, the Caustic gas tanks,

not a lot of people know this,

but if you shoot the base, they go away.

Oh, they figuring it out.

They figuring it out now, yeah.

But, in general, we don't like secret knowledge,

and that was one of those, like,

How do I learn which gas is the one that doesn't hurt me?

I think it was easier to be like,

I know if I go into this gas, it is going to affect me.

The whole company plays the game, constantly.

[Griffin] All the time.

Every single day at four o'clock, we play the game,

whatever the latest working build is.

[both laugh]

[Griffin] Working, yeah.

[Mohammed] And, that's really

the key to character balance, and also likability.

Like finding out what character

is like their personality, like Caustic.

If we never played him, I would have never found out

that that personality, no matter how well written,

didn't match the character.

Yeah, I know.

Yeah, animation, once we were like,

Yes, this is the monster in the closet,

this is the evil guy, the smoke,

animation ran with it. [laughs]

Well, they went ham with, like on the gladiator card,

him holding up Lifeline's drone, like this.

It's like he's giving somebody

a bag lunch, almost, he's like,

I brought this for you. [laughs]

[Gibraltar] I'm like a rock,

but rocks don't hit back. [laughs]

Gibraltar, Gibraltar was one of the first characters.

He was the first, the first character.

The first character.

He probably went through the most visual changes.

Art style-wise, he was very military Titanfall 2 look,

and he's definitely kept a lot of that,

like with the packs on him, and everything.

Once we decided we were making a character game,

and we wanted to branch out into more interesting characters

than just military characters.

I named him Gibraltar and I fought for it,

because for a while, nobody thought

that the name Gibraltar, it was like,

Nobody will be able to remember that name,

but I pushed for it, and I feel like Manny

may have made him Polynesian, initially,

because of the Rock of Gibraltar.

I think it may have been

a Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson reference.

For a while, there was talk of him being Maori,

there was talk of him being Samoan,

and then, we sort of decided that we wanted to cover

as many of the Pacific Islands as possible.

In and of itself, I think it's its own cultural continent,

that's not widely represented in many games.

And so, bringing it to this was just important.

We don't want it to just be an accent or that sort of thing.

Right, you don't want it to be just surface-level content.

Yeah, and so, things like the Patu or Mere club,

the jade or whalebone war club,

we talked about things like the haka, and the significance.

'Cause it's such a, I think,

important part of those cultures

and those warrior traditions and all of those things.

Gibraltar is a warrior in a lot of ways.

And, speaking to matching personality to gameplay,

so, that character is definitely a shield for the team.

Very protective of the team,

and so, when my senior writer, Manny, went out to write him,

he created this whole backstory about SARAS,

which is the Search and Rescue Association of Solace.

Solace is a planet.

His parents grew up, basically, saving people,

and when him and his boyfriend

got into a motorcycle accident,

his dad lost his arm to save him,

and that really touched him, so when he grew up,

that stuck with him and maybe even created a motto

for this imaginary search and rescue organization,

which is the shield to protect those in need.

And that, very much so, matches Gibraltar's personality.

He's a warrior, he's a fighter.

But, first and foremost,

[Griffin] He's protecting people.

He's a protector, he likes protecting people.

Over the course of the character's development,

a lot of people drew parallels

between Bangalore's bombardment and Gibraltar's bombardment.

But, I do feel like, in the final shipping game,

they fill two fundamentally different roles.

'Cause it's meant to work with your dome.

Yeah, with your shield.

So, if you throw the bombardment,

and then drop the thing,

you can do a hammer and anvil tactic,

where you can basically create

an exclusion zone that pushes people away,

and during that 15 seconds, you can heal.

Or, pushes them into your shield.

Yeah, they have to pick one.

They either have to, basically,

step into the ring or back off.

[Mohammed] Right, yeah.

The character is a character

that tries to maintain distance and spacing.

It's very important for you to have,

like, sniper battles, because of the shield,

always, if they fire and you fire at the same time,

they're gonna hit your shield and break your shield,

and you're gonna destroy them.

Some people want to push him, you shouldn't actually.

Gibraltar and Caustic are both defensive characters.

Whereas Caustic wants you to come in close to him,

[Griffin] Gibraltar wants to keep you.

Wants to keep you at bay.

So, the best way to play Gibraltar, actually,

is as a long-range defensive character.

Yeah, you play backfield, and if something goes wrong,

you have tools for doing damage control.

You can throw the bombardment out,

and block a zone where people are coming in.

You can cut people's retreats off.

If you're in a building, you can drop it on the house.

Like, watching people play Caustic, Lifeline, Gibraltar.

Caustic will block all the doors,

and Lifeline will heal, and Gibraltar will peek windows.

And, if a squad gets too aggro, likes to push in,

like, say the first floor, they're like,

Oh, there's Caustic gas here,

and then Gibraltar's like,

And, there's also a bombardment outside,

so, either come in with us, or

Or they're screwed.

Or get screwed, and so, very much gives you

a lot of flexibility for forcing people's hands,

and as the meta evolves, there's going to be more room

for tactical gameplay and abilities

and basically forcing people

who may be better shots than you into bad positions,

and leveraging that strategic, high-level,

to win matches that you wouldn't be able to win

in a heads-up gunfight.

[Lifeline] Remember this,

I'm the one you should have concerns about.

I like Lifeline a lot. [laughs]

[Both] Who doesn't like Lifeline?

[Mohammed] She's so spunky. [laughs]

[Griffin] The drone, yeah.

The drone came on by.

She's drumming on the drone,

and the drone's like her friend,

and I'm like, I love this.

You know, Lifeline having that thing to emote with

just made it so much easier

to find the personality on the MOCAP stage.

A lot of times, we have an idea

when we go onto the MOCAP stage,

and sometimes those ideas come through 100%.

Other times, we find the character on the MOCAP stage.

Yeah, the moment I remember,

very specifically in Lifeline's development

was actually pretty late,

when the facial animations came in.

I feel like Lifeline is particularly expressive,

and the one that I think of, specifically,

is the legendary where she spins the healing syringe

like a pistol, and then catches it.

And, there's this sort of look of joy

where she's almost surprised.

It's funny you mentioned that, 'cause,

so, all of our characters,

we model them with a very blank expression.

For somebody like Caustic, it works.

You really don't need

a lot of facial animation to see the evil.

But, in a character like Lifeline,

whose voice is so fun and having that dead face,

Really, you're like, What's going on here?

Yeah, it's hard,

and I remember, the first time Lifeline's face was animated,

I fell in love with her, I was like,

She's so adorable.

You don't see the whole thing come together

until something like, at least, for me specifically,

those facial animations.

And, even like for a character that's so light-hearted,

something like that, some of the executions are pretty dark.

My favorite one is still the D.O.C. Shock one,

where she pulls the cable off the drone

and shocks the person.

The look on her face when she turns and looks at the drone.

And she's like, Do it.

She's like, yeah, Just do it.

It's so mischievous, it's amazing.

[creepy piano]

The core mechanical set was to really make a combat medic.

Someone who would feel comfortable

running out to help teammates under fire.

Like, we don't just want a healing character,

we want a character that feels like

they're putting themselves at risk to help their team.

One of the big things we were trying to figure out

with Lifeline from a general gameplay balance standpoint

for a long time was,

in a game where your goal is not to die,

how do we make sure that a character

who is really good at making you not die

doesn't become the meta,

where things like damage interrupts and stuff like that

that make it so that you can't use the drone

to heal through damage if you're directly under fire,

and that sort of thing.

And so, we had this interesting duality of the character.

Some of the abilities you need to use in cover, and stuff,

but others, like the res, you're supposed to use,

just right in the middle of combat,

when there are bullets flying, and all this stuff.

Probably the same level as Wraith, I would say.

There's not many more characters

that you need to worry about more

than losing track of where a Lifeline went,

because as soon as you lose track of the Lifeline,

that means she's gonna come back

with like 10 billion health.

[laughs] She's gonna reset the fight, basically.

You're gonna be trying to finish her friends,

and you're going to be run ragged,

and she's going to come back like,

I've dusted myself off, and I'm ready to fight again.

And, you're just like, Oh no.

[laughs] I'm tired.

And I want to go home.

And, she's like, Oh, you're going home.

[laughs] Body bag.

In a body bag, exactly. [laughs]

[Mirage] I gotta admit, I may have tricked you.

So, in many ways, Mirage,

his personality is based off of me.

Bits more me.

A bit talks a little fast.

Gets ahead of himself.

He's a lovable jerk.

He is a lot of fun, though.

[laughs] He is a lot of fun.

Mirage was actually a bit vague

having Holo Pilots of himself,

and having fun with them, and joking with them,

and basically loving himself a lot.

He's very vain.

Even things like when he's in the menu,

and you know, he's going like this.

And then, there's the Wingman in his hand, he's like,

Oh, where did that come from?

Then he goes like this again, and it's gone.

Or, like making the bird appear.

There's a lot of new, old-timey vaudevillian stuff in there

that I really love.

[Mohammed] Yeah, the animators had a blast with him.

[Griffin] Oh my god.

I did a little MOCAP,

but most of the MOCAP was done by Sean.

And, he basically said,

I thought of you, and then I just exaggerated.

[Griffin laughs] I'm like,

I don't know how to take that.

Thanks? [both laugh]

This battle royale is this weird fine line

between this show that's all about battle

and fighting, and everything,

and then, Mirage comes in, and he's just like,

What's up, I just want to look good. [laughs]

His solo lines, when everybody else in his squad is dead.

[laughs] He's like,

And, I'm still talking to myself.

Yeah so, all the characters

just have to say everything just for game state stuff,

but he's the only one that comments

that he's alone and talking to himself.

People don't often talk to themselves, right?

Like, Caustic was a little bit easy,

'cause he's a bit loony, and it's not too hard to imagine

he likes to hear his own voice.

But, most of the other characters, it's like,

Okay, how do I say this without sounding weird?

'Cause you're talking to yourself

when the rest of your teammates are dead

and you're playing solo.

Mirage was easy,

Mirage almost break the fourth wall.

Basically, he's like,

This is kinda silly.

I'm talking to myself, but here I go.

It fits his character, it fits perfectly.

I think of all the characters,

he probably has the most attitude.

For anyone coming from Titanfall 2,

who's familiar with the Holo Pilot thing.

When people see like,

Oh, that's the Holo Pilot guy,

there's a little bit of they've got their guard up,

but anybody who's coming new into the experience

doesn't understand that there's such a thing

as a fake guy running around.

[Mohammed] Right. [laughs]

And so, you watch a clip of like a guy,

send a Holo Pilot around a corner, and like a Bloodhound,

it was like a cat with a laser pointer,

where he just leaps off of a rock

and just starts like trying to bludgeon it,

and it disappears, and they're like.

And, the best part is, they're like,

I got him, like, I obliterated him.

They don't realize it's fake. Yeah, so.

Granted, that's not gonna happen much longer.

There's the learning curve.

There's the learning curve.

Mirage is actually a great example

of how we like to try to come up

with one or two or three-word descriptor for a character.

The trickster, the magician, the vaudevillian.

He's basically putting on a performance,

and the Holo Pilots and his personality, and everything.

I just really feel that character

really came together really well.

Yeah, I know, it's awesome.

[Pathfinder] Hey, that's me.

Actually, from a personality standpoint,

Pathfinder was pretty easy.

He's very much Marvin 2.0 from Titanfall,

and we knew that all we had to do

was bring that character into this game,

and give him a voice.

[Pathfinder] High five?

The community loved the Marvins,

these poor little worker bots

that had this smiley faces and emoted sad faces.

[Griffin] And how they never got high fives.

Yeah, the faction leader in Titanfall 2,

the Marvin, never got a high five.

Like, we have to make a playable Marvin.

And, he has to get a high five.

Exactly, by force.

By force, right.

So, one of the first animations,

and I mean very first animations we ever did,

was Pathfinder basically doing the grapple

into the forced high-five kill,

and that animation, I'm pretty sure,

is what spawned the idea of executions,

because we weren't even planning on having executions,

and that's 'cause we didn't know how to incorporate them.

'Cause in Titanfall 2, if you just went up behind somebody,

you'd immediately execute him, but we're like,

Well, that's really cheap.

In a battle royale, we're not gonna do that.

Pathfinder is an interesting character,

mechanically, because Pathfinder gives you

access to terrain and ground

that you would not normally be able to fight from,

and him making those superior positions available

is extremely powerful. It's readable.

So, you can very easily go,

this is where Pathfinder has been,

See the squad moving right now.

They're not going to do any crazy wizard magic,

and he's got his mobility and such,

which helps him in direct fights,

but a lot of his abilities focus more on positioning

and getting your squad into position,

and selecting ground to fight from,

more than the actual heavy lifting,

the way the Bangalore, Gibraltar does heavy combat lifting.

It's much more intro, outro.

He can get your squad out of a really bad situation, too.

[Mohammed] And, he can also scout

what's up ahead and come back pretty easily.

His ability, passive ability,

being able to see where circles are, down the road.

I think, as the meta evolves, and the meta shifts,

pairing him with characters

that want to know where the circle is as early as possible

is really going to become, I think, an important combo,

because he's giving you tactical information

and allowing you to get ahead of more offensive squads

and prepare for, basically, the really aggressive

Wraith, Bangalore, Bloodhound squads.

And so, I think there's a lot of power in that package.

I love the concept art that they did,

where he's a window-cleaning robot,

and he's got the mop, and in the reflection,

he's got the rocket launcher and all the guys

holding up the signs 'We Love You', 'Pathfinder',

and I think it was Manny who was like,

He's just a robot looking for purpose

by participating in a blood sport.

[both laugh]

It seems like Marvins do have a breaking point.

[laughs] The robot revolution.

[Griffin] The robot revolution, yeah.

Yeah, be nice to Pathfinder.

He'll come and get ya. [laughs]

[Wraith] Maybe in another time of space, you killed me,

but not this one.

Wraith was one of the hardest characters.

[Griffin] Oh, yeah.

Oh my god, like when you guys finalized on the design of,

it's a person who travels between two points in space,

goes into the void,

and she hears voices in her head, I was like,

How am I supposed to contextualize that? [laughs]

Phased was a very contentious point on this project.

This character probably went through

more iteration than, I think, any other character.

Yeah, we restarted Wraith three times.

When we were first experimenting

with the concept of characters,

we were pulling abilities from Titanfall 2,

the first thing that we had in there

was Titanfall 2 Phase Shift.

It was rough, because Titanfall 2 Phase Shift,

there's no trail, so you have a person who disappears,

reappears at some other, random point in space,

and can immediately go guns up and hose you.

From a learnability standpoint, what do I do about this?

And, the answer is, well,

don't let Wraith get anywhere near you.

Just like, run away.

[laughs] Which is not a valid

or fun method to play the game.

That's why you made it so that

there's a significant delay

between when she comes out of phase,

And the guns out, yeah.

We want the character to be a phase skirmisher,

so she's all about not presenting a solid target for people

and not over-committing to fights.

Wraith loses when she over-commits to a fight.

She's much more about playing the peripheries,

harassing from the side, harassing from the rear.

She's going to either make lateral movements,

or cautiously aggressive movements,

where she might use it to go from here

to some cover up in front of her,

but she's not going to go directly up into your face,

pop into existence, and just shotgun you.

If you lose track of a Wraith, you should be concerned.

Wraith was the hardest character

for me to find the focus on.

The voices in the head presented a real problem,

because our game is a sci-fi game,

it's not a fantasy game.

Spooky, scary ghost game, yeah.

Right, so it can't be spirits.

So, I was watching Donnie Darko, actually,

and it kind of hit me, what if the void is a window

into infinite dimensions.

What she's doing is stepping out of this dimension,

into this void space that's a window

into every infinite other dimension,

and then stepping back in, right?

And then, when she's in that window,

she can somewhat see into,

other possibilities, and things like that.

In the void, you see little ghost images of Wraith.

That's basically infinite versions of her,

from other dimensions,

also passing through the void at the same time.

And, that's what the voices are.

They're basically seeing through a window,

and warning you, like, Hey, they see you.

Wraith receives voices about

whenever you are being fired at,

whenever you're being looked at,

grenades, traps, all this stuff.

And, the idea was is that

the portal allows you to move an entire squad,

and when you first start using it,

it feels highly situational,

but the more comfortable you get with it,

the more applications you have.

If you think of it as risking only one person

while moving three people, as a value proposition,

it becomes very useful in a wide range of scenarioses.

The combination of being able to hear

when someone's aiming at you, and then,

being able to phase out and place the portal,

the idea was that you can charge a sniper,

you can charge a machine gun position,

if your squad is pinned down,

and move everybody either up on the position

or around the flank or out of harm's way.

And you can really pick your fights,

in a lot of ways with Wraith,

and from a mechanical standpoint,

she's actually an interestingly selfless character

in some ways, in that she's risking herself

to save everybody else,

because she's the only person that can move forward

and is fully aware of all the consequences of the situation.

It's funny you bring up using the ultimate

and the tactical at the same time,

'cause this was one of the first characters we created,

and that led to us changing our animation systems.

Most of the time, we animate the hands,

like in the first person view, together.

And, since design wanted to be able to use the portal,

but at the same time, be able to activate the tactical,

we needed to switch up our animation system,

and it's a readability thing for the player, as well.

I can always learn that, like,

Okay, I'm using the tactical,

now I'm using portal.

It just helps reinforce the UI and everything else,

when everything works together, actually.

[Octane] [laughs] That's how you do it.

He's definitely an aggressive flanker.

I think he'll pair well with Wraith, Bangalore, Bloodhound.

I think he's going to fit into that heavy offensive mix.

He's an offensive character,

but he's inherently a CQ character

other than how you equip him with weapons,

and stuff like that.

He's much more about closing, flanking,

running down fleeing squads.

His ability to rotate and maneuver

is the source of his power,

and introduce himself or extricate himself from situations.

Most squads, because movement speed is relatively fixed,

you have to play with a certain distance of each other

for reasonable response time.

He can move so quickly with his ability,

'cause he can use Stim, basically back to back,

so he's sacrificing health every time he does it,

which is part of that, in the spirit of extreme sports,

pushing yourself. Pushing yourself extra.

[Griffin] Like, running the red line, yes.

If you want to play him conservatively,

because you're too scared about the Stim,

takes a little bit of your health away,

you can play him a little bit more defensively,

like I do, actually.

Which is, I don't Stim into fights, actually.

I usually stay with my team in a fight,

but if it gets hairy, I Stim and get the hell out of there.

But, I've seen people

who are pretty confident in their shooting skills,

and aren't worried about taking damage.

Basically, Stim back to back to back,

to just get in there, get the gun first.

Get the drop on people, shoot, shoot, shoot.

And then, hide in a corner and heal up.

But yeah, super aggressive players are going love Octane.

I think it's going to present

a real challenge to defensive players

and how they're going to deal with them.

But, at the same time, if he gets too far ahead of his team.

Yeah, we'll see how the meta settles out,

'cause I think it's gonna introduce

a lot of really exciting stuff.

Like, we have an idea of what it's going to be,

but you never know.

So, we've been playing with Octane

and his abilities for probably about six months,

but you just never know what happens

until you get it out there

into the hands of millions of pro, effort players.

That's true, yeah.

So, for example, like Bangalore,

I never saw her defensive smoke.

Oh put smoke down and, yeah.

Put smoke down right in front of me, and run off,

as like that viable of a solution, until it got out there,

and that's clearly, a very valid play style.

I know what I expect with Octane,

but more excited about what I-

What people do.

What people do with it, yeah.

So, that's all of our legends, so far.

We'll have more coming.

Thank you so much for playing our game.

It's been a surreal-

Yeah, it's been crazy.

We're hoping we had something good,

but we really didn't know what we had

until the community embraced what we had so, thank you.

Thank you for supporting us.

And yeah, keep streaming, 'cause we love to watch.