Genshin Impact cracks down on leakers, quickly suffers massive leak of new characters

Less than a month after successfully driving Genshin Impact's biggest leaker out of the insider info trade, developer Hoyoverse has suffered another massive leak covering upcoming content and characters coming to the hit open-world RPG, potentially unearthing six to eight months of updates. 

As ever, these leaked assets are nearly impossible to verify, but there's plenty to suggest that at least some of the characters and details uncovered are legitimate, so I guess this is your spoiler warning for future Genshin Impact updates.

I won't be embedding or linking to specific images, but if you do want to see these leaks, you won't have to look very hard. Plenty of Twitter posts have been pulled via takedown requests – which, of course, makes the assets appear more legitimate – but that hasn't stopped the Genshin Impact leaks Reddit community from having a field day. 

Virtually every Genshin Impact update is leaked to some extent, but we don't often see multiple characters tied to a far-off region pop up like this. I can't remember something of this scale leaking since a pre-Inazuma model sheet spoiled the likes of Kokomi and Yaoyao long before their release. Funnily enough, with Genshin Impact update 3.4 adding Alhaitham and Yaoyao in just a few weeks, all the characters from that leak are now accounted for – and now there's already an ever bigger list of leaks to check off in the updates ahead. 

The latest mega leak seems to be about Fontaine, long believed to be the region that will follow Sumeru's release, and includes nearly a dozen characters. This non-final, nonexhaustive list of Fontaine characters reportedly includes the Hydro Archon, at least two new characters with ties to Mondstadt, and a frankly impressive variety of hats adorning eight female characters and two male characters. 

Genshin Impact update 3.4 was only just revealed, confirming the return of the Lantern Rite event, reruns for long-awaited characters Hu Tao and Yelan, as well as another desert expansion for Sumeru. Given Inazuma's update history, we can reasonably expect at least three to four more Sumeru-focused updates before Genshin Impact launches a whole new region – Fontaine or otherwise – in its presumed update 4.0. 

Hoyoverse has warned players to avoid Primogem and account resellers amid a spike in phishing scams.