Apex Legends Data Miner Reveals New Possible Date for Cross-Play

With several popular battle royales facilitating cross-platform play, it has become a hot topic in the online gaming community. In June, Respawn announced that Apex Legends would arrive on Nintendo Switch and Steam this fall, with cross-play becoming a salient feature.

Data miners had examined all sorts of data in the game’s build while looking for clues. They had predicted September 15 as a possible date for the inception of cross-play in Apex with the next major event. Despite credible evidence backing their claims, it didn’t happen. Instead of the “Aftermarket” collection event and cross-play kicking off on September 15, Armed and Dangerous mode went live as a part of the September Soiree.

Prominent Apex Legends data miner, Shrugtal has now updated his predictions in a YouTube video. He has also explained why Aftermarket and cross-play didn’t hit the servers on the previously intended date.

Reason for Apex Legends cross-play delay

The data miner stated that due to delays with features such as cross-play and Switch/Steam release, Respawn had to re-schedule the Aftermarket event before Season 6 started. The event was initially set to arrive on September 15. He provided further evidence to back his claims about the delays caused.

A statement from EA Support had revealed that the game’s launch date on Nintendo Switch “might not be as soon as September”. The development team was “still working through some details” to ensure the game was ready for launch. This caused them to miss the initial target.

Apex Legend content creators also had predicted September as the time frame for the arrival of cross-play. Shrugtal says the community creators likely received the information from external sources, who weren’t aware of the delays.

Finally, the devs decided to release September Soiree as filler content after they missed out on their expected time frame, according to Shrugtal. He said the event was created by adding a few lines of code in the game’s playlist. It didn’t require a major client patch. Moreover, the September Soiree Sale will last as long as Aftermarket would have, and it also started on the same day as the Aftermarket sale would have.

Read more- Apex Legends: Is It Time for a Pathfinder Buff?

New possible date for Aftermarket and cross-play

Shrugtal then explained when he had previously predicted the September 15 date for Aftermath. He shared some code about the Aftermarket event that had “S06E01” tags. This tag indicates that the skins/bundles were set to arrive in the store during the first major event in Season 6. The bundle names in the code also had a “6.1” tag and numbers that suggested September 15 as their arrival date.

According to Shrugtal, the devs had already planned to coalesce the Season 6, Event 1 bundle code with the Season 6 launch code into a big stack of code until the new Aftermarket date. However, they didn’t risk updating the internal tags or the store data to reflect the new time frame.

The data miner now expects October 13 as the next possible released window for the Aftermarket event. He examined the store block’s data and landed on the likely time frame of October 13. Thus, one can also expect the cross-play and Switch/Steam launch on the same day. He also found out two new recolors that will return with the other recolors for weapons. The two new recolors are the Magnum Opus for R-99 and the Night Breaker for Longbow.

Additionally, Shrugtal said that players could expect devices around the map to initiate a count down on October 6, a week before Aftermarket will go live. This is similar to what happened with the bunkers during the Lost Treasures event.

However, the new possible time frame is based on speculation from data mined information. There is no official word from Respawn yet. Although nothing is set in stone yet, Apex Legends has exciting features planned for the future.