Hot Drop: Apex Legends Is Ramping Up Towards All-Out War Ahead Of Season 13

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.

I thought I had covered all my bases last week when I theorized as to who Octane’s dad is, with the second-to-last chapter of Season 12’s Quest revealing that Eduardo Silva had died years earlier and that an imposter was posing as him. But as the finale of The Perfect Son has shown, that is not the case.

As it turns out, Eduardo Silva is actually Torres Silva, Octane’s grandfather. Torres took his son’s place following his death, and despite being close to 100 years old has managed to maintain the look of a middle-aged man by taking a special concoction of Stim, which is fed to him through that cane he’s always carrying around. The reveal was quickly followed by two more: one expected, and the other not so much.

With Lifeline and Octane stubbornly refusing to see each other’s side, Apex Legends’ resident medic found herself alone in her quest to take down “Eduardo.” So she went to Maggie for help, agreeing to work with the freedom fighter to burn down the entire Syndicate, even if it takes violent action. Given how many legends hate the Syndicate, the duo will likely be able to find plenty of support going forward.

That reveal was obvious. The Perfect Son kicked off with Maggie warning Lifeline that Octane would let her down and she’d come crawling to her eventually. It’s a nice bit of foreshadowing. Meanwhile, the other reveal, though also set up well, is far more surprising.

Upon successfully uniting all of the Syndicate under him, Torres used his majority share in the Frontier Corps (a publicly funded volunteer program that provides social, medical, and economic development throughout the Outlands) to transform it into the Syndicate Corps, putting an emphasis on the group bringing control to various planets. This new Syndicate Corps is seemingly better outfitted in terms of armor and weapons–Octane remarks on the group now looking like an army. And Torres also makes Cherisse Che, Lifeline’s mom, into the group’s head.

This is huge, given that Cherisse is a war profiteer who rose to prominence selling weapons to both the Militia and the IMC during the events of Titanfall and Titanfall 2. She likely has no interest in running an organization designed for bringing peace to a war-torn pocket of the galaxy. She probably wants a war to further stuff her own coffers. All she now needs is an enemy to fight, and The Perfect Son ends with Torres hinting that he may have plans to help provide that for her.

Basically, Torres is giving off big Star Wars’ Palpatine energy right now. Apex Legends is beginning to feel like Star Wars did between The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones, where one man is placing himself in a position where he can play both sides of a conflict he planned for in order to influence multiple groups and come out on top with an enormous amount of power.

It’s still a bit unclear as to what the “other side” of this conflict would be. This supposed war likely wouldn’t be between the Outlands and the Core Worlds given the 20-year journey it takes to travel between the two. If I were to guess, I’d assume Torres is preparing to go to war with the rest of the Outlands beyond Syndicate space. The Syndicate is the dominant power in the Outlands, directly controlling Talos, Boreas, Solace, and Tartarus, while also overseeing the ruling bodies of Psamathe, Gaea, and Salvo. But there are plenty of other planets in the Outlands, listed as the Fringe Worlds, that aren’t under Syndicate control. Attempting to subjugate the Fringe Worlds by force could lead to a civil war within the Outlands, especially with someone like Maggie acting as a symbol of resistance against the Syndicate in the Apex Games.

I very well could be wrong about all of this. I just don’t see the reasoning in the creation of an army if you’re not already planning for war to break out–if Torres and Cherisse aren’t leading the Outlands to war, then they must need an army for something else. I just can’t imagine what that something else could be.

It also would be a great lead-in to a new Titanfall game. Maybe not Titanfall 3–I don’t see Respawn supporting two service games at once–but another game in the Titanfall universe that explores this simmering conflict from a broader perspective than the narrow field-of-view that Apex Legends provides. There have been allusions that Apex Legends is building towards a new Titanfall game, with Respawn vaguely teasing in September 2021 that more Titanfall is coming, but there’s no official information to bank my theory on. We’ll have to wait and see.

Regardless, even if we aren’t getting a new game set in the Titanfall universe, Apex Legends seems to be heading towards all-out war. So we may be seeing a story like the ones we got in Titanfall and Titanfall 2 make their way into the battle royale game soon enough. And if it does, it will be fascinating to see how it affects the ongoing storylines of the legends, and how it may create a schism and a small civil war between Apex Legends’ playable characters.