Apex Legends dataminers make a lovely select screen for 10 seemingly leaked characters

A set of 10 new Apex Legends characters seem to have surfaced early thanks to datamining efforts, and so much info is leaking out that Respawn Entertainment itself has officially addressed it. I guess people being interested enough in your game to dig around in the data and find new stuff is a good problem to have, though it's probably annoying to see all these prototypes(?) show up online.

Also mock up made by @Loudwindow and edited by @sargent179 to have the proper characters and respective names pic.twitter.com/QUxNxzgKQ9March 12, 2019

That mocked-up selection screen is starting to look a bit Smash Bros-ian in its expansiveness. Take a look at these combinations of concept art and datamined models to learn more about the potential new additions to Apex Legends' roster.

There is so much more to it actually, Shrugtal datamined the next 10 legends of 2019, Shrugtal and I made this compilation of the leaked legends pic.twitter.com/JREzMeegLzMarch 12, 2019

These leaks follow others that indicated the possible arrival of NPCs and hoverbikes, not to mention the fact that we've been seeing Octane's masked face for weeks now. Respawn Entertainment isn't confirming or denying any of it. But along with revealing that the Apex Legends battle pass wasn't coming on March 12 (despite, you guessed it, leaks), Respawn cautioned fans against reading too much into datamined material.

"There’s lots of stuff that has been datamined from Apex since launch and is swirling around the Internet," Respawn community manager Jay Frechette wrote on Reddit. "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."

Of course, the developers would say that, right? They want to reveal new details about the game in their own carefully tailored way so they're going to downplay leaks. But it's still a good idea to consider not just what gets pulled from the back end of a product but why it was there in the first place. As long as game developers make new stuff faster than they can purge all traces of the old stuff, they're going to leave some unintended red herrings behind.