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.
Parra explained that Respawn wanted Wattson's animations to communicate that she's not used to handling weapons. To accomplish that, Wattson's 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 like an American football.
In a response to the video, 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" recently in the Genesis Collection Update that sees new characters revisiting old locations from Apex Legends' original launch. "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 on the map at once.
You can read more about how best to play Wattson (and all the other legends) in our Apex Legends characters guide.
