Respawn’s principal animator Moy Parra recently took to Twitter to explain why Apex Legends character Natalie ‘Wattson’ Paquette holds her weapons “a bit awkwardly”, in a fun behind-the-scenes video.
The reason is because the motion capture was done by Parra’s niece, who had never held a gun before, “and we wanted to capture this natural innocence in all of Wattson’s move sets.”
⏪ if you ever wondered why Wattson holds her weapons a bit awkwardly compared to say, Bangalore. That’s because my niece who provided the MoCap for her had never held a gun before in her life and we wanted to capture this natural innocence in all of Wattson’s move sets ⚡️❤️ pic.twitter.com/HZyfYW73LEJuly 1, 2021
The video shows a side-by-side comparison of the original motion capture performance and some of the animations used for Wattson, including Wattson running with the gun clasped in her arms.
In a reply to another comment Parra added, “Much of our direction was: don’t try to play a character, just be yourself and we will find Wattson together!”
At 22, Wattson’s character is one of the youngest in Apex Legends, but also distinctly non-combative in both her background and playstyle. As the daughter of an engineer, who then took engineering on herself as a special interest, her toolkit is all themed around electricity-based defensive play.
Wattson also received a “major buff” as part of quality of life updates accompanying the Genesis Collection Update that sees new characters revisiting old maps from Apex Legends’ original launch. Quote: “Wattson can now place more than one Nessie on the map at a time with her Epic emote.” There can, in fact, be up to twenty Nessie plushes in the map at once.
You can read more about how best to play Wattson (and all the other Apex Legends) characters in our guide.
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