Fans of Apex Legends have been creeping through the game’s code and finding all kinds of interesting little bits of information. As you’ve probably heard, there was recently a pretty big leak that dug up the existence of a ton of new playable characters for the battle royale.
Respawn has since responded to these datamining antics, and while the studio doesn’t seem angry, it did want to make it very clear that just because something has been discovered in the game’s files, that doesn’t automatically mean it will make its way to the game.
But first, what exactly were these leaks? Yesterday, a dataminer by the name of Shrugtal on Twitter shared a ton of new findings, a number of new weapons and playable characters among them. the most prominent of which looks like actual assets for a number of new legends (playable characters).
Among these many assets was a 3D icon for a character who looks like Octane, a legend that has been hinted at a few times now. The rest of the characters were all previously unknown, but there are certainly some interesting looking additions in the mix.
However, in a post to the Apex Legends subreddit, Respawn said:
There’s lots of stuff that has been datamined from Apex since launch and is swirling around the Internet. We know this stuff is fun to dig up and speculate about, but you should not treat any of that info as a source of truth. There’s stuff in there that is very old, or things we’ve tried in the past and cut–remember our design process is to prototype and play lots of ideas–and some of it may be things we’re still building for Apex Legends. Finding this stuff by no means confirms that it’ll ever come out. At best you should treat any posts about this as a rumor and the real info will come from us when we’re ready to show off what’s coming next.
Respawn has done a fantastic job of being transparent and communicative throughout the first few weeks of Apex Legends, and it is important to remember that looking through the game’s files is cool and exciting, but nothing is ever set in stone till it’s been officially confirmed and added to the game.
Ewan Moore is a journalist at UNILAD Gaming who still quite hasn’t gotten out of his mid 00’s emo phase. After graduating from the University of Portsmouth in 2015 with a BA in Journalism & Media Studies (thanks for asking), he went on to do some freelance words for various places, including Kotaku, Den of Geek, and TheSixthAxis, before landing a full time gig at UNILAD in 2016.