Apex Legends dataminer explains what the Capitol City ‘meteor’ could be
The Apex Legends community is in a buzz of excitement over the possibility of a Season 4 teaser finally starting, after a mysterious projectile detonated in Capitol City, and data-miner That1MiningGuy believes he’s solved the puzzle.
With Respawn’s third season of the battle royale rolling to a close at the end of the month, players are chomping at the bit to find out where Apex Legends is headed next after nearly four months battling on the much-maligned World’s Edge.
Apex’s new anniversary event the ‘Grand Soirée Arcade’ may have gone some way to whet appetites, but players are mostly keen to see what changes are coming in Season 4 — and the first hint may already be raining down on Capitol City.
Some Apex Legends players believe a meteor landed in Capitol City, but That1MiningGuy believes there may be more to the “freaky” event.While some have speculated the mysterious object could be a meteor, similar to Fortnite’s Season 3-ending event where Dusty Depot was wiped off the map, That1MiningGuy has another theory: one that may involve Gibraltar’s ultimate.
According to the popular data-miner, there’s a spot north of Capitol City where you can make Gibraltar’s Defensive Bombardment “fall through the map,” just near the gaps that lead from the hills into either The Geyser or Fuel Depot.
If pulled off correctly, the bugged Gibraltar ultimate will actually land on the game’s horizontal axis in the X, Y, and Z codes. This means the barrage would come in from the side of the screen, instead of from the sky as it’s supposed to.
“Likely what’s happening is, at a certain distance, the radius can crest the game’s ‘horizon,’ and allow the bombardment to actually launch horizontally instead of vertically, which would then cause what we see in the two videos,” he explained.
“It’s a rare and freaky bug… but I believe the randomization of the projectiles still uses the beacon’s location to determine what coordinate the bombardments can hit. Therefore, once it gets too far away, it would allow for some weird results.”
https://twitter.com/That1MiningGuy/status/1215366398869999619
That1MiningGuy added the sound of the “meteor” players have been claiming to see was likely a variant of the “Wpn_DefensiveBombardment_Incoming_Mid” soundbite in the code, and could sound “strange” because it’s coming in sideways.
Not every part of the mystery was solved, however, with the data-miner admitting he had “never seen” the explosion he suspected was a “rogue” ult. Because not every element lined up, he added he wasn’t “100% sure” it was an ult at all.
“I’m still not 100% sure it’s a Gibby ult,” he said. “You can feel free to believe what you want, but with the above evidence, the only explanation to me is that if it’s not a bugged Gibby ult, they [Respawn] reused all those assets for the EE.”
https://twitter.com/That1MiningGuy/status/1215366410177781765
Considering the data-miner spends a lot of his time digging through the game’s codes and audio files, he would definitely have a good idea if the ‘meteor’ was just another bug added to the ever-growing pile of glitches in the battle royale.
Read more: Apex’s Grand Soirée Arcade event: 7 new modes, skins, more
But, just like many of the players that first spotted the strange explosions in Capitol City, That1MiningGuy isn’t 100% sure what we’re seeing either — at this point, it may take Respawn developers actually wading into the discussion to put it all to bed, as they did when they shut down potential Revenant rumors earlier this week.
UPDATE: That1MiningGuy replied to Dexerto, revealing he had spoken to one of the developers at Respawn, who he would not name, who confirmed his initial theory on why the projectiles were going on rogue across Capitol City was “likely the case.”
“It’s awesome that people are hyped for stuff to start happening, but this ‘meteor’ isn’t it just yet,” he added.