It looks like Apex Legends secret bunkers will open next week
Apex's dataminers are at it again
At the start of Apex Legends' fifth season, players witnessed Kings Canyon erupt after new Legend Loba went sneaking through a creepy underground lab. She set off all sorts of alarms and caused the facility to explode, changing the landscape of the map for good. Now there's a whopping great hole where Skull Town used to be, various dig sites dotted around, and a few mysterious metal bunker doors in the ground. One dataminer reckons these bunker doors are about to open, and it looks like there's some golden loot waiting inside.
When these bunker doors appeared right at the beginning of the season, they were very much the sort of environmental change you look at and think, "oh yeah, something funny is going on here". I thought they were all just going to be quest related (only one of them is, for now), but according to data miner "Shrugtal", they're set to open in battle royale matches.
From this map, it looks Terminal Station F-85, the bunker in-between Water Treatment and Salvage (or, Skull Town's remains), will start opening on June 16th, and be ready for players to explore by June 23rd. This should be followed by Terminal Station W-78 opening between June 23rd and 30th, O-240 between June 30th and July 7th, then L-19 between July 7th and 14th.
The datamine shows players will be rewarded for exploring these secret underground zones with some lovely fully kitted out gold weapons (namely the Prowler, Sentinel, and Havoc), and even a gold knockdown shield in that first one. I'm hoping that's not all that's down there though, sneaky bunkers seem like an excellent place to hide easter eggs and lore snippets.
Seeing as this is a datamine, obviously all this info should be taken with a pinch of salt. We'll just have to see what happens when it's all meant to kick off next week.
Along with the big map changes, Apex Legends has a bunch of new stuff come in this season. We got master thief Loba as a new playable Legend, and the new story quests that follow her revenge mission against killer bot, Revenant.
Respawn are really getting into all this narrative stuff now. The other week I had a chance to talk about it all with game director, Chad Grenier, and design director, Jason McCord, and they told me about the challenges of storytelling in a battle royale, and the how all of it fits into the future of Apex.