Apex Legends Battle Pass For Season 1 Leaked: Respawn Addresses Leaks And Datamining

Apex Legends has been available since early February, but it's only sometime this month that Season 1 will officially begin with the release of the game's first battle pass. That will consist of, among other things, a new character, and the first Battle Pass legend leaked thanks to a mistaken update on the Origin store. Developer Respawn Entertainment is now acknowledging that the mistake happened, but also warning fans not to put too much stock in datamines and leaks that appear to reveal other new characters and content.

[Update: Respawn has finally announced details on the Season 1 battle pass. It releases on March 19 alongside the new character, Octane, who will be sold on his own, just like Caustic and Mirage. The battle pass includes free rewards for all players, but most of its contents are reserved for those who purchase it and level it up sufficiently. Alongside skins and other cosmetics, you'll be able to earn up to 1,000 Apex Coins, letting you recover the full cost--and have enough to buy Season 2's.]

In an update on Reddit, community manager Jay Frechette acknowledged there was an "unintentional update about Season 1 on Origin today." That confirms that the leak was legitimate. But Frechette also said the team wanted to clarify and set expectations given both that leak and earlier datamining efforts, which could be misleading or erroneous.

"There's lots of stuff that has been datamined from Apex since launch and is swirling around the Internet," Frechette said. "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."

The statement doesn't appear to apply to the Origin leak that revealed the next character as Octane. It also wouldn't make sense for Origin to have an advertisement ready to go for the new character if it was still in testing and subject to change. But the statement does warn users not to put too much stock in datamined information. That said, don't expect fans to stop digging into that sort of thing and potentially uncovering information regarding what's to come; Fortnite, despite its massive success (or perhaps because of it), constantly deals with the same sorts of leaks.

Aside from revealing Octane, the leak also mentioned new weapons and loot, and a battle pass price of 950 Apex Coins (roughly $10). If that's accurate, that would enable the bonus coins given to EA and Origin Access members to be used to buy the battle pass.

Meanwhile, Respawn recently banned 355,000 cheaters on PC, and detailed plans for dealing with cheaters in the future. It won't be adding a reconnect feature, though, due to the resource intensity and chances for being exploited further by cheaters. It does fortunately plan to deal with people who spam and quit out of matches at the start, though it hasn't shared any details in order to avoid enabling those players further.