Battle Pass teaser? Octane’s launch pad mysteriously appears in Apex

Another day, another surprise in Apex Legends. Today, many Apex players are reporting that they have found what looks to be Octane’s leaked ultimate, the “Launch Pad” appearing near the Market area in-game.

 

The first mention of the launch pads mysteriously appearing was made just over an hour ago, and already has more than 500 comments and 1600 upvotes on reddit, at the time of this writing. Since then, a mass of similar threads has been posted to the fast-paced forum. Two of those threads received developer responses. In both cases, the developer simply wrote down an emoji and nothing else.

While many believe the appearance of the pads to be an accident, the prompt and satirical nature of the dev responses leads us to believe that this is an intentional addition to the game. Respawn may finally be teasing Apex Legends‘ first Battle Pass!

Everything that’s happened so far

A lot has transpired over the past several days, so let’s quickly recap to catch everybody up.

At first, the community was certain that the game’s first Battle Pass (and with it, Season 1) would release on Tuesday, March 12. And when that date came, it really seemed like it was happening. Then, for some reason, it didn’t. There was much speculation on what exactly that reason was. Our theory was that it was delayed due to an exploit giving people 1000 Apex Coins, enough to steal the Battle Pass for free. Releasing a Battle Pass with that ongoing would have upset the honest players who had to pay for it, and would have probably cost Respawn a significant amount of money.

Yesterday, that theory may have gained some credence, when Origin announced they’d be pulling the “refer-a-friend” promotion to work on a fix for that exploit. Today, we suddenly have people finding signs of the much-anticipated Octane appearing in-game.

It’s been a wild ride to be sure, but we’re hoping that we’re finally about to get some answers.

Can’t catch what you can’t see!

One noticeable aspect of this mystery is that the launch pads have only appeared on console versions of the game. They have yet to show in PC clients. Renowned leaker, Shrugtal, believes that this was a crafty attempt at hiding the launch pads from data-miners such as himself.

Update (3:40 PM EST): Two hours after the launch pads appeared on consoles, the changes finally reached the PC platform.

Pretty sure this was only put into the console build to hide from dataminers. Crafty. https://t.co/3dqS5tZT1y

— Shrugtal (@shrugtal) March 15, 2019

While we had seen a picture of Octane’s alleged abilities from leaks in the past, there was no way to confirm their legitimacy. Today’s events tell us that they may have been accurate all along.

This is all we know for now! Stay tuned for more information! We’ll be updating this post throughout the day with any new developments.