Apex Legends and Titanfall hackers are forcing Respawn to divert attention away from upcoming features like cross-progression.
As spotted by Eurogamer, Apex Legends game director Chad Grenier explained that recent hacks, including one that essentially nuked matchmaking for a huge chunk of players (including this writer), has slowed down development.
Grenier was asked by a Twitter user if fans could get an update on cross-progression, and although he confirmed the feature is still very much in development, he added that "recent hacks on Apex and Titanfall have slowed down the progress of it as we context switch to solving live game issues."
Back in May, Respawn's director of communications Ryan Rigney explained that an onslaught of DDoS attacks on Titanfall essentially resulted in the dev team throwing away weeks of work because they were being forced to address "each new stupid thing" hackers were dreaming up.
"Instead of delivering new value, building incredible things for players, we've got people tearing their hair out digging into the newest exploit, the new type of attack, some fresh way to target streamers, or high-rank lobbies or everyone. Weeks of work thrown away," wrote Rigney on Twitter.
"I genuinely don't even hold any anger in my heart toward these people. I mostly just feel sad about it, and I wish it would stop. There is no worse feeling than seeing something you care about being destroyed. Especially something that's meant to bring joy, like a game."
Respawn recently reiterated its commitment to cracking down on cheating, and explained it would be hiring more people to focus on manual bans, developing more tools capable of automatically detecting and preventing DDoS attacks, and investigating new ways of quickly catching and removing cheaters from games.