Apex Legends' Seer Can See Heartbeats Farther Than He Can Hear Them

Apex Legends Season 10: Emergence has officially begun (the full patch notes are live too), introducing playable character Seer. Of Seer's three abilities, his passive ability, Heart Seeker, seems especially valuable as it allows him to track enemy legends through the sound of their heartbeats. Of course, not all of the playable legends are human--Pathfinder is a MRVN and Revenant is a simulacrum--so a few of the characters in Apex Legends don't actually have hearts. Don't worry: Seer can sense them too.

"Seer's passive Heart Seeker ability does work on Pathfinder and Revenant," software engineer Travis Nordin told GameSpot. "During development, the issue definitely came up! Do we have an alternate sound for non-human legends? Do we have it not work at all? In the end we settled on having the same sound as everyone else for clarity of gameplay. The sound isn't quite a literal heartbeat and is somewhat synthesized so I think it works. The comparison I've been using is that we suspend our disbelief/bend the rules for Pathfinder being able to 'heal' by injecting a syringe into his arm--the same can apply here."

Heart Seeker seems to be a powerful tracking ability--you only get to hear the sounds of heartbeats up to a certain distance but there is no limit on distance when it comes to seeing the heartbeats. So for all those moments you're trying to discern whether a far-off target is an enemy player or a floating flower petal (if you've played on World's Edge, you know what I'm talking about), you can use Seer's Heart Seeker to see whether that far-off target has a heartbeat.

"The range for hearing the heartbeats of any enemies within your viewport is 75m," Nordin said. "The UI element will still work beyond that, but only for targets that you have a direct line of sight to--we wanted to avoid the situation where you're looking right at someone far away and have the heartbeat sensor UI do nothing. We have some subtle VFX that turns on when you activate the heartbeat sensor as well as an overlay for the 'vision cone' on the minimap to help players get a feel for the range in the world."

In trailers, we've only seen Seer use his passive amidst small groups but anyone who plays Apex Legends can tell you that some areas of each map can become chokepoints, forcing half a dozen squads into a major firefight. Respawn planned for that, limiting the scope of Seer's passive ability so that it won't overwhelm you with information when you're surrounded by dozens of heartbeats.

​​"The heartbeat sensor can track up to 10 targets, but we only play the actual audio event for the enemy that is closest to your crosshair," Nordin said. "During development, it wasn't always this way but we found that hearing multiple heartbeat sounds at the same time ended up just creating too much noise to parse."

Nordin added that the UI element to the heartbeat sensor that appears on your crosshair won't always be there. "[The crosshair] is obviously a very important piece of real estate on the screen, so the UI will fade out as you fire your weapon and dims if there are no targets nearby," Nordin said. "The goal was for it to feel useful, while at the same time not getting in the way during combat. The UI has pips that rise and fall in the direction of an enemy with the rhythm of the heartbeat sound for an enemy."

According to Nordin, the lower an enemy's health, the faster their heart will beat. This is important to note if you're looking to pair Heart Seeker with Seer's tactical ability, Focus of Attention, which tracks enemy legends for eight seconds and temporarily stuns them, stopping healing items and certain character abilities.

"With their tactical, [Bloodhound] has this very wide scan," Nordin said. "You just tag a whole POI and see who's there, whereas Seer is much more close and intimate. The primary case that I always think: You're in a building and you hear some footsteps, and you're like, 'Is that my teammate? Or is that another squad?' So you just aim down sights, bringing up the heartbeat sensor, and look around to see if you get a reading. And then, if you do, you can follow up with [Focus of Attention] to hopefully tag them."

Seer is Apex Legends' fifth recon character (alongside Pathfinder, Bloodhound, Crypto, and Valkyrie), making him geared towards information gathering and enemy tracking. Like all new legends, you'll be able to unlock him by spending 12,000 Legend Tokens or 750 Apex Coins.