Hot Drop is GameSpot's weekly Apex Legends column, in which Jordan Ramée takes a closer look at Respawn's battle royale to provide additional insight into the game's evolution, as well as dive deeper into its episodic storytelling and characters.
Apex Legends Season 14 is fast approaching, scheduled to launch on August 9, and add Xiomara "Vantage" Contreras to the playable roster. It confirms my long-held theory that Vantage would be the next playable character after Newcastle. Seeing her added to the Apex Games should make me happy--I was right after all. But if I'm being honest, I now wish I had been wrong. As cool as Vantage seems, I've since discovered there's someone far more interesting: her mom.
As seen in Stories from the Outlands: Survive, Vantage has been stranded on the planet Pàgos for her entire life, trapped in the snowy tundra alongside her mother, Xenia Contreras. Though Vantage is led to believe that she and her mother are both native to Pàgos, her trip into the bowls of a crashed ship called the G.D.S. Vantage unveils a startling secret: Xenia was a prisoner aboard the vessel, with G.D.S. standing for Gaean Detention Ship.
Xenia taught her daughter to shoot, implying that both may be expert sharpshooters.Ignoring, for a moment, that with Xenia and Vantage being Cuban-American, the Apex Legends team has written yet another Latina character to be a criminal--a too long-standing issue in video games, especially when it comes to hero shooters--Xenia is (so far) just a more interesting character than her daughter.
As Respawn describes in a press release, Xenia is a "wrongfully-convicted criminal." That's not all that big a deal when it comes to Apex Legends--we already have legends who were falsely accused for something, like Crypto and Seer. But Respawn has noticeably gone out of its way to not specify what Xenia was convicted of.
Every other criminal in Apex Legends' lore has had their crimes--whether they actually committed them or not--revealed pretty much immediately. And there's some heinous stuff in there between Caustic willingly gassing an entire room of scientists to test some pesticide, Revenant dropping a father down an elevator shaft so that he'd crumple into a bloody mess in front of his daughter, and Ash leaving a colleague to rot in a black hole for 88 years just to make a quick buck. There are a lot of bad people in Apex Legends' lore.
And yet, Respawn doesn't want us to know why people think Xenia is among them. What's so detestable about Xenia's crime that we've seen her in two trailers already (which is wild for what's currently amounting to be a side character), and the only hint as to the conviction's ramifications is Vantage asking her mother--in the Season 14 launch trailer--about it, saying, "Is...is it true? Did you do the things they said?" with a face that's been twisted with pain, repulsion, and fear.
Vantage seems almost scared when asking her mother whether she's guilty of what she's been convicted of.There's clearly something there, something that Respawn wants to keep hidden for now. Already, my mind is racing through possibilities--many of which seem too far-fetched, but there are a few that could be promising.
My favorite theory has to do with where Xenia was imprisoned. Since Xenia was held on a Gaean ship, does her crime have any connection to Caustic, Crypto, or Rampart, all of whom also call Gaea home? There's a lot of interesting potential there, especially if Xania's story somehow links back to Rampart. Could Xenia have some sort of connection to Big Sister, the masked gang leader seen in Stories from the Outlands: The Endorsement, which first introduced us to Rampart? Though Xenia was seemingly wounded on Pàgos long after the events of The Endorsement, it is striking that her scratched-out eye now makes her face mirror the mask worn by Big Sister, perhaps implying some sort of unseen narrative connection. I think it's safe to say that it's impossible that Xenia is Big Sister--how could she have been at Rampart's shop on Gaea and stuck on Pàgos at the same time--but the similarities in their two "faces" is hard to ignore.
There definitely different people, but it feels like there may be a narrative connection between Xenia and Big Sister, as the former's face mirrors the latter's mask.I could very well be wrong about that, obviously, but the fact remains that Xenia has a history that's interesting and mysterious and unknown and full of potential--there's a lot we don't know, and I personally want to figure it out. I'm not convinced the same can be said for her daughter, who can seemingly be summed up as, "a girl who was born in a snowy wilderness and has never met people beyond her mother before." Granted, you can make some fun storylines with that--it's like a kid who's home schooled being put into public school for the first time as a high school senior--but there's not much in the way of mystery or intrigue there. Vantage's past doesn't create a character who I desperately want to get to know.
And it's not just the past--Xenia's story has more potential to go in interesting directions in the future, too. As seen in the Apex Legends Season 14 launch trailer, she's being held in the same detention facility as Mad Maggie, who's currently working with Lifeline to bring down Torres Silva, Octane's grandfather, and the Syndicate, the governing body of the Outlands and overseer to the Apex Games. Could future seasons see an alliance between Xenia and Maggie?
Again, I could be totally off base there, but there's at least that possibility of something interesting happening, and that's something that Vantage's future seems to lack. Even if we don't know what it was, Vantage already knows about her mother's crimes so there's no mystery for her to solve there. And we know she won't stop competing in the games to raise awareness for the injustice of her mother's imprisonment because no legend's story can develop to the point that they leave the games and thus would need to be removed from Apex Legends' playable roster. The most intriguing thing to look forward to about Vantage--so far anyway--is seeing her fish-out-of-water storyline play out, though I suspect it will be reminiscent of Bloodhound's tales of their early life, given they were also a person largely secluded from the outside world who eventually joined the Apex Games.