Hot Drop: Apex Legends Has Made Vantage's Mom Too Interesting--I Want To Play As Her
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.
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
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