Genshin Impact players rattled by what could be the game's biggest and most illegal leak yet
Up to 9 months of updates may have been spoiled by a leak "tsunami"
Nearly a year of Genshin Impact updates and characters have seemingly been leaked in what the game's community has called a near-unprecedented "tsunami" of illegally dumped information.
The fallout started over the weekend as a large batch of data allegedly sourced from Hoyoverse servers began to circulate. The scope of the leak is tremendous, covering everything from update 3.3 through the release of Fontaine, the next Sumeru-sized region seemingly planned for update 3.8 around July 2023.
Many of these topics have come up in previous, minor leaks, but never all at once and never with so much tangible evidence attached. We're looking at roughly 36 weeks of leaked content, with plenty of new characters, bosses, weapons, events, areas, and more in the mix.
As far-reaching as this leak is, it's limited in terms of actual assets due to the apparently server-side nature of the leaked information. It's different to the situation around Genshin Impact's infamous 1.5 update, which saw a development build spill online and ultimately prompted Hoyoverse (then Mihoyo) to crack down on leakers more seriously. However, it still seems much more serious than the initial Sumeru and Dendro leaks around update 3.0.
That being said, all of this information is subject to change, especially regarding when certain characters will be released and even what weapon types they'll use. We won't be linking to anything in this article given the nature of the leak. As several known Genshin leakers have pointed out, the leaked files also appear to contain user data for multiple Hoyoverse QA testers. This leak is so dicey, in fact, that many prolific leakers have washed their hands of it altogether.
"After further consideration with friends, I decided to remove ALL my tweets from today just to be safe," said Ubatcha, a leaker with over 450,000 Twitter followers. "To make it clear, I do not condone whatever methods in which the data was obtained and I was not involved in obtaining nor distributing the original data."
We've reached out to Hoyoverse for additional details on the cause and scope of this leak and will update our reporting if we receive a reply.
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Genshin Impact's Xiao appeared in a mural drawn by a high school student, and angry parents called the art "satanic."
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