Who Has The Biggest Hitbox In Apex Legends? (Updated Answer)

An important aspect of the game is Apex Legends’ characters’ hitboxes. Hitboxes are a universal mechanic which directly impacts game performance and can be the difference between a good and a bad game They lie on a spectrum ranging from small to some very large hitboxes adding even more complexity to the mix. Without further adieu, let's dive into the world of Apex Legends’ hitboxes and see how they influence the game.

How Do You Define A Hitbox In Apex Legends?

As always, before we get into the nitty-gritty of it all, it is important to know what a hitbox is in Apex. But in layman's terms, a hitbox is a specific surface area assigned to a character model, that defines where bullets, or any other projectile, can impact and affect the character.

Hitboxes are part of a game mechanic that is common to all those games where a person can take or inflict damage. Casual games usually do not bother much with complex hitbox designs but competitive ones such as Apex Legends require an accurate design of hitbox sizes to ensure fair play for all players involved.

Once you realize the importance of hitboxes, you can reap the benefits of knowing where to shoot each legend that you may encounter, increasing your chances of winning gunfights drastically.

How Are Apex Legends’ Hitboxes Assigned?

Apex Legends’ characters are very unique, having their own sets of abilities and personalities. Moreover, they vary in shape and size, resulting in a variety of hitboxes. Respawn Entertainment has divided its legends into 3 different size categories, small, medium, and Large.

Legends with a small body have smaller hitboxes and are hence put under the small category. Smaller characters include Wraith, Wattson and Lifeline, with Wraith having the smallest hitbox in Apex Legends at only 34 square cm.

Larger characters with a bigger body mass are put under the large category of legends. This means that they have larger hitboxes as compared to the other legends. These include Gibraltar, Caustic, and Newcastle, the last of which was recently added to the game in the Saviors Update in Season 13.

Certain characters such as Bangalore, Mirage, and Crypto lie somewhere in the middle and are put under the medium category. They are neither too large nor too small and are evenly matched when it comes to hitbox sizes.

What Is The Biggest Hitbox in Apex Legends?

The biggest hitbox in Apex Legends belongs to Gibraltar at a size of approximately 79 square cm, making him the largest legend in the game. Pathfinder and Caustic are also two such legends that are included at this end of the spectrum.

Caustic takes the second position with a size of approximately 68 square cm, followed closely by Pathfinder with a size of 63 square cm. It is interesting to note that the larger characters are more than double the size of some of the smaller ones.

This naturally introduces the question of whether this large difference affects gameplay or not.

How Have Apex Legends’ Hitbox Sizes Changed Over The Years?

In order to see whether differences in hitbox size affect gameplay, it is essential to see how they initially started and where they are now. Respawn Entertainment decided to assign passive traits to try to balance these differences in hitboxes.

Prior to the Genesis event in 2021, characters with some of the smallest hitbox sizes were assigned the Low Profile perk. Low Profile caused legends with smaller hitboxes to take increased incoming damage as compared to those with a larger hitbox. This resulted in a 5% increase in incoming damage.

Similarly, larger characters such as Gibraltar and Caustic were assigned the Fortified passive trait, which meant that they would take less incoming damage from enemy bullets. This 15% reduced damage effect served as a thin string holding the game together until the Genesis event was released.

How Did The Genesis Event Impact Apex Legends’ Hitboxes?

The Genesis event introduces some major changes to hitbox sizes to add balance to the game. The event removed Low Profile altogether and then proceeded to slightly increase every smaller character’s hitbox size.

This change added some much-needed balance to the game. Small hitbox sizes were increased to reach closer to the medium-sized category. This would attempt to eliminate the overall extreme nature of the hitbox spectrum and remove any unwanted advantages or disadvantages that smaller or larger characters may have had to experience.

Do Large Hitboxes Affect Ranked Play?

Now that we know how hitboxes in Apex Legends have evolved over the years, we can determine whether they affect Apex ranked gameplay or not. Even though Respawn has tried to reduce the gap between small and large legends, the contrast is still pretty evident.

However, this contrast has an almost negligible impact on competitive matches as ranking up in Apex requires many more factors to be considered. Legend abilities, play style, decision-making, gun management, and map awareness are all equally important factors, if not more, that directly affect the outcome of your matches.

This shows that climbing ranks is not as simple as it sounds and requires skill and practice in a lot of different things instead of just large hitboxes. A large hitbox is not really a disadvantage in the hands of an experienced player. Apex already assigns the Fortified perk, which greatly reduces incoming damage due to lower mobility and being a bigger target.

What Is The Future of Large Hitboxes?

Respawn plans to introduce more updates to the game in the future and remains committed to providing a balanced experience for its players. It has made many changes to gameplay mechanics in the past and will continue to do so to ensure that in the near future, extremities of any sort are avoided.

An overview of all the above means that the community can be assured that large hitboxes do not provide any unfair advantage or disadvantage to anyone in the game and neither will any future legends bring about any hitbox abnormalities in the games.