Here's the real story of the Apex Legends character that never was, and how he was born from "pure frustration"

Apex Legends‘ early days were a simpler time. There was a smaller roster of characters, fewer weapons, and it didn’t seem like people had ‘solved’ the meta in quite the same way they have now. The Wingman took heavy ammo and Skull Town was the hottest drop – like I say, life was simple. However, it all changed in Season 4, when Respawn announced the next legend, Forge, and promptly killed him off. It was a move that fans didn’t see coming, and an ambitious piece of storytelling that hasn’t been seen before or replicated since by any major live-service game.

What you’ve got to know is, at this point, Apex Legends was a behemoth. It still comfortably sits in the top five Steam games at any given time, but the early days were even bigger. Every season was a monumental event, but with that came leaks and datamines which undermined the intended impact of new trailers and reveals.

“It’s better than if they didn’t care at all,” concedes Respawn’s narrative lead Ashley Reed during our chat about the last seven years of Apex Legends’ development, but it still rankled the development team at Respawn, especially when half-finished assets were being criticized or in-development mechanics were prematurely revealed. Thus, Forge was cooked up. From images in the game files to a full-on reveal, all but the smartest of players thought that the next legend in the FPS game was going to have a massive power fist and rhyme with gorge.

“[Forge] came out of frustration because we had just gone through, I’m going to call it ‘the big leak’,” says Reed. “There were a couple very close together when we first launched.” The first was a picture of the characters currently being playtested, which had been taken from inside the developers’ studio. “That shook the studio up,” Reed says.

“But then there was another one where essentially all of our prototype characters for the next three or four years leaked at once through some kind of datamining or something like that. With all that together we were getting frustrated and then stuff was getting datamined ahead of time, so we were having to do extra work to kind of hide things within our own code. We couldn’t be too obvious – and we got in trouble for being too obvious a few times.”

After the series of constant leaks, some people had had enough. “Some of our designers got irritated and were like, ‘fine, if you want to datamine something, I’ll give you something to datamine’,” she laughs. “That was actually where the idea for Forge came from – why don’t we just put a fake one in there, just to fool them?”

Did it work? It’s hard to say for sure. Casual fans were fooled, as Forge had artwork and trailers and all the usual fanfare deserving of a new addition to the game. But what about the leakers and the hardcore players?

“I think some people were fooled,” says Reed. “[But] I think some people caught on that it was a concept art and not a model. But everybody had fun with it and it ended up being a real blast to put together. That’s where Forge came from, it was pure frustration, but turned in a positive direction.”

Forge must have been a cathartic experience for the developers, and it’s undeniable that the trailer where Revenant murdered the champion-elect was shockingly brilliant. While some players still call for Forge to be added to the game, there’s even less of a place for a close-combat oriented character in the modern iteration of Apex. Forge is dead, long live Forge.