Apex Legends data-miners recently revealed a treasure trove of information about potential new Legends. The Iron Crown update files were meticulously combed over, revealing detailed data on an impressive 14 new characters that may be coming to the game. Since then, the community has been abuzz, with the specificity of the new characters and their abilities apparently making it a foregone conclusion that they’ll make it into the title.
But hold your horses and remember that Respawn has already said that players shouldn’t put complete faith in data-mined information. Back in Season 1, they explained:
“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.”
This fits with the surprisingly large amount of new Legends. Up until now, Apex Legends has seen a new character join the battle every three and a half months. If all of these folks made it into the game, that’d mean that Respawn already has the next four years of major content lined up. That would leave them with a very rigid schedule and give them little scope to adapt to what players want from Apex as it develops.
In addition, at least some of these leaks will be experimental concepts whose aspects may have already been rolled into other characters. As they said, Respawn are constantly working on iterating the game, so will be trying out all kinds of new characters behind the scenes. This may explain why some of the leaked heroes like Immortal have powers and abilities which sound like they’d ruin the balance. After all, what better way to find out than to have your testers play matches with them to decide just how broken they are?
All that said, I’d be surprised if at least some of them don’t make it into the full game. A lot of work has gone into these characters, so while some of the more overpowered ones might not make the cut, I’m betting some of them will. In meantime, I’ll keep paying attention to data-miners despite knowing they’re not a cast-iron prediction of things to come in Apex Legends.